While legacy eCommerce platforms help brands in the beginning, as businesses scale, most platforms fail to provide the advanced capabilities and support required by innovative brands.
From operational complexities to increasing overheads due to constant developer interventions, there are many reasons why brands are migrating to more efficient platforms such as Shopify.
In this blog, we look at four Centra to Shopify migration case studies, why the brands switched, and how it benefited them.
If you’ve been thinking of migrating from Centra to Shopify, here are four brands that did and benefited.
Centra to Shopify migration case studies and what you can learn
Here are 4 Shopify Plus migration case studies to help you understand the advantages, the difference it makes to businesses, and whether or not you want to switch to Shopify.
1. Swati
(Beauty and lifestyle)
A lifestyle and beauty brand, Swati is a DTC business that migrated from Centra to Shopify Plus. The brand faced limitations with the platform during its growth stage. Minor website changes required intervention from technical teams.
Some specific limitations faced by the brand are: Automation tools could not be integrated easily, integrations required a lot of time, localization features such as tax application was impossible to automate, and the platform required too much customization. Moreover, onboarding new team members took weeks.
Swati Cosmetics decided to migrate to Shopify. And here’s how the Shopify migration helped:
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The brand experienced an immediate operational transformation
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Localization, currency conversion, tax calculation, and language translation became automated
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Shopify's centralized management and Shopify Markets capabilities made it possible to combine five separate websites into just two
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Staff onboarding became faster
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Hiring people with existing platform knowledge became significantly easier
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The brand saw a 40% increase in conversion rate and 45% revenue increase
2. Nudient
(Consumer electronics and phone accessories)
This Sweden-based brand offers consumer electronics and accessories. The brand migrated from Centra to Shopify for scalability. While Centra’s headless architecture and multi-market capabilities seemed like the right fit, operating on a fully composable, headless platform was far more resource-intensive than imagined.
Expanding into new markets took extra time, the site often faced weekend crashes, and payment systems failed regularly. One of the most damaging consequences was that of SEO. On Centra, the site visibility was almost zero. The team said they didn’t know the challenges until they used the platform. Additionally, the development costs were high, and there was an increase in frontend bugs.
How Centra to Shopify migration helped Nudient:
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With Shopify, the team's focus shifted from fixing bugs to driving global sales
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The brand consolidated 15 storefronts into a single Shopify store, unlocking far simpler centralized management
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Shop Pay became a core tool for international checkout, particularly in key growth markets like the UK, DACH region, and North America
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Content localization was automated using Shopify's native Translate and Adapt app, while Search and Discovery enabled cross-sell and upsell opportunities that had previously required custom development
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The frontend bugs were eliminated
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Nudient was able to experience faster market expansion
3. Westwing
(Home and living)
Westwing is one of Europe’s leading premium home and living brands, operating in 12 countries. They left their existing platform because it was old and did not meet the demands of the growing business. The old platform was not agile and was slowing down their need for innovation.
The cost of maintaining the technical set up was high, as each launch or feature addition required customization and development team intervention. One of the biggest reasons the brand chose to migrate to Shopify was the platform’s ability to combine innovative capabilities with customization.
How did Centra to Shopify migration help?
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The brand’s operational and engineering teams could work on strategic tasks without the stress on maintaining the platform
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Westwing paced out the migration process. The first three months were dedicated to building the platform foundation
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The brand launched websites of different regions one by one with Portugal being the first launch
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Within a year, the brand launched in 12 markets
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High customer engagement rate throughout migration
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Easy enterprise-level, multi-market brand migration to Shopify
4. The Quality Group
(Sports nutrition and fitness)
A fitness and sports nutrition brand, The Quality Group was on Centra and chose to migrate to Shopify. On Centra, the brand faced challenges with operations at scale. The company has multiple brands running in a shared infrastructure and needed to reduce its technical overhead. It was also looking to enable each brand to grow independently within a unified system.
Centra made it difficult to make any changes quickly, deploy integrations efficiently, and keep the technical teams to focus on strategy and growth rather than maintenance.
How Shopify helped:
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The brand migrated to Shopify in 2020 and have seen growth after that
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The Quality Group was able to connect marketing, loyalty, CRM, and fulfillment tools without customization
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Strengthened touchpoints online and offline
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Shopify powers and coordinates its weekly promotional campaigns, seasonal product drops, and community engagement
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The platform supports the brand during high traffic events, such as flash sales
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The brand has processed 10 million orders after migrating to Shopify
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Stable conversion rates across all brands
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Development teams freed up for strategic and growth initiatives
How Centra to Shopify migration has helped brands
Brands switching to Shopify reveal certain common advantages for brands. Here’s what these Shopify migration case studies show:
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Centra's headless architecture demands significant ongoing frontend development. For brands without large, dedicated developer teams, this creates a constant limitation. Shopify's managed infrastructure, native features, and app ecosystem shift the cost structure fundamentally, reducing developer dependency.
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Multiple brands cited the slow pace of launching new markets on Centra as a key challenge. Shopify Markets, combined with native localization capabilities, makes multi-market rollouts dramatically faster and more repeatable.
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A fully headless, custom frontend requires SEO to be built from the ground up. Several brands experienced significant visibility losses on Centra. Shopify's managed URL structures, metadata handling, and sitemap generation protect organic search equity.
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From onboarding new staff to making content changes, Shopify's user-friendly interface empowers marketing and merchandise teams to work independently without developer bottlenecks, enhancing operational simplicity for non-technical teams for brands switching to Shopify.
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Features that once made Centra capable, such as multi-currency, multi-market, B2B, subscription commerce, headless API access, are now available natively on Shopify Plus.
How to migrate to Shopify
If you’re facing limitations and challenges on Centra or any other eCommerce platform, migrating to Shopify could be the right choice for you. If your current platform’s capabilities are not supporting your growth, and your day to day needs, migrating to Shopify is the best alternative.
If you’re looking for a Centra eCommerce alternative or wondering if it’s the right time to migrate to Shopify, reach out to our migration experts for an audit, advice, and to plan your migration.
