Gambio vs Shopware

Gambio

Variantenartikel, Staffelpreise, unlimited products and vouchers are all evidenced, which is more than a flat list — but the payment story is 'PayPal & Co.', with no invoice, no direct debit and no buy-now-pay-later named, and for me that vagueness loses trade deals. No bundles, no guest checkout and no per-channel pricing in evidence; 'B2B' is a bare checklist word with no customer-specific price list behind it.

Shopware

The captured developer pages show a real variant model with parent-child inheritance and a configurator, hierarchical categories, multi-sales-channel availability, and a payment system built on extensible synchronous and asynchronous handlers — but customer-specific prices appear only in the top Beyond tier. I found no public information on bundles, tiered pricing, guest checkout, or invoice and direct debit as payment methods, which is the first thing a German trade buyer checks.

Gambio

Zertifizierte Rechtssicherheit and Rechtstexte mit Haftungsübernahme show genuine vendor-maintained legal care, and Rechnungen & Lieferscheine ship in every plan — but the evidence evidences nothing on VAT-ID validation, reverse charge, net-price display per customer group, destination VAT or OSS. A trade shop that cannot show my customers net prices has not met a trade customer, and this sheet gives me no reason to believe it can.

Shopware

The only tax mechanism on the captured pages is an app-based tax provider invoked during checkout with a five-second timeout — a hook a merchant must build or buy, not determination the vendor maintains. I found no public information on VAT-ID validation, reverse charge, gross and net display per customer group, OSS, e-invoicing, or the checkout legal texts German law imposes.

Gambio

A Gambio Store, the StyleEdit design tool and 'über 200 Schnittstellen und Partnerfirmen' make a real ecosystem, but 'API-Zugang' appears only as a plan-matrix checkbox with no documented surface, and there is no word of webhooks, headless, staging or a local development story. The pitch 'Keine Programmierkenntnisse nötig' tells you who this platform is for, and it is not a dev team.

Shopware

This is a platform a development team can work with: plugins are Composer packages extending Symfony bundles that declare dependencies, the Store API is documented down to naming conventions and decorator patterns, the headless payment flow returns the redirect URL inside the API response, and the core is open source with self-hosting. I found no public information on staging environments, theme version control or documented rate limits, and plugins cannot run on cloud stores where only apps are allowed.

Gambio

Invoices & delivery notes, multichannel selling and import/export cover the order basics, and Afterbuy arrives as six months of Growth-tier credit — an order-management partner at arm's length. Beyond that, stock, returns, partial shipments, carrier label printing and maintained ERP interfaces are entirely unevidenced, which is thin for running a business after checkout.

Shopware

The order model is workflow-oriented with three state machines covering delivery states such as shipped partially and returned partially and transaction states through refunded partially, plus order management, notifications and history extendable via plugins, and Multi-Inventory in the Beyond tier. I found no public information on named carrier integrations with label printing, dropshipping, or maintained interfaces to named ERP and accounting systems — the integration claim covers CRM, payments and shipping only in general terms.

Gambio

The shop lives in Gambio's cloud with hosting included, and the only exit evidence is an unspecified 'Import/Export' feature — no export fidelity, no documented deletion, no data-return commitment, no self-hosting option and no migration path. Leaving this platform is a promise the evidence does not make.

Shopware

Ownership is structural here: an open-source core with self-hosting as the stated default, and a documented, extensible Migration Assistant with connections, media processing, logging, error resolution and delta handling. That tooling migrates data into Shopware 6; I found no public information on export-out completeness including order documents, or on a contractual data-return commitment.

Gambio

Vendor and contracting entity are German — Gambio GmbH, Bremen — which is the right starting point for a German merchant, and hosting is bundled with the vendor rather than third-party cloud. But the pipeline has no sovereignty attributes on record: hosting location is unstated and no subprocessor list exists, and a German checkout deserves a named chain before I trust it with customer data.

Shopware

The captured imprint evidences shopware AG with a German register court, executive board and VAT ID, and self-hosting is the default posture, which is the strongest form of control. European datacentres are named only for the Intelligence Copilot product line, and the independently sourced attributes came back unknown; I found no public information on subprocessors, on data residency for the shop platform itself, or on ownership.

Gambio

This is a strong pricing page: all four tiers public with 12-month terms, monthly/annual options, an 11% annual discount, a worked example (12 × 29 € = 348 €) and hosting included — the licence invoice is computable. But payment-processing rates, the volume limits implied by 'geringem Volumen', and the VAT treatment of the stated prices are all absent, so the real annual cost for a given order volume still cannot be derived.

Shopware

Tier prices are public with VAT treatment stated — "Ab € 600 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", "Ab € 2.400 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", Community Edition at €0 — and the Intelligence+ add-on carries plan-specific monthly figures. But both commercial tiers are quoted as floors, Beyond is "Individuell", and I found no public information on transaction fees, minimum terms, or order and revenue limits, so a real annual invoice cannot be computed from the page.