Note: Any of the three typical Shopify versions (Basic Shopify, Shopify, Advanced Shopify) can be connected with a Megaventory account.
This article covers the case of a company that is already using a Shopify subscription and has all its data entities (products, product categories, clients, etc.) there. The Megaventory account is assumed to be empty of data (either new or after a reset operation).
Preliminary Step – Necessary settings in Shopify
The following Shopify settings need to be appropriately set for the correct interoperability between Megaventory and Shopify:
SKUs - All Shopify products (including Variants) should have SKU numbers. Products or Variants with no SKU will not be synchronized with Megaventory.
Stock - All Shopify products should have Track Quantity enabled in order to be able to update their stock from Megaventory.
Tax - By default, Shopify Products include a Tax in the price (this is a global account setting). In this case, Shopify Orders containing discounts will be synced with the discount already applied to the unit price in Megaventory, and the discount details will not be passed to the Megaventory order.
Step 1 - Signing up for a Megaventory account
A new Megaventory account should be created here.
After signing up for the first time the user will see the initial Setup page (Admin > Account Setup) approximately as shown in the figure below.
Extra help while filling out the form can be obtained by hovering with the mouse over the bubble icon next to each specific field.
The option Enable Sales and Purchase Orders should be enabled.
Finally, it is strongly recommended that the Numbering Scheme of the Sales Order document is set to automatic numbering. By doing so, all the Sales Orders coming from Shopify will receive an Order Reference Number (the sales order number of Shopify), and the sales order numbering scheme of Megaventory will be independent of the sales order numbering scheme of Shopify. This also makes Megaventory ready to accept Sales Orders from other sales channels as well (other e-commerce software, manual sales orders through phone, etc.). If the Numbering Scheme of the Sales Order document is set to manual numbering, the Shopify Sales Order number will be used also in Megaventory. The latter option should be selected if your Megaventory account will receive orders from the Shopify store only.
Note: The trial account of Megaventory supports up to 5000 product SKUs and 5000 customers. If your Shopify store has more products or customers, please contact Megaventory support at support@megaventory.com to raise those limitations for the evaluation period of the Megaventory account.
Step 2 - Activating the Shopify integration in Megaventory
To use the Shopify eCommerce software, the appropriate checkbox has to be enabled in the Integrations module of Megaventory. This module lies under Menu > Integrations and handles the few settings involved in integrating Megaventory to any 3rd party software. Extra help while filling out the form can be obtained by hovering with the mouse over the bubble icon next to each specific field.
When ready, save the form by clicking the Save option.
Step 3 - Creating the Shopify store in Megaventory
Fill in the Store link below in Megaventory based on the Shopify store link you want to connect to your Megaventory account.
Click Insert, and follow the on-screen instructions.
Step 4 – Store Initialization and Connection activation
After the store has been successfully created in Megaventory, a new entry in the Megaventory list of Shopify stores appears. Under the store name, the Synchronization icon will now be visible. Clicking it will start the Synchronization process for the first time with the newly created Shopify store. A popup module tracking the progress is displayed as in the figure below:
The process automatically sends and receives the following entities to and from Megaventory.
Locations are synchronized from Shopify to Megaventory.
Customers are synchronized from Shopify to Megaventory.
Products are synchronized from Shopify to Megaventory.
If there are multiple variants per product in Shopify, the corresponding products will be created as separate SKUs in Megaventory.
The Megaventory product description is populated from the Shopify product title
If the ‘Synchronize product prices’ checkbox is enabled (and assuming the Megaventory default currency is the same with this Shopify Store’s default price), then the product and variant prices will be synchronized from Shopify to Megaventory too.
In case some of the entities fail for any possible reason (for example, connectivity is temporarily lost etc.), then a log is written to the Shopify event section of Megaventory and a prompt to view the logs is shown in the pop-up module. The log is also accessible via the Shopify Logs button on the Shopify pop-up.
If for any reason, the setup does not finish successfully, the user may address the problem as diagnosed from the logs, refresh the page of the list of stores and click the Synchronization link to start over.
After the sync ends and if the user has checked ‘Shopify Orders synced as Approved’, the Inventory Location of Megaventory that will receive Shopify orders by default has to be selected. If at any point the user visits the page to Edit the store details, they can change the default Inventory Location.
Note that, since Megaventory supports multiple Inventory Locations, product quantities can be later distributed between Inventory Locations from the Megaventory software; inventory information will always be synced to the Shopify software in any case.
The initial stock synchronization from Shopify to Megaventory is part of the Initial Sync process as well.
The stock synchronization from Shopify to Megaventory creates some stock adjustments (Pending) in the Megaventory account for each location. For example, If the stock for a product in Shopify is 10 and in Megaventory it is 0 in a specific location, then in that Megaventory location an adjustment plus document will be created with stock 10. On the other hand, if more stock is on your Megaventory account, say 15, then an adjustment minus document will be created for this location with stock 5 for this product.
As soon as the Initial Synchronization process is finished, two new options show up under the store name - Connect and ReSync.
The ReSync option lets you perform the Initialization process again for a specific entity (either Locations, Customers, Products or Stock). Clicking it will toggle the pop-up module and display the available choices, as seen in the figure below:
Please note that the store must not be connected for the Re-Initialization of a specific entity to be possible.
As soon as the option of Connect is clicked, then the Shopify integration will start sending and receiving data with every Shopify action that needs to communicate data to and from Megaventory. Clicking the Disconnect link will effectively disable all the functionalities of the module, except the ReSync option.
For the setup to be successful, the store should be in Connected state.
This is the last step of the whole set-up process.
See here for information regarding the extra features that the Shopify integration has to offer.
Having completed the initial synchronization see here for what is synchronized in an automated way on a regular basis.