Gambio vs Shopware

Gambio

Variants, tiered pricing, vouchers and B2B are confirmed, which is solid conversion groundwork — but the payment story is just "PayPal & Co.", with no invoice or direct debit evidenced, and no bundles, guest checkout or rule-driven promotions in the evidence. Checkout changeability beyond the StyleEdit design tool is unevidenced, so I sit between the anchors.

Shopware

The variant machinery is real — parent-child inheritance, a configurator object, unlimited property groups for filtering — and the payment architecture with synchronous and asynchronous handlers and the redirect URL returned in the API response means checkout can be reshaped without a rebuild. But we found no public information on invoice or direct debit as payment methods, on promotions or voucher rules, on guest checkout or bundles, and customer-specific prices appear only in the top Beyond tier.

Gambio

"Zertifizierte Rechtssicherheit" plus optional legal texts with vendor liability in all cloud plans is a genuine German-market strength I'd pay for. But the tax machinery — automatic VAT by destination, VAT-ID validation, reverse charge, OSS, e-invoicing — is completely unevidenced, so I can't credit the anchor-5 requirements.

Shopware

What the pages document is a pluggable tax-provider framework: apps registered via manifest are called during checkout in priority order with signed requests, adjusting tax at item, delivery or cart level while Shopware trusts the returned sums. We found no public information on destination-based VAT determination, VAT-ID validation with reverse charge, OSS reporting or e-invoicing handled by the platform itself — the automatic tax path runs through third-party apps rather than the shop system.

Gambio

There is a Gambio Store, 200+ partner interfaces, StyleEdit for design, and API access — though API-Zugang sits as a row in the plan matrix, which smells of tier gating. No webhooks, no headless storefront, no local development story anywhere in the evidence, so a developer cannot own this platform.

Shopware

This is where my investment feels safe: plugins are Composer packages that can declare dependencies and behave as Symfony bundles with their own controllers, services and tests, and the Store API with service-based, decoratable routes gives headless builds a first-class surface, including the headless payment flow. The open-source Community Edition at "Kostenlos € 0" means the code is not hostage, though we found no public information on staging environments, theme version control or documented rate limits.

Gambio

Multichannel, invoices and delivery notes, and an Afterbuy partnership are on the page, but nothing on stock, returns, partial shipments or carrier integrations. When the promoted answer to order management is a €59/month external tool (Afterbuy), the built-in back office is telling you it's thin.

Shopware

Three configurable state machines model the after-checkout reality properly — partial shipment, returns, partial refunds, chargebacks — and orders persist their own line items and calculated prices independent of the catalogue, with notifications and order history documented. But we found no public information on named carrier integrations with label printing or maintained interfaces to ERP and accounting systems, and the multi-inventory capability sits in the top Beyond tier only.

Gambio

An unspecified "Import / Export" and cloud-only hosting ("Erstelle deinen Shop in der Cloud") is everything the evidence offers: no export completeness, no self-hosting, no deletion or migration path documented. Whether my customers and order history leave intact is a promise, not evidence.

Shopware

Ownership here is structural rather than promised: an open-source Community Edition and the option to deploy the shop on my own cloud infrastructure mean the data sits where I put it. The Migration Assistant is well documented with dedicated media processing, delta migration and error resolution, but it documents the way in — we found no public information on a comparable documented exit migration or a stated data-return commitment beyond GDPR portability tools.

Gambio

The vendor is German (Bremen), which helps, but the pipeline recorded no sovereignty attributes at all: hosting is stated only as "the cloud" with no location, and no subprocessor list exists. Silence on where checkout data sits and who processes payments is exactly what rubric level 3 penalises.

Shopware

The independent sovereignty review returned no confirmation for jurisdiction, ownership, data residency or subprocessors, and we found no published subprocessor list. The imprint does name a German stock corporation registered at Amtsgericht Coesfeld, and the homepage claims European data centres, but only as the basis for the AI Copilot architecture, which is no guarantee for the checkout path.

Gambio

Four public tiers with minimum term, an 11% annual discount, a worked example (12 × 29 € = 348 €), and hosting included — that's more computable than most. But transaction fees, the order limits hiding behind "low/high volume" tier labels, app-store costs and VAT treatment are all unstated, so my real annual invoice still isn't derivable from the page.

Shopware

Every named tier is public with period and VAT treatment stated — Community Edition "Kostenlos € 0", Rise "Ab € 600 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", Evolve "Ab € 2.400 /Monat exkl. MwSt." — and the AI add-on carries a per-plan price. But the Beyond tier is "Individuell", and we found no public information on transaction or revenue-share fees, order or revenue limits, or minimum terms, so the true annual cost for a shop of my size cannot be worked out from the pages alone.