Comparison

When Cin7's native connector is enough, and when you extend it

Cin7 builds and maintains its own storefront connectors, which changes the shape of this decision. On most ERPs you're choosing what to put between the storefront and the back office. On Cin7 that piece already exists and the vendor supports it, so the question becomes narrower and more useful: what does the connector not reach, and does that gap matter to how you sell?

What does Cin7 ship, and what does it cost?

Cin7 publishes native connectors to Shopify, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, and Amazon, for both Core and Omni. They handle the core traffic: products out, inventory levels out, orders in, order status back. Cin7 maintains them, which means the integration isn't sitting on a third party's release schedule.

Settle the licensing before the architecture. Each connected store consumes one integration add-on on a Cin7 Core subscription. Two are included on Standard, four on Pro, six on Advanced, and more can be purchased. If your plan involves several storefronts, several brands, or a separate B2B site, that count is a line item, not a footnote.

Which Cin7 connector is the strongest?

Shopify, and it isn't close. Grading all 143 connector capabilities on each Cin7 edition puts Shopify at 2.06 out of three on Cin7 Core and BigCommerce at 1.81, the widest gap among the four storefront connectors, with Adobe Commerce and WooCommerce between them. Cin7's own partnership team says the same thing from the field. When the data and the practitioners agree, that's usually the answer.

That doesn't make BigCommerce a wrong answer. It means a BigCommerce build on Cin7 carries more integration work to reach the same place, and the scope should say so out loud, before month three says it for you.

What doesn't the native connector reach?

Four gaps come up repeatedly. None of them is a defect. They're the difference between syncing records and running a buying experience.

1. Contract pricing per account – Cin7 holds price tiers and customer-specific prices. Rendering the right price to a logged-in buyer, for their account, on every product page, is storefront work that has to read from Cin7 instead of caching a copy.
2. Approvals and quote-to-order – Buyer-initiated quotes, an approver who has to sign off before an order commits, and saved lists for reordering. These live above the connector.
3. Cross-location fulfilment orchestration – Cin7 knows stock by location. Deciding which location ships a given order, or splitting one order across two, is logic somebody has to write.
4. Configured or made-to-size products – If the buyer specifies dimensions or builds a product from options, the validation has to happen before the order reaches Cin7, because Cin7 will store what it's given.

We'd rather describe the resulting work as extending the connector than bridging to Cin7. The distinction isn't pedantry. A bridge implies the vendor's integration is being worked around, which on Cin7 isn't what's happening: it keeps doing the core sync and the extension covers what it was never built to do.

What if there's no connector for your platform?

Some storefronts have no Cin7 connector. Shopware is the one we get asked about most, and there isn't a native Cin7 integration for it, so that pairing is a custom build and should be priced as one. The same applies to any headless front end reading Cin7 through its API directly.

That's a legitimate architecture when the buying experience genuinely needs it. It's the wrong architecture when it's chosen for preference, because you've taken on the maintenance of something Cin7 would otherwise maintain for you.

When is a custom build the wrong answer?

Our own accelerator, Gesso, isn't the answer to every Cin7 project and we don't propose it as one. It earns its place when mandatory integrations go beyond the standard set of commerce, inventory and order platform, accounting, 3PL, and EDI. If those five cover the business, the shortest path is a supported storefront on Cin7's own connector, extended where it needs to be.

How do you make the call?

Write down how a customer buys from you today, in order, including the parts that happen over the phone or by email. Then mark each step as something the storefront does, something Cin7 does, or something a person does. Steps in the third column are the scope. If that column is empty, the native connector on a supported storefront is the whole project, and you should resist making it more interesting than that.

What to take from this

1. The connector is the vendor's, so start there – Cin7 builds and maintains it. Scope what it misses, not what to replace it with.
2. Shopify is the strongest path on Core – 2.06 against BigCommerce at 1.81 across 143 graded capabilities. A BigCommerce build gets to the same place with more integration work.
3. Count the storefronts before you architect – Each connected store consumes an integration add-on, and the plan tier caps how many you get.
4. No connector means custom – Shopware and headless front ends have no native Cin7 integration, which is a valid choice priced as a build, not a default.

For what Cin7 runs and where accounting sits, see the Cin7 topics. For keeping stock honest once several channels read from it, see one inventory truth across channels.

Frequently Asked Questions

Next Step

Get the foundation right before you build.

For readers scoping a platform decision or wanting a full architecture recommendation.