To optimize the shopping experience and the sales processes behind it, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is now working with Shopify and offering a corresponding connector for this purpose.
As one of the most popular e-commerce solutions, Shopify offers merchants a particularly user-friendly way to create and operate online stores, while Business Central acts as a comprehensive enterprise management solution for financial, sales, service and other business processes in a single application. A new connector now creates a seamless link between the two systems, synchronizing order, stock and other relevant information between Shopify and Business Central. In this way, order processes and customer service activities can be handled more quickly.
Streamlined customization
The networked business processes enable employees to focus more on sales and respond more quickly to requirements, for example, by adjusting product pricing. And because Business Central supports multitier pricing structures, as well as multiple currencies, companies and entities, it easily covers a wide range of Shopify store scenarios.
More transparency
Connecting Shopify and Business Central also significantly increases visibility into stock, pricing, existing customers, order history, order status, billing and payments. This not only increases accuracy in order processing, but also speed – for example, in responding to inquiries and processing returns and refunds. The resulting increase in operational efficiency saves time, reduces costs, and ensures better results and faster decisions.
Helpful features of the Shopify connector
• The Shopify connector offers numerous helpful functionalities in the process – even when multiple Shopify stores are connected to the same Business Central system. In this case, each store has its own setup (e.g. a collection of products, inventory calculation locations and price lists).
• In this case, images, item variants, barcodes, vendor item numbers, extended texts and tags, for example, can be synchronized between the systems via bidirectional synchronization. In addition, item attributes and prices defined via price groups and discounts can be exported from Business Central to Shopify. It can be decided whether non-existing items should be created automatically or only updates to existing products should be allowed.
• When synchronizing inventory, both individual and all available locations can be selected in Business Central. Also, inventory can be updated at multiple locations in Shopify.
• Bidirectional synchronization of customers ensures that they are intelligently mapped by phone number and email. Country-specific templates can also be used when creating new customers to ensure correct tax settings.
• The Shopify connector also allows the import of orders from Shopify. Customers can be automatically created in Business Central or managed in Shopify instead. Shipping costs, gift cards, tips, shipping and payment methods, transactions and fraud risk are also supported. Payout information can also be received from Shopify Payments.
• In addition, when sending order fulfillment information to Shopify, item tracking information can be included.
The Shopify connector is available for both cloud and on-prem versions of Business Central. For cloud customers, the solution was automatically deployed with the Business Central 20 update (Cumulative Update 2). On-prem customers must at least update to this version to use the connector.
An overview of how the Shopify connector works is also provided in the following YouTube video:
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