What the solution is
Centra is a Swedish commerce platform built for fashion and lifestyle brands. It is a headless platform, meaning it delivers data and commerce logic through APIs while the frontend the customer sees is built separately. Centra's hallmark is that consumer selling and wholesale are two sides of the same product, and that the wholesale part is built for the fashion industry's seasonal orders with showroom and order taking.
The integration to Business Central comes from Junipeer, a Nordic integration platform with prebuilt flows to a range of ERP systems. Other routes from Centra to Business Central exist, among them connect2Centra from Codeunit, Patchworks and HighCohesion, and Junipeer is chosen here as the most widely used one.
How the integration works
Junipeer is an integration platform with prebuilt flows rather than a tool you have to build in. Setup consists of field mapping and a test run, and the vendor states a quarter of an hour as the time it takes. That is a different kind of promise from the traditional iPaaS products, where the integration has to be built, and it is why the solution belongs in this catalogue.
The directions are documented and broad. From Business Central to Centra go orders, articles, prices, stock, customers, companies and shipments. From Centra to Business Central go articles, orders, refunds and customers. Synchronisation is described as near real time and continuous.
There is a middleware layer to operate, and that is the most important operational fact. Junipeer writes that logs can be reviewed before going live, but we have found no documentation of retry logic or of a monitoring view. Ask to see what happens to an order that fails at three in the morning. Only Business Central online is documented.
Prices, discounts and agreements
Prices are transferred from Business Central to Centra. The agreed price therefore comes from the ERP, and that is the mechanism this site measures. It is a transfer model, so the price is right until the next run.
Campaigns and bundles belong in Centra. For a fashion brand that is the right division of labour, because campaigns in that trade are visual and fast, and because they can rarely be expressed as a price in an ERP. It is at the same time the reason for the label about logic set up in two places.
The wholesale part is worth a closer look if you sell to retailers. Centra's wholesale module works with seasonal collections, pre-orders and delivery windows, and that is a logic Business Central has no concepts for. Ask to see how a pre-order with a delivery window ends up as a document in the ERP, because that is where this combination stands or falls.
The order and the finance function
The order is written to Business Central, and refunds come back through the same flow. That refunds are named explicitly in the integration is worth noting, because return rates in fashion are high, and a return that does not reach the accounts automatically quickly becomes a full-time job.
Shipments go from Business Central to Centra, so the customer can see what has been sent. That is the piece of information customer service otherwise spends the most time on.
VAT is decided by Centra. If you sell to consumers in several countries, it is Centra's VAT setup and possibly an external tax engine that has to carry it, not Business Central's setup.
Who the solution fits
The solution fits a fashion or lifestyle brand in the Nordics selling both direct to consumers and to retailers, and which has or can get a development team for the frontend. That is a narrow profile, but within it there are not many better choices.
It also fits if you want an integration that can be set up quickly without an integration project. Junipeer's promise of a quarter of an hour should probably be taken with a pinch of salt, but the distance to a traditional iPaaS project is real.
The solution does not fit if you want a finished store. Centra is headless, and the frontend is a development effort of its own with its own price and its own maintenance. That is the largest item in the budget, and it is not part of the platform's licence.
What to settle before you decide
Junipeer's price starts at 399 euro a month with no setup fee, and that figure is public. Centra's own licence is not, and the frontend development is the largest uncertainty. Our bands reflect all three items and carry low confidence.
Ask to have the frontend priced separately, both to build it and to maintain it. A headless platform moves work from licence to development, and that is a different kind of cost from a licence: it does not disappear when the project ends.
Settle how the wholesale part's seasonal orders should look in Business Central. That is the one question a feature list cannot answer, and it is worth spending half a meeting on with someone who knows both systems.