Gambio vs Shopware

Gambio

Variants, tiered pricing, vouchers and B2B are all confirmed on the feature list, so the merchandising side is real. But the checkout evidence is one phrase — 'Zahlungsabwicklung mit PayPal & Co.' — with no invoice, no direct debit, no guest checkout and no bundles anywhere in the record, so I cannot credit the German checkout anchor.

Shopware

The variant machinery is genuinely worked — parent-child inheritance, a configurator object over property groups, unlimited properties with filtering — and the payment architecture with synchronous and asynchronous handlers plus a redirect URL returned in the headless API response shows a checkout built to be extended. But I found no public information on bundles, guest checkout, promotions or vouchers, the only payment provider named anywhere is PayPal, and customer-specific prices surface only on the top Beyond plan — good machinery with the conversion features unproven on the captured pages.

Gambio

Legal texts sold with Haftungsübernahme in every cloud plan is a genuine vendor-maintained legal story, better than free-form pages. But the tax half of the criterion is entirely dark — not one word on VAT determination, OSS, reverse charge, VAT-ID validation or XRechnung — and 'Zertifizierte Rechtssicherheit' names no certifier a lawyer could check.

Shopware

What the developer pages document is a seam, not a service: an app can expose a tax endpoint that is called during checkout by priority with signed requests, and rates are configured by hand under Settings > Tax in the administration. Automatic VAT by destination and customer type, VAT-ID validation with reverse charge, OSS, and e-invoicing are all left to a provider the merchant must build or buy; I found no public information showing the platform handles any German legal case itself.

Gambio

'API-Zugang' appears as a row in the plan matrix, meaning API access is a tier differentiator rather than a right, and the developer story stops at StyleEdit, free themes and 'Keine Programmierkenntnisse nötig'. Two hundred interfaces and partner firms is an ecosystem claim; webhooks, a headless storefront API, local development and staging are absent from the record.

Shopware

Plugins are Symfony bundles delivered as Composer packages that may declare dependencies, the Store API is a documented headless surface with decorator patterns and naming conventions, and the open-source core can be self-hosted, run on PaaS or SaaS — a real dependency model rather than a walled app store. The pages state plainly that plugins do not run on cloud stores, only apps do, and I found no public information on staging environments, documented rate limits, or upgrade paths for customisations.

Gambio

Multichannel selling and invoices & delivery notes are confirmed, and 200 interfaces gestures at carriers and ERP. But the only named back-office tool is Afterbuy — offered as a promotional credit worth 6 months of a €59/month tier — while stock, returns, shipping labels and fulfilment routing are entirely absent from the record.

Shopware

The order model is the strongest evidence here: orders are denormalized and persisted independent of the catalogue, three state machines cover delivery states like Shipped partially and transaction states like Refunded partially and Chargeback, and a Documents module sits in the checkout guides. But states are not operations — no carrier is named, no label printing, no returns process beyond state names, no ERP or accounting interface is evidenced, and multi-inventory appears only as a Beyond-plan feature.

Gambio

The shop lives in the vendor's cloud ('Erstelle deinen Shop in der Cloud', 'Hosting inklusive') with no self-hosting option on record. 'Import / Export' is a checkbox with no stated scope over order history or documents, and there is no migration path, deletion policy or data-return commitment — leaving costs whatever the export button happens to give you.

Shopware

Self-hosting on an open-source core with a Community Edition at € 0 is structural ownership — the merchant can run the shop and its database themselves rather than trust a promise. But the documented Migration Assistant runs one way: connections, profiles, premapping, delta detection and media processing are all built to bring data into Shopware 6, and I found no public information on export completeness, documented deletion, or a migration path out.

Gambio

Gambio GmbH in Bremen gives a European vendor and contracting entity, which is the only thing carrying this score. Beyond that the chain is unverifiable: hosting is 'the cloud' with no location stated, no subprocessor list exists, 'Zertifizierte Rechtssicherheit' certifies law rather than data residency, and the sovereignty pipeline itself has nothing on record.

Shopware

The imprint names shopware AG registered at Amtsgericht Coesfeld with a Schöppingen address — a German contracting entity with published DPA terms based on the EU standard contractual clauses. But the European-datacenter claim is scoped to the Intelligence Copilot architecture rather than shop hosting generally, and I found no public information on a subprocessor list, named hosting infrastructure, or vendor ownership; SOC 2 Type II alongside ISO 27001 evidences audits, not where checkout data sits.

Gambio

Four tiers priced publicly, 12-month minimum term stated, monthly vs annual at -11% with a worked example, and hosting declared included — more public than most. But the transaction side is the classic hole: payment processing appears as 'PayPal & Co.' with no rates, no VAT treatment of list prices, tier limits only as adjectives ('geringem Volumen'), and no per-tier feature allocation, so the annual invoice for a growing shop is still not computable.

Shopware

The ladder is public and honest about VAT — Community Edition at € 0, Rise "Ab € 600 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", Evolve "Ab € 2.400 /Monat exkl. MwSt.", Beyond "Individuell" — but every number that decides the invoice is missing: no transaction or revenue-share fees, no order or GMV limits, no hosting costs, no minimum term, and no stated basis for what pushes a "from" price upward. Nexus carries a "Kostenlose Einführungsphase" planned until 1 October 2026 with a non-binding review limit of 10,000 requests per customer and calendar month — a price signal with no price attached.