Shopify’s roots are humble: Initially conceived as a home-brewed platform built to sell snowboards, it has since exploded into the go-to eCommerce enablement platform for start-ups and small businesses around the world. With its merchant base eclipsing one million users after years of rapid growth, Shopify has broken down barriers and enables small businesses to make the leap from idea to reality by providing a one stop shop for building, launching and supporting an internet storefront without the overhead of supporting an enterprise-grade system.
Shopify API Integration
As companies achieve growth through successful eCommerce strategies, new opportunities may arise, and along with opportunity comes evolving business requirements and technical challenges: Implementing EDI, integrating with a new internal ERP platform, or meeting trading partner mandates.
Implementing a commerce platform such as Shopify is a great start for companies looking to expand their footprint into multichannel retail from an eCommerce storefront. As that expansion strategy rolls out, however, limitations begin to arise. Commerce platforms such as Shopify do not natively support EDI integration, external orders and invoices not created on the platform, or integration with an ERP system like SAP, NetSuite, or Quickbooks.
Open API access, however, enables Kleinschmidt to develop custom solutions for the Shopify platform that can help extend its capabilities beyond the storefront.
A Kleinschmidt customer in the garment industry recently came to us for help solving a unique problem: They provide contract manufacturing for large retail brands, but a growing segment of their business included smaller, independent brands who sell exclusively through a Shopify storefront. The larger brands and retails were integrated with our customer’s ERP through EDI via a typical AS2 connection. The smaller brands utilizing Shopify, however, were running the entirety of their business on the Shopify platform, thus our client had to implement an interim manual process to manage the wholesale ordering and invoicing for this segment of customer. Not exactly an optimal solution for the long run.
We dug into the Shopify API and quickly learned that we could integrate the external wholesale orders into the platform, and accommodate our customer’s EDI requirements without disrupting the business processes of the customers they supply.
Our development team created custom logic that transformed X12 EDI and XML data into JSON digestible by the Shopify API, and in return, transform Shopify JSON data into X12 data required by our customer. This enabled our customer to seamlessly push the exact X12 EDI data to trading partners utilizing Shopify that they would to the rest of their partners with EDI capability.
We helped to eliminate the manual process and reduce the amount of exceptions to our client’s business mandates by helping to roll out this integration across the majority of their trading partners who utilize Shopify.
We took our experience building API integrations with Amazon, ChannelAdvisor and other eCommerce platforms and marketplaces and applied it to Shopify. With its explosive growth and newfound leadership in the space, we’re expecting this uncommon scenario to become much more common in the future. And we’re ready to help.
We’re ready to help.
Want to learn more? Reach out to our team today. Our EDI and API integration experts are excited to help you integrate your Shopify store with EDI in order to expand your customer base and grow your business.