Shopify Business Central integration

What moves between Shopify and Business Central

Shopify takes the order. Business Central ships it, invoices it and books it. The integration carries nine flows, each with one direction and a fixed endpoint on both sides.

Items, variants, customers and sales orders run on the standard API v2.0. Price lists, stock per variant and location, and the tracking number are not in it, which shapes most of what follows. The general setup is on e-commerce ERP integration.

Which system owns what

What Shopify and Business Central store differently

Options against one variant code. A Shopify product has up to three options and up to 2,048 variants. A Business Central item has item variants, each with a code of at most 10 characters and a description. There is no second or third option: color and size live together in one code such as NAVY-L. The integration keeps a table from option values to variant codes and reads each variant's ID from your tenant, because salesOrderLine takes itemVariantId as a GUID, not the code. A value that has no variant code yet goes on a checklist and is not dropped. More in variant mapping.

Units of measure. Business Central sells item 10482 per piece and per box of 6. Shopify has no unit of measure, so the box becomes a third option. Both variants draw on the same stock. With 14 pieces available, Shopify gets 14 for the piece and 2 for the box: 14 divided by 6 is 2, remainder 2. A sale of one box takes 6 pieces, so the piece variant has to drop to 8 at once and the box to 1. The integration recalculates every unit of an item after each order, instead of waiting for the next stock run. On the order the line gets unitOfMeasureCode BOX with quantity 2, which Business Central books as 12 pieces. Background in units of measure.

Stock is one number in the API. The inventory property on an item is a single read-only figure across all locations, and an item variant carries no quantity at all. Shopify keeps stock per variant per location. Stock for 1,500 items with 6 variants each in 2 locations is 18,000 quantities. They come from a query on item ledger entries, published as an OData web service. That is one page, since a page holds up to 20,000 records. Writing them to Shopify takes 18,000 divided by 250, which is 72 calls. After the first run only changed quantities are sent. See multi-location inventory.

Posting groups Shopify has never heard of. A Business Central customer needs a general business posting group, a VAT business posting group and a customer posting group. Shopify sends none of them, and the customers resource in the API does not accept them either. A template on the API Setup page fills empty fields when a customer is created. One template gives every web customer the same groups. A business customer in another EU country with reverse-charge VAT needs a different VAT group. The integration decides on country and VAT number from the billing address and sets the group through a custom API page. The general problem is in required fields the source never sends.

Addresses and references. Business Central's customer table holds Address in 100 characters, Address 2 in 50 and City in 30. The Shopify order name goes into External Document No., at most 35 characters. A Shopify B2B order with a PO number needs that field too, so one of the two moves to a custom field on the sales header.

The technical reality of this pair

The numbers were checked on October 3, 2026 in Microsoft's operational limits and Shopify's rate-limit documentation. The cost model is explained in Shopify API rate limits.

Orders, worked through. An order with 3 lines costs 5 requests in Business Central: a customer lookup, the sales order header and 3 lines. A peak hour of 600 orders is 3,000 requests, or 250 in each 5-minute window. That is about 4 percent of the 6,000 budget. The tighter limit is 5 requests at a time per user. The integration runs under its own Microsoft Entra app registration, so it does not share that limit with other tools, and Microsoft requires no license for such a service-to-service app.

Webhooks on the Business Central side expire. A subscription lives three days and is renewed with the same handshake used to create it. Notifications arrive about 30 seconds after the change, and more than 1,000 changes in that window arrive as one collection notice with a filter. Shipments have no webhook, and the salesShipments resource has no tracking field. The integration polls posted shipments by date, reads the package tracking number from a published page and calls fulfillmentCreate with company, number and URL.

Tax is recalculated. On salesOrderLine, taxPercent and totalTaxAmount are read-only. Business Central calculates tax from its own VAT setup, not from Shopify's tax lines. When the two disagree by a cent, the integration flags the order before posting, so the payment still matches the invoice.

Where standard connectors stop

Microsoft ships its own Shopify connector with Business Central. Its documentation is precise about where its settings end.

• One price. It exports one price per variant, calculated through a sales quote for quantity 1. Quantity-based prices cannot be exported.
• No option matrix. It uses the variant code as the only option, so it cannot add a variant to a Shopify product that has two or more options.
• Units share stock. With units of measure as variants, each unit gets the same availability, and a sold box shows as still available until the next sync.
• Scheduled stock. Microsoft's tip is a job queue run every 15 to 30 minutes.
• Online only. The connector is not available for Business Central on-premises.
• B2B prices on Plus. Its B2B catalog price sync is documented as a Shopify Plus feature.

Standard connectors and iPaaS templates from other vendors add their own extension to Business Central and follow its fields. A built integration has none of these fixed settings: option tables, unit rules, price lists and stock queries follow how your tenant is set up. Comparison on technical grounds: custom integration vs iPaaS.

When it goes wrong

An order that still fails after its retries is kept with its original payload and sent again once the cause is fixed. A reconciliation run compares recent Shopify orders with the External Document No. values in Business Central, so an order whose webhook never arrived still gets in.

Before go-live the integration runs as a dry run against a Business Central sandbox, writing nothing, and you approve what it would do. After that every run has a diff per record in the dashboard. We host and monitor it and change it when Shopify or Microsoft changes an API. The system side is on Business Central integration, the platform side on Shopify integration, all flows on integrations. Sibling pages: Magento Business Central integration, Shopify NetSuite integration and Shopify SAP integration. Tell us how your Business Central is set up.