Magento and Shopify are always seen as all-in-one e-commerce platforms, often competing against each other, making it difficult to envisage Magento and Shopify working together side by side in the day to day operations of an online business.
Why did we integrate Magento with Shopify?
The request came from one of our clients who uses Magento to not only receive orders and manage their back office but also to integrate with their suppliers and warehousing software through a Laravel system integrated with Magento.
The client wanted to keep using Magento as a back of the house solution but use Shopify as a front-end solution.
How does the data flow in the Magento - Shopify Integration?
In our integration flow we are sending every new product from Magento to Shopify using the Shopify API and a cron on the server where Magento is that would check the system every 10 minutes for new products as well as Observers to update stock and price changes on save.
The orders are being sent to Magento every minute using the Shopify API to fetch the orders from our online Shopify store and import them to Magento.
Challenges
- Duplicate data - we had to create attributes for orders and products within Magento that would store a Shopify id of the order entity or product to avoid duplication.
- The challenge at #1 created this challenge because if you have crons running on a live Magento system which is doing a lot of saving and updating we had to find a way to update the indexes for specific products only.
Further use of the Integration
Apart from the way that our client uses this integration there are many other things that our integration can help with, such as:
- Managing Drop-ship stores - If you are a supplier and have drop-shippers working with you, this tool would make it very easy for sending them price updates, stock updates, new products and even returning orders from their store to your website for fulfilment.
- Migrating - Our tool enables you to easily migrate from Magento to Shopify by migrating products, customers, order history etc.
- Selling products under different brands - You can easily open new Shopify stores and reach new niches and industries in a cost-effective way.
