JTL-Shop vs Shopify

JTL-Shop

Payment integrations 'zu allen beliebigen Payment-Anbietern' plus unlimited articles, multiple Profi-Shops and rule-based repricing get it past a flat form, but the evidence is silent on variants, bundles, customer-group pricing, guest checkout, vouchers-with-rules and the German must-haves — invoice and direct debit are never named. Nothing says I could change the checkout without a rebuild, and that silence caps it.

Shopify

The pages sell a checkout with a conversion story — Shop Pay converting up to 50 percent better than guest checkout, checkout directly in chat, B2B catalogs — but checkout customization is "Eingeschränkt" on every plan except the top tier, and I found no public information on variants, bundles, tiered or customer-group pricing, or promotions and vouchers with rules. For a German shop, the part that decides me — invoice and direct debit at checkout — has no public information at all.

JTL-Shop

GoBD- and DSGVO-conformant finance processes, a 'Tax' module and the JTL2DATEV bridge evidence German accounting correctness, but there is not one fact about VAT by destination, OSS, reverse charge, VAT-ID validation or the mandatory checkout elements German law imposes. From a German vendor selling to German merchants, that silence in the evidence is loud — a lawyer could review nothing here.

Shopify

I found no public information on VAT determination, OSS, B2B reverse charge, VAT-ID validation, gross and net display per customer group, or the checkout requirements German law imposes like order-button wording and withdrawal policy. Localized selling via Markets and B2B catalogs are the only adjacent signals on the captured pages, and neither is a tax capability.

JTL-Shop

Partner apps, extensions, interfaces and stepwise migration exist, and there is a REST API — but it is a Beta sold as a paid add-on at 199/99 EUR a month, which tells me how they feel about me building on the platform. No themes, no webhooks, no headless storefront API, no local development story in evidence.

Shopify

The app ecosystem is real and large — more than 21,000 apps — and there is a headless toolkit (Hydrogen), a Universal Commerce Protocol with APIs and tools for developers, and published API rate limits per plan. What I miss: headless storefronts are rationed, one on the standard plans and 25 on the top tier, and I found no public information on custom themes, staging environments, version control or local development.

JTL-Shop

JTL is the ERP and WMS itself: mobile warehouse devices, sendungsverfolgung im ERP, 30+ marketplaces without extra licences, multi-channel sync that reduces overselling, a Returns module, bank reconciliation from Advanced and DATEV export. Shipping labels are only 'coming soon' and dropshipping/supplier flows are unevidenced, so it sits at 8, not higher — but this is the strongest part of the evidence.

Shopify

Inventory locations (10, or 200 on the top tier), 50 free synced marketplace orders a month, in-person POS that syncs with online sales, Shopify Collective for sourcing products and 200-plus real-time reports give me a credible back office. But I found no public information on returns and refunds, partial shipments, named carrier integrations with label printing, or maintained interfaces to ERP and accounting systems.

JTL-Shop

'Lokal – Auf eigenem Server' is real ownership — running the stack on my own server beats any export promise. But the evidence says nothing about export completeness, documented deletion or a migration path out; 'schrittweise Migration möglich' reads as getting data IN. Self-hosting evidenced, exit unevidenced.

Shopify

Hosting is bundled with the subscription and I found no public information on self-hosting or on export completeness for catalogue, customers and order history. The captured pages do commit to deleting or anonymizing data on closure — with store information retained two years before deletion begins — and name transfer to another provider among data-subject rights, which is thin comfort for a real migration.

JTL-Shop

The imprint shows a German GmbH, Amtsgericht Mönchengladbach, a German VAT ID and a named DPO via Proliance GmbH — vendor and contracting entity are clearly European. But the sovereignty pipeline could not confirm data residency or ownership, no subprocessor list appears anywhere, and the privacy policy discloses group-wide data sharing across the JTL-Group; the chain is German at the front and undocumented behind it.

Shopify

This is a Canadian company; an Irish subsidiary receives the data for EEA users, but the captured privacy policy states the data then goes to Canada and the USA, including to service providers, and only subprocessor categories — cloud hosting, content delivery, data analysis, logging, fulfillment, email — are published with no named list. Where the shops are hosted is not confirmed on the vendor's own pages; binding corporate rules and standard contractual clauses are the only safeguards named.

JTL-Shop

Real, computable numbers: Advanced at 99 EUR/month, orders from your own shop and POS free, extra-order packages at 0.11–0.22 EUR, and the API, Workbench, production modules and Wawi Cloud all priced. But Enterprise is 'Auf Anfrage', the Start and Pro headline prices are absent from the evidence, payment gateway rates are unstated and neither VAT treatment nor minimum term is stated — most of the invoice is computable, with a sales conversation hiding at the top.

Shopify

Tier prices with the billing period stated, per-tier card fees, external-provider transaction fees (2 %, 1 %, 0,6 %, 0,2 % by plan), no setup fees, a priced POS Pro add-on and the Plus commitment terms are all public — I can price both payment routes honestly. What I still cannot compute from the pages: the cost of the apps a real shop needs, order or sales-volume limits on the core plans, and the VAT treatment of the published prices.