Choosing a Centra partner is half the platform decision. Every storefront is custom-built, so the team you hire matters more than the platform itself. And the partner half gets a fraction of the attention the platform half does.
On a themed platform, a mediocre agency delivers a mediocre store; the theme catches the fall. Centra has no theme layer to catch anything, so the same agency delivers a broken one. That asymmetry is the reason this guide exists.
This post assumes you have decided on Centra, or are close to it. If the platform question is still open, start with our comparison of Centra and Shopify and come back.
One disclosure before we start: we are a Centra Pro Partner, so we are one of the agencies this guide evaluates. No question below comes with an exemption for its author.
The directory tells you who exists, not who fits
Centra lists its partners at partners.centra.com: around 20 agencies at the time of writing, roughly half of them carrying the Pro Partner label and the rest marked Partner. You can filter by location, services, expertise and language. You cannot filter by quality. The directory carries no signal for it beyond the tier, and it does not say what the tier requires. Treat Pro Partner as Centra's label, not a verdict on fit.
Two things a listing will not surface. Some listed partners are consultancies rather than build agencies. The advice is valuable, but it is not the build, so check which one you are talking to. And the ecosystem moves. Agencies drift between platforms and in and out of the directory, which makes your shortlist a snapshot of a market in motion.
Use the directory to find candidates. The evaluation is yours to run, and the rest of this post is that evaluation.
What Centra-specific experience looks like
Three areas, and fluency in each is hard to fake.
Markets, pricelists and the grid underneath
Centra is natively multi-market. Markets split the store into logical entities, geographic or not; a VIP segment can be a market as easily as a country. Pricelists carry prices per currency and region, warehouses stack in priority order, and allocation rules decide which warehouses serve which market. Everything downstream depends on how that grid is configured, and configuring it well is most of what separates a store that scales from one that fights itself.
The test: ask the agency to walk you through a market and pricelist setup they configured. In the admin, not on a slide. A partner with real mileage will have raised the topic before you do, because it shapes the entire build.
The wholesale half
By Centra's own count, 70% of its brands run DTC and wholesale on the platform together. Wholesale is also where thin experience hides. B2B pricelists, order windows and stockist logic behave differently from a consumer campaign, and none of it shows in a portfolio. Plenty of agencies have shipped the DTC half only. Ask which builds included wholesale, then ask to talk to that client's operations team rather than their marketing lead.
Variant depth and the unglamorous integrations
Fashion catalogues compound: sizes, lengths, washes, drops. Centra's variant model carries that complexity, but the storefront has to surface it, and the surfacing is agency work. Look at how their live stores handle size logic and near-identical products.
Then listen for the Integration API, the part of Centra's developer surface where products, inventory, orders and your ERP meet. In our experience the ERP connection is the schedule risk on most projects, not the storefront. A partner who brings it up early has been burned in the right ways.
The stack is theirs, and so is the accelerator
Centra's tech-partner directory lists more than 40 integrations: Klarna, Adyen, Qliro and Stripe on the payment side; Ingrid for delivery; Voyado and Klaviyo for CRM; ERP connectors like Visma and Dynamics 365. What you will not find there is a CMS. Storyblok, Sanity and Contentful are absent. Not because Centra stores skip them, but because they live in the frontend, and the frontend is the agency's territory. The platform cannot answer for that layer. Only the agency can. So ask: what is your storefront stack, why, and which live stores run it.
Then the accelerator question. Centra publishes a storefront accelerator of its own, and established partners tend to maintain their own; our builds start from our @aino commerce engine. Accelerators are normal now, so having one is not the differentiator. Ownership is. Who owns the code? If the relationship ends, what leaves with you? Could another team take over the repository without starting over? An accelerator that shortens the build but binds you to the builder has a cost no proposal will show you.
One team, or a Figma file thrown over a wall
On a themed platform, a design agency can hand its files to a theme developer and the theme absorbs most of the mismatch. Centra has no theme to absorb anything. Every design decision is also an engineering decision: a product page concept assumes something about variant data, a campaign module assumes something about pricelists, and someone has to know whether the assumption holds before it gets built.
So ask how the team is put together. Are design and engineering employed by the same company, or is one subcontracted? Have this designer and this engineer shipped a Centra store together before? Who resolves the moment a design assumes something the market model cannot do? A split setup can work, but you become the integration layer between two companies. On a platform with no guardrails, that seam is where budgets disappear.
Six questions to ask a Centra partner in the first meeting
- Which live Centra stores are yours? Built by the team you would get, not by people who have since left.
- Can we operate the admin of one? A storefront proves design taste. Market, pricelist and campaign setup proves Centra competence, and it lives in the backend where portfolios never look.
- Walk us through a market and allocation setup you configured. Watch whether they explain it in your terms or retreat into vocabulary.
- Which builds included wholesale? With a reference client you may call.
- Who owns the accelerator code, and what happens if we leave?
- Which brand did you advise against Centra? Every honest partner has this story. An agency that has never argued a client out of the platform has been selling it, not recommending it.
The sixth is the cheapest test on the list and the most telling.
Comparing proposals without a price list
Centra proposals resist line-by-line comparison because no two agencies scope the same build. Compare what each one asked before quoting instead. A serious estimate cannot exist without answers about markets, wholesale, catalogue size and the ERP, so a number that arrived without those questions is a guess wearing a signature.
Shape matters more than total. A phased engagement, with a scoping phase that can end the project cheaply, signals a partner pricing what they understand. A single fixed figure for an unscoped headless build signals one pricing what they hope. And read the retainer line closely, because that is where the next three years of cost live. The cheapest build with a vague retainer is rarely the cheapest option.
Reading a portfolio, and when to walk away
A portfolio shows the design half. The operational half, which is most of why you chose Centra, is invisible in it. From the outside you can check market behaviour: switch country and watch currency, language and assortment follow. You cannot see wholesale, admin quality or how the codebase has aged. So the portfolio's real use is generating questions. Pick their best store and ask what was hard about it. A team that built it answers in specifics. A team that inherited it, or subcontracted it, stays general.
Walk away when the pitch mentions themes or templates on a platform that has neither. When no reference client is available on the phone. And when every answer is yes: on Centra, yes to everything does not mean capable. It means the constraints will surface after the contract is signed.
After launch is the real test
A Centra engagement should not end at launch, because the store is built to keep expanding. But someone has to own the configuration that expansion runs on: season setups, campaign pricelists, the next market, the next integration. Ask what month six looks like: who from the build team stays on, and who runs the setup when market twelve opens.
This matters more on Centra than elsewhere. There is no theme ecosystem underneath, so a partner who treats launch as the finish line leaves you holding a custom codebase with nobody to run it. The next agency inherits code, not configuration.
Where we sit
We are one of the agencies this guide is pointed at. Aino has been a Centra Pro Partner since 2015, with 20+ storefronts behind us for brands like Nudie Jeans and Samsøe Samsøe, and our Centra agency page is the long version of how we answer the questions above.
Bring the list to every meeting you take, ours included. We would rather lose a project to a good answer than win one against a question you did not know to ask.