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Shopify Private or Public app: What’s Best for ERP Integration

During the COVID-19 pandemic situation, companies worldwide have shifted their business mostly to their eCommerce front, to stay the course and become effective, given the worldwide safety and restrictions. It is no secret that this kind of business shift positively affected eCommerce platform providers such as Shopify, Big Commerce, WooCommerce, Magento, and others in the marketplace.

Considering Shopify is the one of the top 5 major players in the eCommerce market in North America, we frequently get this question from clients and contacts, when discussion integration projects between Shopify and ERP/CRM:

“What is the best option to integrate the Shopify eCommerce store, is it to do it through any public app in the marketplace or through the private app?“

While this question is very generic, I will try to keep my explanation simple, with an emphasis on the pros and cons of both integration options. All this is based on our proven expertise in ERP integration to eCommerce platforms and other systems; Let me start by putting some definitions.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a Canadian eCommerce platform company based in Ottawa (Canada), with a revenue of less than little less 3 billion US dollars as of 2020. Shopify is servicing companies and users around the globe, in providing a stable, intuitive, and solid eCommerce platform for eCommerce business.

For more information about Shopify as a company or offerings, you can always check their website

Why companies need integration to their ERP or CRM?

Companies of all sizes in today’s business reality are becoming very agile in using different means to process sales transactions and generate revenues. As an example, a typical company today in the service or retail industry will have several means to receive orders:

1. through a phone call where consumers or even B2B clients might call in, to place orders.

2. through the exchange of electronic business documents (EDI) a typical protocol mainly used by large retailers and distribution (B2B)

3. through one or multiple consumer based (B2C) eCommerce sites.

As you notice, there are different channels or protocols to communicate sales orders for that same company, which are typically through different systems (ERP, CRM, eCommerce site) and having their ERP as the main business system.

The process to consolidate all orders received from all the different sources, into one destination system (ERP or CRM), is called “integration”.

Having an integration and synchronization between an eCommerce site based on any of the known platforms of the marketplace (i.e. WooCommerce, Shopify, Big Commerce, Magento,…), and the ERP / CRM system of an enterprise (i.e. SAP, Oracle JDE, Microsoft Dynamics,….), will improve efficiency and productivity, and most importantly offer a better customer experience to their clients.

Read more about the most 3 important reasons for EDI integration with Shopify

What are the integration possibilities with Shopify?

Shopify offers several options to allow integration between an eCommerce site on its platform and other third-party systems, they are offered under two models:

a) Public Shopify apps

b) Private Shopify apps

both options are available for all Shopify subscribers. Let’s drill down and describe the difference between both integration options

a) Shopify public apps

Those types of applications (or apps) are most of the time activated per instance of Shopify, from within Shopify marketplace. Those apps can be purchased through a subscription paid annually or monthly, in return of its use.

Here are some of the characteristics of Shopify public apps:
  • Public apps are publicly available on Shopify marketplace. They are sometimes developed by Shopify team, or a certified Shopify partner or developer.
  • Most of the times, such apps do execute one and only one functionality (for example reading an inventory feed and updating the SKU available quantity in Shopify).
  • You can find on the same marketplace, multiple apps, providing the same functionality, while it is developed by different professionals, and offered at different prices.
  • Subscription to public apps is most of the times intuitive, quick, and requires little configuration for users with some level of expertise.

b) Shopify private apps

Private apps on Shopify, as per their definition are built for a single Shopify instance (or store). Shopify provides access to the underlying database through a REST API.

By selecting the option to build a private app to access Shopify, you will be given necessary credentials and security tokens to be able to read and write all the data objects available to you from your Shopify store.

Here are some of the characteristics of Shopify private apps:
  • Not available for the public; only you can use it for your own store
  • Not publicly available on Shopify marketplace.
  • This type of private apps is developed by your integration partner, to access your own data.
  • Your integration partner can develop integration flows that can sync in both directions multiple flows.

What is best a Shopify private or public app for integration?

While public apps are great applications, built by experienced developers, we have been seeing much better success when doing the integration between Shopify and a company’s ERP / CRM system using Shopify private apps. This conclusion is based on previous integration projects.

In previous projects, we were able to integrate Shopify orders, fulfillment, inventory with home grown ERP systems, and branded ERP / CRM systems such as Oracle JDE, SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics….

Our integration flows are proven to be stable and mainly it does not conflict with different Shopify public apps active on the Shopify instance. In fact, most of the clients who use our integration services, they come to us, to solve the technological issues they face when they implement and use different public apps in their instance of Shopify.

Choose the best integration provider to integrate Shopify with your ERP or CRM

We, as a successful integration provider, have been helping our customers for 21 years quickly, reliably connect eCommerce to ERP or CRM and integrate it into business systems.

Contact us for a free consultation and we will help you choose the most suitable integration solution for your business.
Shopify Integration

E-commerce integration: How to integrate Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, with ERP/CRM

What is eCommerce Integration?

E-commerce Integration is the action of synchronizing operations of an e-commerce website (online store) with an ERP / CRM or other business systems of a company.

Thus, the goal of e-commerce integration with Salesforce, JDE, SAP, or any other ERP / CRM is to create a unified information space, which is basically within the ERP/CRM in place at the company.

This means that both the ERP and the online store must contain consistent information (that is, the data of one system must not conflict with the data of another).

Therefore, the very first step in any integration project, is to define what data objects should be synchronized and what will remain outside the integration.

Best eCommerce Platforms to Build Your Store

It is not that difficult to start an online business. First, you need to select an e-commerce platform on which you will build an e-commerce website.

There are many e-commerce platforms to choose from, but whether you need an enterprise-level solution or a simple e-commerce website, here are the most popular e-commerce platforms that can meet all your needs:

If you want to learn more about eCommerce platform, read our popular article: E-commerce Integration with business systems – outperform the competition

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is software for complete and efficient enterprise management.

According to research, companies from the Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 such as Walmart, Exxon Mobil, McKesson, General Motors, Costco Wholesale use SAP S/4 HANA. It is an ERP solution for large enterprises.


SAP S/4HANA is an ERP system that combines the functionality of on-premises software with cloud computing. It is often integrated with e-commerce platforms such as Magento to help companies run their online business more efficiently and profitably.

It should be noted that other SAP ERP solutions are no less popular, for example, SAP Business One designed for small and medium-sized enterprises.

The other popular ERP systems and leading vendors are:

  • Oracle (Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Oracle NetSuite ERP)
  • Microsoft (Dynamics NAV, Dynamics AX, Dynamics 365)
  • Sage Group (Sage X3, Sage 300)

Recognize warning signals: How urgent it is to integrate eCommerce with ERP?

The Best CRM Systems for Business

Customer relationship management (CRM) is software for managing interactions with customers and prospects.

As best practices show, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems are always among the key IT systems of companies.

The most popular CRM systems are:

As for the integration of e-commerce and business systems, today the most popular in terms of the number of requests is Salesforce Shopify integration. Of course, this is not surprising given the incredible popularity and availability of these two solutions for medium-sized businesses.

Integrating CRM with business software using Magic xpi

What Data Should Be Integrated With ERP/CRM?

To get the most out of e-commerce integration with ERP or CRM, you need to sync all important data.

Some of the information in your ERP/CRM and the online store is the same, however, they could be in different formats and structure in each system.

Typically, when integrating an e-commerce store with a business system, work is carried out with the following data:

– Product information (Item ID, description, dimensions (weight, length, height…))  
– Inventory and price information
– Customer Information and history Sales Order Information

Thus, typically, through e-commerce integration companies seek to solve the following issues:

Synchronization of Stock Status

Typically this is one-way synchronization from CRM system (i.e. Salesforce) to e-commerce.

Below is our typical synchronization flow for the “stock status”.

  • The Integration process starts runs every 6 hours.
  • The integration flow connects to the CRM/ERP instance to read “stock status”.
  • CRM/ERP should return the list of items, including their Stock available to sell.
  • Once the data is extracted from CRM/ERP, it must be filtered, and the flow will update the necessary items in e-commerce.

Synchronization of Sales Orders

This is one-way synchronization from e-commerce to the business system (ERP/CRM)

Here are the steps for the Sales Orders synchronization flow:

  • The integration process runs every 15 minutes.
  • The integration process connects to the e-commerce instance to read and retrieve the list of orders created since the last call and not yet migrated to CRM / ERP.
  • It brings those orders with their appropriate details
  • Our flow converts these orders into a format ready for transfer to the CRM / ERP system.
  • Orders will be submitted to the CRM/ERP system.
  • An email will be triggered for a mailing list to advise about a new order(s) sent to the CRM/ERP.

Synchronization of Order Fulfillment

One way synchronization from ERP/CRM systems to e-commerce

Here are the steps of this flow:

  • Upon fulfilling the order and shipping the order in CRM/ERP, the status of the order will change.
  • Our integration process runs every 15 minutes.
  • When it wakes up, it will do the following:

1. Extract the list of Orders that are originating from CRM/ERP that are not yet fulfilled

2. For each not fulfilled Order, it will check its status in CRM/ERP

3. If the order status in CRM/ERP is now fulfilled, it will extract the fulfillment necessary information and it will update the e-commerce instance.

4. It will also send an email to a mailing list, to advise about the fulfillment of the order in question.

Looking For the Best E-commerce Integration Solution?

If you need to integrate your online store, contact us, and get a free consultation with our integration expert.

Using advanced integration solutions and having more than 21 years of experience in the field of system integrations, we will quickly and reliably carry out an integration project of any complexity.

Synchronizing Accounts in Salesforce with Customers in NetSuite using Magic xpi

 

Free Consultation

The following is a list of additional helpful information:

Must-Have Integration between E-Commerce and Business Systems

9 Major E-Commerce Trends That Will Help Grow Your Online Business

The main reasons why you need Microsoft Dynamics Integration with your Business Systems

Shopify and Microsoft Dynamics Nav Integration: Things you should know

Free Shopify Integration Whitepaper

Recognize Warning Signals: How Urgent it is to Integrate E-Commerce with ERP?

This post was updated to reflect current trends and information.


Clear navigation, great visual branding, and a simple user-friendly layout – this should look like a good online store. E-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce, BigCommerce, and the likes, already perform these functions.

However, no matter how important usability is, this is only part of the success of your e-commerce business. Long delivery time for example or errors in the order have a decisive influence on customer satisfaction. We all know, that only happy customers will buy again from your eCommerce online store in the future.

The effective work of the online store is ensured primarily, by having a streamlined internal business process and flows, fully integrated with the company’s business management software such as the ERP.
e-commerce automation and integration with ERP and CRM

However, many online store owners, waste valuable time with poorly performing and none-integrated applications, isolated solutions, or even manual work.

If you recognize one of the following warning signals from your everyday work, it is time to act and make a change!

Shopify Store: Not Enough Time for Everyday Activities

What is your daily work in the Shopify online store? Is manual data entry or complex import and export a daily occurrence in your workplace? For small startups, it is reasonable to manage e-commerce business processes using the free basic features of Shopify store.

But if you spend more time synchronizing data than in everyday work, the effectiveness of your online store will drop rapidly.

Online Store: Long Order “Lead Time”

Your store doesn’t have automated processes. Without consistent automation, orders “lead time” for delivery will be on the rise, which affects your service and, above all, the satisfaction of your customers.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

A “lead time” is a measurement of how long it takes to complete a process from start to finish.
For example, the time between placing an online order by a client and delivering goods to him.

The Standard Features of The Online Store are Not Enough

Are the processes in your Shopify store system insufficient to match the growing requirements, even if you have already hired new employees? As company success grows, so does the demand: new functionality must always be embraced.

E-Commerce Store Isolated From Other Business Systems

Do you use your e-commerce store as an isolated solution? If your online store is not connected to the business systems of the enterprise (ERP, CRM, EDI, accounting system, etc.), a separate operation in your company provides double keying-in of data – this is annoying and often leads to human errors.

Loss of Sales

Are you losing sales because you do not have enough goods in stock or there are delays in production or the supply chain? Or maybe you have delays with third-party services such as dropshipping?
e-commerce sales orders automation

Competition

Are you losing qualified employees or applicants to the competition, because they expect a modern, productive work environment?

ERP Integration for Your Online Store

Have you recognized your business and understood the source of the problem? Do you want to change something? We can help you!

We have many years of successful experience in ERP integration with online stores. Our customers note that the integration expanded the functions of the online store, increased the productivity of their online trading, and contributed to the effective growth of their business.

Contact us to get a free consultation on the integration of your online store.
Shopify integration price list

RELATED POSTS:

Must-Have Integration between E-Commerce and Business Systems

9 Major E-Commerce Trends That Will Help Grow Your Online Business

The main reasons why you need Microsoft Dynamics Integration with your Business Systems

PRICING PACKAGES: Shopify Integration

Shopify and Microsoft Dynamics Nav Integration: Things you should know

Why You Should Automate Inventory Updates for Your Shopify Store?

This post was updated to reflect current trends and information.

One of Shopify‘s main challenges is managing your inventory. Without well-organized inventory management, you can lose a lot in sales. A bad situation is when you sell products that you no longer have in stock, which can lead to additional costs for refunding money, irritating customers, and losing loyalty to your store.

Manually updating your inventory level in the Shopify Admin Center can be impractical and you also lose a lot of time and you have no guarantee that you will avoid errors. Thus, how to avoid these problems?

Let’s first look at what Shopify is and how the ordering process takes place.

What is Shopify and How Does it Work?

Shopify perhaps is one of the most popular brands in the world of e-commerce, but not everyone knows how it works. Simply put, Shopify is the software you pay its usage, based on a monthly subscription, under the SaaS model. It allows you to create an eCommerce site and use the solution payment gateway to sell both digital and physical products, to customers around the world.

When you setup your Shopify store, you can choose one of 3 available plans:
  • Basic Shopify – $29 monthly
  • Shopify – $79 monthly
  • Advanced Shopify – $299 monthly

Shopify in no way limits the number of products that you can have in your store. You can sell an unlimited number of items on every Shopify plan.

Many experts recognize Shopify as the best solution in the e-commerce market for investing in the growth of their online store.

Typical Workflow for Online Orders

Understanding Shopify order processing is a fundamental part of your e-commerce business. Let’s briefly review the main stages of Shopify order processing when your Shopify store is not synchronized with your business systems.

Every Shopify online order goes through certain stages. Each of these stages requires a different action in your Shopify store. You can configure Shopify to automatically perform these actions or process them manually.

Capture Payment of a Placed Order

When a client makes a payment by credit card, payment information must be received and sent to his bank for processing. You can receive payments manually or automatically. If you set a manual capture, you will need to capture funds for each order from the Shopify orders area. In this way, (if you configured your settings for manual capture funds), you will not automatically receive payment from orders. And attention, you won’t be able to collect any money for an order after the authorization period ends.

Thus, manual payment management requires a lot of time and effort, especially if you have many orders.

But if you just automate the capture payment, without automating inventory updates, there is a high risk of getting money for goods that are no longer in stock.

Fulfill the Paid Order

When a client buys something from your online store, this information appears as a new order in the Orders page of Shopify. Simultaneously you receive a new order notification by email. The customer receives an order confirmation by email. The fulfillment procedure typically includes the following stage:

1. You log into your ERP/accounting system to create an order record from the Shopify store.

2. Search for customer records in your ERP/accounting system. If you do not find customer information in your system, you must manually enter all the information about the new customer.

3. To account for purchases, you need to manually adjust your inventory levels. This is more complicated than it seems at first glance, because your product identifiers (Shopify creates a unique product ID for every item you sell) in your online store may not exactly match the SKUs (Stock Keeping Unit- the code that identifies the product within your business).

4. After entering and adjusting all the related order information, you can proceed with the order, namely: picking and packaging items, labeling the order for shipment, shipping the package with a mail carrier. The steps for fulfillments may be different depending on the fulfillment method used:
  • Fulfill own orders. You execute orders yourself, packing and sending your goods.
  • Dropshipping (fulfillment services). Dropshipping partners stores, packs, and ships the goods for you to your customers. The typical dropshipping services that integrate with Shopify are Oberlo Dropshipping and Fulfillment by Amazon but it could be other services.
  • Custom dropshipping Customs dropshipping services realize your orders when they receive a request by e-mail. This request is generated when you mark an item as fulfilled in your Shopify store.

5. After completing the order, you must take note of the shipping information and return to your Shopify store to send this information to the customer for tracking.

6. If you use CRM you need to manually update the information to reflect the sale you just completed.

Shopify Refund, Return, or Canceling Orders

If the process described above seems familiar to you, most likely you are tired of manually entering data between business systems and your store. Either you must incur large salary costs for employees who are responsible for data entry. But the worst part is that you often find errors as a result of re-entering data. Thus, part of the orders ends with a return.

Did you know that according to e-commerce returns statistics 65% of all returns are the merchant’s fault (whether it’s an incorrect size, color, etc.) But for sure, your goal is to minimize returns in your store and increase customer satisfaction.

Our recommendation: to better manage your business we highly recommended automating all your order processing at each stage.

Inventory Updates Issues

Another big common problem in online shops is inventory updates. Inventory levels in the online store and business system are never synchronized; as a result, it is typical in such case to find companies issuing lots of refunds to offset ordered goods that are not available for shipping.
Shopify inventory updates

It’s no secret when returning the goods and reimbursing their payment, not only profitability is reduced, but unexpected order processing work is added.

Shopify takes its share from each transaction that occurs in your online store. Fees are: 30¢ for every online transaction, plus 2.9% to 2.4% depending on your plan. Even if you activate Shopify Payments (that available only to stores in certain countries) you still have to pay for each transaction.

Although the fees for Shopify Transactions are not so bad, but if the company has problems with inventory synchronization and often must make refunds, they are not happy to pay the transaction fee.

Some e-commerce owners recommend put in the financial plan “fund returns”. They say start by depositing 10% of the income into the “return fund”. And if experience shows that more or less is needed, change the percentage.

This may seem reasonable, but we recommend that you invest better in automating your business, which will improve the performance of your store at every stage and increase customer satisfaction and profitability.

Save Time and Money with Fully Managed Shopify Integration Service

Do you need an effective integration solution to automate your order processing, update an inventory and help you sell more on Shopify?

Our goal is to save the time of entrepreneurs so that they take care of the e-commerce routine problems as little as possible. We take this job on ourselves. We reduce the processing and delivery time of a Shopify order and make it faster by integrating your Shopify store with another system that you use to run your business.

Contact us today for a free consultation!

RELATED POSTS:

Must-Have Integration between E-Commerce and Business Systems

9 Major E-Commerce Trends That Will Help Grow Your Online Business

PRICING PACKAGES: Shopify Integration

Shopify and Microsoft Dynamics Nav Integration: Things you should know

Secrets and rules of Shopify integration with your ERP or CRM

Secrets and rules of Shopify integration with your ERP or CRM

This post was updated to reflect current trends and information.


As you know, an online store or eCommerce site, always becomes an additional source of revenue for a company, and sometimes even it might become the main source of sales and revenues.

Great design, information blocks and a clear structure are just some of the many good advantages if you decide to create an online store using an e-commerce platform based on Shopify.

Understand what Shopify integration is
Shopify integration

First, your Shopify store needs an inventory management strategy. Keeping track of your inventory should be a top priority. This means that you need real-time automation for all your stock, as manual stock inventory can be an overwhelming task.

Thus, the integration of the online store with the company’s internal business system allows you to synchronize the inventory in your Shopify store with the inventory status of your ERP database system, based on pre-defined schedule.

Automatic updates of Shopify variants, inventory quantities and prices will be useful for online stores that have a considerable range of products, especially when inventory status of those products/items is constantly fluctuating…

With Shopify integration, there is no need to monitor and adjust, manually the stock of your products on the eCommerce site or store; you sell only what is available, and all new products are automatically fed to the site.

Thus, your visitors have the most complete and reliable information on a product or service. At the same time, you can significantly reduce the cost of processing the price lists and catalogs of your products.

Why do you need to exchange data?

Automatic integration between a Shopify store and the business management system (ERP, CRM, accounting, etc.) helps to solve several issues:
– Get rid of problems related to human factor.
– Reduce the number of possible errors during data exchange.
– Reduce the workload of employees and focus their activity on sales and customer service.
– Ensure the relevance of the information for both: store visitors and company sellers. Especially relevant for large turnover.

Useful reading: Challenges of selling on Shopify

The main stages of data exchange

The process of implementing data exchange between Shopify and a company’s business software system, consists of three main phases:
1. Project analysis and initiation.
2. Configuration of the data Upload from ERP/CRM to the eCommerce site.
3. Configuration of the data Download from the eCommerce site to ERP/CRM.

The first phase is a step that happens only once during the lifecycle of the integration project. During this phase, our team at EDI2XML will work with the client and identify the business rules, the entities to synchronize between the ERP/CRM and their Shopify Stores, the frequency and other aspects.

This initiation phase is crucial to initiating a continuous automatic process that will have one single mission: run indefinitely and do what it is configured to do.

The automation process will be executing the upload of data from ERP/CRM to Shopify and the download of data from Shopify to the ERP/CRM system, when needed, without any human intervention.

Which information is usually sent from ERP to the online store?

The following is a list of information and data objects that can be extracted from a company’s management system, and uploaded / synchronized to the Shopify store:
  • Update Variant Inventory/Price
  • Customer Information, Bill To, Ship To
  • Update Shopify Customer (Customer Information, Bill To, Ship To)
  • Update Shopify Orders (Complete, Cancel)
  • Create Shopify Order Fulfillment
  • Update/Cancel Shopify Order Fulfillment
  • Create Shopify Product(s)
  • Update Shopify Product(s)
  • Delete Shopify Product(s)
  • Create Shopify Product Image
  • Modify Shopify Product Image
  • Delete Shopify Product Image
  • Create Shopify Variant(s)
  • Update Shopify Variant(s)
  • Delete Shopify Variant(s)

Which information is sent the online store to ERP?

The following is a list of information and data objects that can be extracted from a Shopify store and downloaded / synchronized to the company’s management system:
B2B Integration
  • Shopify Orders (Ship To, Bill to and Order details) Update
  • Shopify Customers (Customer Information, Bill To, Ship To)
  • Shopify Orders Fulfillment
  • Abandoned Checkouts
  • Inventory Level by Location


Integrate Shopify with Leading ERP Systems

As mentioned above, Shopify integration with your internal system makes it easy to manage your sales, inventory, and reports. We at EDI2XML eliminate the need for manual data entry using the Magic xpi Integration Platform, we automate the most important business processes, ensuring data exchange between Shopify and leading ERP and accounting systems.
Shopify integration

Following is a list of the most commonly used ERP systems to integrate to Shopify:

What to consider when organizing the integration of Shopify.

Prior to kicking off a Shopify integration project between your company’s business system and the eCommerce store, it is necessary to define the business flow. Think through all the stages of working with customers, this help determine what information you need to transfer and in which direction.

What points are important to consider for integration:

1. What data should be uploaded to each side;

2. How often will the exchange take place;

3. Prepare your data for Integration based on the appropriate data format (i.e. csv, xml, json ….).

4. For the integration to be efficient and smooth, it’s important that you sanitize and clean your data; Clean all duplicate fields and customers, correct incomplete or contravening data, Product/SKU IDs on your online store, must match the Product/SKU IDs used to represent items in your accounting/ERP system. ..

5. Anticipate possible issues: lack of the right product, the possibility of doubling data and other difficulties.

The technical complexities of your integration project depend on how to decide to integrate with your software business system (i.e. accounting software, ERP or CRM system); Connecting directly with certified connectors to branded systems such as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, is possible, but will need additional time and effort to build, test and deploy. Still integration using messages of type XML, Json or CSV are the most standard and efficient to date, and do not require any additional fees or efforts.

Shopify Integration Experts

Need an efficient Shopify ERP integration solution that automates orders and inventory between your Shopify store and your ERP system? We can help you! The e-commerce integration with ERP, CRM and EDI is our specialty and one of the strongest offerings. We setup fast and efficient synchronization bridge that works very efficiently to add value to your business.

We specialize in integrating Shopify with ERP, CRM, and other third-party systems and applications. It doesn’t matter if you are a Shopify user or just want to open a new store, or switch to Shopify from another eCom platform, we have experts who can solve all your integration challenges.

Contact our Shopify integration experts today for a free consultation!
Shopify integration price list

The following is a list of additional helpful information:

Must-Have Integration between E-Commerce and Business Systems

9 Major E-Commerce Trends That Will Help Grow Your Online Business

The main reasons why you need Microsoft Dynamics Integration with your Business Systems

Shopify and Microsoft Dynamics Nav Integration: Things you should know

Free Shopify Integration Whitepaper
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Fully Managed Shopify Integration with EDI2XML

Ecommerce (or online retail) has been a growing trend over the last few years. Due to this, online retailers are always on the lookout for efficient processes in order to better serve today’s well-connected, tech-savvy and wise online consumer. Successful brands are those that are able to find a balance between affordable prices, fast & low-cost shipping, and availability of products.

Download our Shopify Whitepaper to learn more about:
– Shopify & the e-commerce trend
– When you should integrate your Shopify store with EDI
– Integration between Shopify and an internal software management system (like ERP, CRM…)

Interested in fully managed Shopify Integration service?  Take the next step to request our Shopify Integration pricing plans

Related posts:

– Must-Have Integration between E-Commerce and Business Systems

– 9 Major E-Commerce Trends That Will Help Grow Your Online Business

– PRICING PACKAGES: Shopify Integration

– Shopify and Microsoft Dynamics Nav Integration: Things you should know

– Best Practices for Improving E-Commerce Supply Chain Management

Shopify and Microsoft Dynamics Nav Integration: Things You Should Know

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This post was updated to reflect current trends and information.

Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms that allows you to set up an online store to sell your products. With Shopify, you can easily organize your merchandise, customize your storefront, accept credit card payments, track and respond to orders. In addition, Shopify can cover not only online selling, but also your sales on social media, or in-store.

Shopify integration with ERP

Challenges of Selling on Shopify

Many businesses with online commerce on Shopify, use also Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Most of these companies are facing great challenges when it comes to managing their online Shopify store and synchronizing data between their in-house Microsoft Navision ERP on-premises and Shopify.

The major challenge is synchronizing data back and forth between both platforms, on a near real-time basis. Having the synchronization in place will help avoid major logistics and supply chain issues such as:

– Adding and removing SKUs to Shopify platform,
– Updating SKUs pricing
– Enabling and disabling SKUs to sell on Shopify,
– Updating the status of orders that came in through Shopify,
– Synchronizing orders between Navision and Shopify,
– Over ordering of discontinued or out-of-stock items,
– Synchronizing shipment information
– Synchronizing payment information
– And the list goes on…

All these challenges will only create a bottleneck for the enterprise, where inefficiencies will prevail and companies will have to hire more people to manage their online store on Shopify, in addition to the maintenance of their NAV ERP.

As a result, companies won’t be able to improve their online business and run efficiently, if they still manually extracting information from Shopify, and transferring it into Microsoft Dynamics NAV, also manually by keying it in.

This process of manually keying information in both platforms (Shopify and Navision) is a time-consuming open door for human errors, and in a sense, it is an avoidable expense for an enterprise.

Do you want to know more about what Microsoft Dynamics is? Read this article “What is Microsoft Dynamics?”

Magic xpi: the API Driven Integration Platform

Magic xpi, is one of the leading integration and orchestration technologies in the IT market. In fact, it is one of the oldest in this space. Magic xpi helps companies in their digital transformation journey, and empowers them to integrate heterogeneous systems, databases, and business processes using certified connectors by the manufacturer. It is a reliable SOA, API-driven integration platform for all connectivity needs. I have described Magic xpi in a more detailed post: Systems integration platform to improve business performance
Magic xpi integration platform

Integrating Microsoft Dynamics NAV with Shopify will help overcome all the above challenges, by automating the flow of information between different business systems, and eliminating expensive “manual” order management and fulfillment processes.

Magic xpi Integration platform can do the integration job and save companies time and money, allowing human resources to focus on important business tasks. Magic xpi can automatically synchronize Shopify and Microsoft Dynamics NAV, in a non-stop mode, 365 days a year.

Shopify Automation Benefits

Here are the benefits of implementing and deploying an integration platform like Magic xpi to automate Shopify by integrating with Microsoft Dynamics NAV:

Saving of Time and Effort: Avoid repetitive manual data entry and associated errors and inefficiencies

Improvement of productivity: Use the company’s human resources in more important business tasks, rather than redundant data entry. Your company will reduce the risks of human errors.

Improve fulfillment time: Considerably cut down the order fulfillment delay; a Shopify order will be integrated seamlessly into NAV and processed on-time.

Click here to download our free White Paper on Magic xpi Integration Platform

Microsoft Dynamics NAV & Shopify Integration Endpoints

The following are a few basic endpoints, most commonly used to integrate Shopify and MS Dynamics Navision. Certainly, there are more end-points ready for integration, however, most businesses start their Shopify integration projects with the following endpoints:

Clients: Synchronize information about the online customer from Shopify to Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

Contacts: Synchronize Contact information, billing & shipping address, etc. synchronized from Shopify to Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

SKUs:  Synchronize SKUs and items information (i.e. Stock level, pricing, active, discontinued…) from Microsoft Dynamics to Shopify. online store.

Orders: Synchronize Shopify sales orders placed by the online customer, to Microsoft Dynamics NAV Sales Orders.

Payments: Synchronize payment Information and Payment Method from Shopify to Microsoft Dynamics NAV in Sales.

Delivery: Synchronize Delivery information (i.e. tracking No, shipping company…) from Dynamics NAV to Shopify

EDI2XML & Magic xpi are Your Digital Transformation Partners

Magic xpi proved to be a leading, cost-effective solution to integrate easily and quickly Microsoft Dynamics with Shopify.
Shopify Integration

Magic xpi is a cost-effective, code-free, drag-and-drop with pre-built generic connector able to connect to Microsoft Dynamics. Integrating with Magic xpi, companies are capable of reducing their deployment lead time from months to a few days, which creates a great ROI.

We at EDI2XML have been a partner of a global enterprise software company Magic Software Enterprises Ltd. for over 20 years, and we are ready to take your integration challenges.

Looking for an Integration solution? Contact Us Today
Free Shopify Integration whitepaper

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PRICING PACKAGES: Shopify Integration

Top 3 Reasons For EDI Integration With Shopify

This post was updated to reflect current trends and information.
EDI integration with Shopify

In short, Shopify is one of the leading Canadian eCommerce platforms offered to businesses and individuals, based on a monthly subscription fee. Anyone can subscribe and then begin to showcase their products online, to sell directly to the public. For more information about Shopify, you can visit their website here.

Who Uses Shopify?

Shopify is a popular e-commerce platform that can be used by individuals and businesses of all sizes to create and manage their online stores. Here are some of the types of people who use Shopify:
  1. Small business owners: Shopify is an excellent platform for small business owners who want to sell products online without having to deal with the technical aspects of building an e-commerce website.
  2. Entrepreneurs: Many entrepreneurs use Shopify to create and sell their own products online, whether it be clothing, beauty products, or digital downloads.
  3. Large businesses: Shopify’s scalability makes it a popular choice for larger businesses that need a platform that can handle high levels of traffic and sales.
  4. Dropshippers: Shopify’s integrations with popular dropshipping apps and tools make it an attractive option for dropshippers who want to sell products without having to hold inventory.
  5. Non-profits: Shopify offers special pricing and features for non-profits, making it an excellent platform for charities and other non-profit organizations to sell merchandise and raise funds online.

Overall, Shopify is a flexible platform that can be used by a wide range of people and businesses to create and manage their online stores.

A Word on Drop-Shipping

One important thing to emphasize here is that with the emergence of the online retail (or eCommerce) market, companies selling products through the Internet on platforms such as Shopify, are not necessarily carrying inventory of their products anymore.

More and more, once a company receives an online order from a customer (through the Shopify platform), these orders are then transferred to the manufacturing business partner(s) for shipping and delivery of the bought item(s), where they are told the “white label” the delivery package. This concept is called “Drop-Ship” (or Drop Shipping) in the retail and eCommerce world. Basically, the seller receives orders from their online retail store and is paid via the Internet (through PayPal or credit card) and then forwards the order to the manufacturer to then ship directly to the client. For many, there is now no need to hold inventory in a local warehouse.

What Does EDI Have To Do With eCommerce?

For those who aren’t very familiar with EDI (or Electronic Data Interchange), it is a set of standards and processes to exchange business documents electronically between Business (or Trading) Partners. Common business documents include Purchase Orders, Invoices, ASNs (Advance Ship Notice), Inventory Inquiry/Advice and more. This data exchange can happen in both directions – incoming and outgoing.

In the context of online sales over the Internet, on an eCommerce platform like Shopify as well as with the introduction of drop-shipping, EDI comes into play for several reasons;

1. Most major manufacturing and distribution companies will require a system-to-system integration through some sort of EDI. This speeds up processes and allows for greater efficiency in partner communication.

2. Shipping companies also require integration via EDI.

3. Today, consumers are very well educated and require to be informed on the status of their orders at every step of the way during the shipping process.

As you may notice, all of the above requires system-to-system integration between so many unrelated or diverse systems and platforms. At this point in time, most major companies and retailers are well equipped with EDI platforms and standards in which they have been investing in for many years now. Companies are now finding more ways to use their EDI to increase efficiency and are truly seeing returns on their investments.

Top 3 Reasons Why You Need EDI Integration With Shopify

The reasons may seem obvious to you at this point, but I will re-iterate the top 3 reasons for EDI integration with your Shopify store or any other eCommerce platform;

Cloud Services Provider If you are in the Drop-Ship business and you are selling online through Amazon, Wal-Mart, Cabela’s or Target, for example, chances are that these retailers will impose certain rules, and require that you go on EDI. If you are dealing with suppliers, they will also impose similar rules and require the use of EDI.

Cloud Services Provider If you are selling online through your own store via Shopify, and you have a high volume of clients that expect to the informed of their orders at any given moment, this is another big reason why you should have EDI integrated with your Shopify store.

Cloud Services Provider If you are dealing with shipping companies like FedEx, Purolator, UPS, etc., and you have a high volume of shipments on a daily basis, then you need to integrate your management systems AND Shopify with EDI.

The above are the main reasons for EDI integration but there are tons of other ways EDI can improve your processes and reasons to talk with an EDI consultant today.

How Can I Integrate My Shopify Store with EDI?

This integration is very feasible however you will most definitely need a team of system integrators with a high knowledge and expertise in EDI. With the right team like the EDI2XML team, there is no going wrong.

If you are interested in learning more about this topic or any other issue related to EDI integration projects, please contact us today and receive your free consultation.
Shopify integration
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