BC + Shopify Implementation / Integration rescue
Option 04
Fix a Shopify and Business Central Integration That Is Not Working
Orders that do not arrive. Stock levels nobody trusts. Duplicate customers multiplying. Payouts your controller reconciles by hand every month. The integration exists, it was signed off, and it is quietly costing you a person’s worth of time. We audit it, tell you what is actually wrong, and fix it.
- Fixed fee audit
- Written findings you keep either way
- No obligation to use us for the fix
- Audit, fixed fee
- $6,500 USD
- Audit duration
- 2 to 3 weeks
- Deliverable
- Written findings and plan
- Remediation
- Quoted from findings
- Who built it
- Does not matter
- Middleware or native
- Either
- Live store
- Keeps selling throughout
Symptoms
What a broken Shopify Business Central integration looks like
These are the calls we get. If two or three of them describe your month, the integration is not working, whatever the status dashboard says.
- Shopify orders are not importing into Business CentralThey sit in Shopify, or they appear hours late, or some arrive and some do not and nobody can see the pattern.
- Inventory in Shopify does not match Business CentralYou oversell items you do not have, or you hide stock you do. Either way the warehouse has stopped trusting the numbers.
- Duplicate customers keep appearingThe same person exists three times in Business Central because the matching rules were never configured properly.
- Shopify Payments payouts will not reconcileYour controller unpicks a lump sum by hand every month because fees, refunds and chargebacks were never mapped.
- Tax is wrong on some ordersUsually orders from a country whose template was never set up, or a customer whose tax area does not resolve.
- Refunds and returns are handled manuallyReturns were left out of the original scope, so somebody raises every credit memo by hand and inventory is adjusted separately.
- The sync log is full of errors nobody readsJob queue entries failing daily, error logs nobody owns, and a workaround that has quietly become the process.
- Prices differ between the two systemsNobody agreed which system owns pricing, so both do, and somebody reconciles the difference on a spreadsheet.
- Only one person understands itIt was built by a contractor or an employee who has since left, there is no documentation, and nobody dares change anything.
- You are paying for middleware you may not needA monthly subscription for a connector doing work the native Microsoft connector now does at no licence cost.
Root causes
What is usually actually wrong
In our experience the technology is rarely the problem. These are the causes we find, roughly in order of how often they turn up.
Cause 01
Nobody decided who owns what data
The most common finding by a distance. Items, prices and customers are edited in both systems, so every sync overwrites somebody’s work and the team invents workarounds to protect their own records. No amount of technical fixing helps until that decision is made and enforced.
Cause 02
The item master was never mapped properly
Variants modelled as separate products, SKUs that exist in one system only, units of measure that do not correspond, barcodes on some items and not others. The integration was built around the exceptions instead of the exceptions being fixed.
Cause 03
Returns and refunds were left out of scope
The original project covered the happy path. Returns, partial refunds, cancellations and order adjustments were deferred and never came back, so finance carries them manually and the inventory position drifts.
Cause 04
Sync scheduling was never tuned
Everything on the same interval, or intervals set once at install and never revisited as volume grew. Order sync too slow, item sync too frequent, and a job queue that falls behind at exactly the times you cannot afford it to.
Cause 05
Customer matching rules were left at defaults
No smart mapping on email, phone or tax registration number, no country templates, no default customer strategy for guest checkout. The duplicates follow inevitably.
Cause 06
Finance mapping was never completed
Payouts, fees, gift cards, tips and chargebacks with no accounts behind them, so everything lands somewhere generic and the month end unpick becomes routine.
Cause 07
Nothing was documented
No mapping decision record, no runbook, no troubleshooting guide. When the person who built it left, the integration became something the business is afraid of rather than something it operates.
Cause 08
The wrong tool for the requirement
Occasionally the finding is that the business genuinely outgrew what was built, or the opposite: it is paying for middleware to do something the native connector handles. Both are worth knowing before you spend anything else.
The audit
What we do in two to three weeks
A fixed fee, fixed scope assessment. Your store keeps selling throughout and we change nothing without your approval.
01. Read the system, not the documentation
Connector or middleware configuration, mapping setup, job queue entries, error logs, sync history, and a sample of real transactions traced end to end from Shopify order to posted Business Central invoice.
02. Data integrity check
Item and variant mapping coverage, orphaned and duplicate records, inventory variance between the two systems, customer duplication rate, and unreconciled financial entries. Measured, not estimated.
03. Talk to the people working around it
Finance, customer service and the warehouse. The workarounds people have built are the fastest route to the real problems, and they never appear in a configuration review.
04. Written findings and a remediation plan
Every issue found, its business impact, its root cause, and what fixing it involves. Ranked by what it is costing you, not by what is easiest to fix. With a fixed price against each remediation item.
- yours to keep
- no obligation to proceed
- usable by another vendor
If the honest finding is that the integration is sound and the problem lies elsewhere, that is what the report will say. We would rather write that than sell a rebuild nobody needs.
Cost
What integration rescue costs
$6,500
USD, fixed fee for the audit
One price, whatever we find. The deliverable is the written findings and remediation plan, and it is yours to keep and to act on however you choose, including with another vendor.
Remediation is quoted from the findings, item by item, at a fixed price each. Most engagements land well below the cost of a rebuild, because most of what is wrong is configuration and process rather than code. Where a rebuild genuinely is the answer, the audit fee is credited against it.
What the alternative usually costs
- Rebuilding the integration from scratch$15,000 to $30,000
- Middleware subscription, ongoing$600+ per month
- North America developer rate, time and materials$100 to $150 per hour
- A person spending half their week on workaroundsyour call
Frequently asked
Integration audit questions
Yes, and most of the ones we audit were. It makes no difference whether it was built by a Dynamics partner, a Shopify agency, a middleware vendor, a contractor or an employee who has left. We are reading the configuration and the data, not reviewing anyone’s work.
No. The audit covers whatever is actually running. Part of what the findings answer is whether the native Microsoft connector would now do the job, since it has gained a lot of ground, and what dropping the subscription would save you against what migrating would cost.
No. The audit is read-only. We review configuration, logs and data, and trace transactions that have already happened. Nothing changes without your explicit approval, and any remediation work is scheduled with you and tested in a sandbox first.
Then the report says that, with the reasoning and the cost. The audit fee is credited against a rebuild if you choose to do it with us. If you would rather take the findings to another vendor, the document is written to be usable by one, and that is a legitimate outcome we have no problem with.
Around four to six hours in total, spread across finance, customer service and warehouse, plus read access to both systems. We do the rest ourselves, deliberately, because the point is to see what is actually happening rather than what people believe is happening.
Frequently it is. Businesses often discover through the findings that the real answer is a fuller rebuild, a storefront replacement or a Business Central reconfiguration. The audit is designed to let you make that decision on evidence, at a low fixed cost, rather than on a vendor’s assertion.
Other options
If this is not quite your situation
Next step
Tell us what is going wrong
A short call to confirm the audit is the right starting point, then two to three weeks to a written answer. Your store keeps selling the whole time.