Shopify is the world’s fastest growing ecommerce platform, powering millions of businesses both big and small, and increasingly enterprise.
For brands at the enterprise level, integrating Shopify into an ERP can unlock its full potential, enabling you to build online stores, sell globally, manage inventory, and often reduce total cost of ownership with less custom code. By integrating your ERP into Shopify, you can streamline operations, enhance data accuracy, and improve overall efficiency. This integration allows for real-time updates across platforms, ensuring that inventory, orders, and customer data are always current.
Unsurprisingly though, an ecommerce-ERP integration isn’t as simple as flipping a switch – even with Shopify. These integrations take planning and technical expertise. At Domaine, we’ve developed a rock solid set of Shopify-ERP integration patterns designed to support our brands’ immediate and long-term goals.
Here’s how we do it.
“Custom” Made Easy
Integrating Shopify into your business workflow is straightforward, thanks to its robust and modern GraphQL APIs, which are supported with publicly accessible and detailed documentation on shopify.dev. Shopify’s architecture is designed to facilitate easy customization, supporting both event-based and job-based integrations. This flexibility allows businesses to tailor their ecommerce operations to meet specific needs without extensive coding. Additionally, Shopify’s lightweight extension model enables custom order management and discounting business logic directly through Checkout Extensions and Functions, ensuring your business requirements are met with ease.
Decrease Total Cost of Ownership
While integrating with Shopify requires some initial effort, the long-term benefits are substantial. Shopify offers out-of-the-box integrations with commerce services available in its App Store. This means app vendors for returns, customer service, tax, fraud prevention, payments, and financing maintain their own integrations with Shopify, reducing the need for custom code. As a result, our clients see a significant decrease in development time and costs.
Shopify’s admin dashboard features a polished, straightforward user experience that simplifies business processes, sometimes even replacing entire systems. This streamlined approach enhances operational efficiency and lowers the total cost of ownership (TCO), allowing businesses to focus on brand growth.
Typical Integration Flows Between Shopify and Your ERP
When integrating Shopify with your ERP, several key data flows need to be established.
Inventory
Accurate inventory management is mission-critical for avoiding stockouts and overstock situations. By synchronizing inventory levels, businesses can maintain real-time inventory visibility, ensuring that stock levels are updated across all sales channels. Depending on your specific business needs this can be as simple as a scheduled job with updates to the entire catalog, or more advanced in omnichannel scenarios with event-based workflows and external calls for availability checks or inventory reservation.
Product Data
Integrating product data between Shopify and your ERP allows for centralized management of product information. This keeps product descriptions, pricing, and availability across all platforms consistent, reducing errors and enhancing the customer shopping experience. Shopify provides flexibility, having the ERP drive all product content, interfacing with a PIM for enrichment, or doing the enrichment right in Shopify through its polished Admin UI.
Order Export
Exporting order data from Shopify to your ERP is vital for order processing and fulfillment. This integration ensures that orders placed on Shopify are automatically transferred to the ERP system, resulting in better order management and less manual data entry. Shopify can also implement routing logic, if needed to reduce shipping/logistics costs, and holding logic to ensure certain checks and filters are made before exporting for fulfillment.
Fulfillments
Effectively managing fulfillment is how brands can meet many customer expectations. With Shopify, brands can manage split and partial fulfillments, provide customers with built-in carrier tracking links, manage digital items, handle local pickup options, and more. Baking fulfillment data into a Shopify-ERP integration not only improves operational efficiency, but the customer experience too. Shopify can support partial fulfillments, and exceptional situations when items cannot be fulfilled.
Cancellations
Handling cancellations promptly is also important for maintaining customer satisfaction. Integrating cancellation data ensures that orders canceled on Shopify are immediately reflected in the ERP system, as well as vice versa for orders canceled from the ERP/warehouse side. This keeps inventory levels and order statuses accurate.
Payments
Integrating payment data between Shopify and your ERP is critical for managing financial transactions. While Shopify’s payment model can initially seem counterintuitive for large brands to adapt to, it comes with a massive benefit: Shopify provides an abstraction layer on top of payments, allowing its rich ecosystem of third-party apps and services to trigger payment events without requiring custom integration work for each payment method. This allows the brands to swap out payment types and third party services easily without development support.
Depending on specific business needs, additional integration flows such as returns management, location-based inventory, and B2B transactions like EDI can also be implemented.
How Domaine Can Help
Consultations
For brands that already have a development team or an integration partner, Domaine offers expert guidance and recommendations around Shopify best practices when it comes to ERP integrations.
Here’s a rundown of our consultation services.
Architecture Planning
We start with understanding their current architecture, to make sure all systems and needs are accounted for.
We then put together a proposed future state architecture, incorporating recommendations for best-in-class services within the Shopify space, where integrations can be simplified or removed, and which areas may need special attention.
Detailed Flow Review and Documentation
We provide thorough reviews and documentation of your integration flows, example queries and integration approach recommendations, ensuring all processes are efficient, accurate and optimized.
Custom Integrations
For brands requiring more hands-on guidance, Domaine provides full custom integrations tailored to your specific needs. In full Shopify-ERP integrations, we manage the entire integration process from strategy to execution. We also design smaller automations to fill system gaps or improve overall business operation efficiency.
How We Work
Every Shopify-ERP integration begins with a Discovery phase that includes:
Architecture Session
In the Architecture Session, we examine how a brand’s ERP fits into the overall omnichannel workflow. Understanding what, when and why data flows between systems allows us to design a Shopify-ERP integration that blends with the existing processes. We account for core functionalities such as inventory management, order updates, and payments management.
At this stage, we’re also answering key questions that will influence our approach to the integration, namely:
- What data needs to be included in this integration? Order data? Product data? Financial data? Customer data?
- Does data need to move in real time or can it move in batches?
ERP Deep Dive
Next, we take a deep dive into the ERP itself. Netsuite… Microsoft Dynamics 365… SAP… SAP… RLM… KWI… Aptos… Brightpearl… you name it, we’re familiar with it. We look at the proposed integration method and analyze what systems a brand currently uses to integrate with its other commerce channels.
Identifying Integration Capabilities and Methods
We then assess the integration capabilities of your ERP and how it fits into your business operations. This exercise will show us any potential integration gaps that we might need to address.
At this stage we’ll also define the integration method. Most often, we’re using APIs, either Shopify’s or the ERP’s. (Many ERPs are increasingly offering Shopify integration capabilities.) Other times we’re using flat files on an FTP or an iPaaS solution like Boomi. It all ultimately depends on the requirements and objectives.
Proposed Future State
By the end of Discovery, we propose a future state tailored to a brand’s objectives that identifies the Shopify integration capabilities of the ERP, what custom development, if any, is required and what the final output will achieve.
Once all parties are aligned, it’s time to build.
Development
We practice iterative and transparent development. Workstreams are broken down by integration flows: inventory, orders, exports, cancellations, returns, payments, product catalogs, pricing, etc. We establish requirements and solutions documentation and lead regular recurring collaboration sessions with the client. Integrations are hosted on client-preferred platforms like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud to support scale and stand up high volume events such as Black Friday/Cyber Monday or major sales.
Testing, Launch and Support
As we get close to the completion of the Shopify-ERP integration, we’re testing heavily. Unit and functional tests to confirm correctness. Performance testing to validate scale and bottlenecks. End-to-end integration testing to ensure all systems are working together as expected. All of those tests are then followed by user acceptance testing. Typically baked into a broader Shopify launch, we deploy ERP integrations simultaneously. Active monitoring and troubleshooting ensures system stability.
Client Snapshot: How Domaine Designed a Custom Shopify-ERP Integration for Melissa & Doug.
As we migrated childrens toy titan, Melissa & Doug, from Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify, the brand needed to maintain a seamless integration with Salesforce Order Management (SOM), their ERP of choice. Their legacy fulfillment system required information to be held and updated in a specific way in SOM and that information needed to be transferred and updated within Shopify.
Domaine created a custom middleware that keeps Shopify orders in sync with SOM. This middleware manages order actions like fulfillment, partial fulfillment, order cancellation, and appeasements and returns. Our custom middleware also keeps inventory and pricing up to date between SOM and Shopify. This integration was crucial for Melissa & Doug, allowing their team to seamlessly export order information, access critical data, and act on it efficiently, without disrupting their existing fulfillment processes.
A Shopify-ERP Integration Improves the Customer Experience
It provides better visibility and access to mission-critical data – which, in turn, fuels better decision-making. Getting it right can have a major impact on a brand’s scalability and growth.
Ready to level-up your brand with a Shopify-ERP integration? We’re here to help.
