Usability improves for Shopify Connector

Important

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Enabled for Public preview General availability
Users by admins, makers, or analysts Mar 15, 2023 Apr 1, 2023

Business value

Business Central has teamed up with Shopify to help our customers create a better online shopping experience. Shopify provides merchants with an easy-to-use e-commerce solution, and Business Central offers comprehensive business management across finance, sales, service, and operations teams in a single application. The seamless connection between the two systems synchronizes order, stock, and customer information to ensure that merchants can fulfill orders faster and better serve their customers. The joint effort furthers the commitment of Business Central to connect data to help businesses adapt faster, work smarter, and perform better.

Feature details

In this release wave, we've made improvements in the user interface based on feedback from customers and to address changes in the Shopify platform.

Switch from configuration templates to item and customer templates

To create customer or item data quickly and accurately, use templates to standardize settings for new records. For example, standard settings help ensure that posting and reporting are set up correctly, so that productivity isn't interrupted when people are entering data.

Configuration templates require technical expertise and aren't always easy to use. Instead, you can switch to simpler item and customer templates that make it easier to create item and customers from list pages, or convert contacts to customers.

Note

To enable the feature and automatically start using the simpler templates, on the Feature Management page, enable Feature Update: Use new customer and item templates in Shopify instead of the generic templates for all users. The upgrade logic checks which templates you've used and offers to convert them. You can skip this step if you'd rather create templates manually. Upgrade also checks whether your configuration templates reference fields that aren't available in the item or customer template. For example, these fields were probably introduced by third-party apps. To learn more about extending customer or item templates, go to Extending Customer, Vendor, and Item Templates.

Control whether to release created sales document automatically

If you prefer to release sales documents manually—for example, because ordered items are not available for shipping yet—you can use the new Auto Release Sales Order toggle to control the behavior of the system.

Shopify actions in the Item Card and Item List

The Add to Shopify shortcut works similarly to the Add item to Shopify task and adds selected item to the Shopify Shop. If several shops are configured, the connector will ask you to select the target shop.

Note

The action is visible only to users who have write permission to Shopify Product tables.

Shop product in Shopify opens the product page in the Shopify shop.

Note

You might be asked to sign in to your Shopify admin, especially if you published items to the development shop.

Item marketing text as part of product description

For any item registered in Business Central, you can write marketing text about the item. Although marketing text is a kind of a description, it's different than the item's Description field. The Description field is typically used as a concise display name to quickly identify the product. The marketing text, on the other hand, is a more rich and descriptive text. Its purpose is to add marketing and promotional content, also known as copy. This text can then be published with the item if it's published on a web shop, like Shopify.

There are two ways to create the marketing text. The easiest way to get started is to use Copilot, which suggests AI-generated text for you. The other way is to start from scratch.

Enable the Sync Item Marketing Text toggle to specify whether you want to synchronize marketing texts to Shopify.

Changes in Shopify API affect how order source is displayed

The Source Name field is not populated by Shopify anymore. It's replaced with:

  • App Name: The name of the app used by the channel where you sell your products. A channel can be a platform or a marketplace such as an online store or POS.
  • Channel Name: The name of the channel where you sell your products. A channel can be a platform or a marketplace such as an online store or POS.

You can use Channel Name in Sync Orders from Shopify.

There is no data upgrade. All orders will have Source Name populated, while the new orders will use new fields.

Export customers to several shops

You can now export Business Central customers to the Shopify shops. The new Shop ID field was added.

Tell us what you think

Help us improve Dynamics 365 Business Central by discussing ideas, providing suggestions, and giving feedback. Use the forum at https://aka.ms/bcideas.