Gambio vs Shopware

Gambio

Variants, tiered pricing, vouchers, B2B and multilingual are confirmed feature items, which is beyond a bare variant list. But the evidence evidences no bundles, no guest checkout, and payments only as 'PayPal & Co.' — the German payment set (invoice, direct debit) is not shown, so I stop between the 3 and 5 anchors.

Shopware

The variant machinery is real — parent-child inheritance, a configurator assembled for storefront requests, unlimited property groups and multi-category products — and the checkout is documented down to payment handlers with synchronous and asynchronous gateway flows. What the captured pages do not show is bundles, tiered pricing, guest checkout, or German payment methods beyond PayPal; customer-specific prices appear only in the top Beyond tier. Checkout customisation without a rebuild is well evidenced through the plugin and Store API documentation.

Gambio

'Zertifizierte Rechtssicherheit' plus vendor-supplied legal texts with liability assumption in all cloud plans is legal correctness maintained by the vendor, which is the direction of the top anchor. But the evidence says nothing about VAT determination, OSS, reverse charge or XRechnung/ZUGFeRD, and silence there caps it.

Shopware

Tax handling is documented as an app integration point: providers are registered in the administration under Settings > Tax, called by priority during checkout, and Shopware trusts the provider's calculated sums without recalculating them. That is plumbing for automatic VAT determination, not evidence the vendor maintains rates, OSS reporting, reverse charge, VAT-ID validation or e-invoicing. We found no public information on the mandatory German checkout elements such as order button wording, withdrawal policy or price indications.

Gambio

There is an app store, 200 interfaces, a StyleEdit design tool and an API-Zugang — but API access is a plan dimension, suggesting tier gating, and no webhooks, headless API, staging or version control are evidenced. 'Keine Programmierkenntnisse nötig' is a marketing line, not a developer surface.

Shopware

This is a developer platform: plugins are Symfony bundles shipped as Composer packages with a real dependency model, the Store API is documented with service-based decoratable routes and named routes, and headless payment flows return the redirect URL in the API response. An open-source core and a free Community Edition mean a team can shape and own the shop. We found no public information on staging environments, theme version control or documented rate limits, which keeps it off the top step.

Gambio

Multichannel selling and invoices & delivery notes exist, and the Afterbuy credit points at ERP connectivity — but it's a six-month discount on a third party, not an interface the vendor maintains. Partial shipments, carrier label printing, returns and partial refunds are entirely unevidenced, and that silence is decisive for me.

Shopware

The order model is built for people who actually ship: three state machines with configurable, API-modifiable transitions, delivery states including shipped-partially and returned-partially, and transaction states including refunded-partially — the partials I need for December are in the core state model, and orders are denormalized with line items and calculated prices persisted independently of the catalogue. We found no public information on named carrier integrations with label printing, maintained ERP or accounting interfaces, dropshipping flows, or a returns workflow beyond the states; multi-inventory appears only in the top Beyond tier, and shipping is named only as an integration category.

Gambio

Import/export appears as a bare feature bullet with no format or completeness detail, and the shop is created in the cloud with hosting included — no self-hosting, no documented deletion or migration path. That is exactly the 3-anchor situation.

Shopware

Self-hosting is offered alongside PaaS and SaaS, the core is open source with a free Community Edition, and the Migration Assistant documents media processing, persistent mappings and delta detection by checksum. The documented migration path runs into Shopware rather than out of it; we found no public information on full-fidelity export of order documents or on a contractual data-return commitment when leaving.

Gambio

The sovereignty pipeline has nothing on record: no subprocessor list, and hosting location is unstated beyond 'cloud' with hosting included. Only the provenance (Gambio GmbH, Bremen) confirms an EU entity, which holds it at the low-mid anchor rather than the floor.

Shopware

The captured pages establish a German contracting entity — shopware AG of Schöppingen, registered at Amtsgericht Coesfeld — with SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 claims, a data-processing agreement on the EU standard contractual basis, and self-hosting that puts the shop under the merchant's own control. The European data-centre claim is scoped to the Intelligence Copilot architecture rather than stated for the platform generally. We found no public information on a subprocessor list or on where customer and order data reside for the hosted shops, and the collected sovereignty attributes came back unconfirmed.

Gambio

All four tiers are publicly priced with the 12-month minimum term, monthly/annual options at 11% discount, hosting included and a 30-day trial — that removes the usual hosting surprise. But transaction or payment fees, order-volume limits and VAT treatment are absent, so the annual invoice is still only partly computable.

Shopware

Tier prices are public with the billing period and VAT treatment stated exactly — "Ab € 600 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", "Ab € 2.400 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", Community Edition at € 0 — and the Intelligence+ add-on is priced per plan at € 29 or € 19 per month. But the tier prices are from-prices, the top Beyond tier is "Individuell", and we found no public information on transaction or revenue-share fees, order or GMV limits, minimum terms, or hosting costs, so the real annual invoice is not computable from the pages.