Business Central for Ecommerce
Your orders come from multiple channels but your stock lives in one place, and it is never current. Your fulfilment team is firefighting oversells, your pricing across channels is a manual nightmare and your finance team cannot tell you which channels actually make money. Business Central's native Shopify connector and comprehensive warehouse management provide the backbone for efficient, scalable online retail operations. When your ERP and your storefront share real-time data, overselling stops and fulfilment accelerates.
Native Shopify connector built into Business Central
Your stock levels are out of date the moment a sale is made, and your team spends hours each week reconciling orders across channels. Business Central includes a native Shopify connector that Microsoft develops and maintains as part of the core platform. This is not a third-party add-on that might break with updates. It is a first-party integration that synchronises products, customers, orders and inventory between your Shopify store and Business Central in real time.
Product synchronisation is bi-directional. Create or update a product in Business Central and the changes flow to Shopify. Prices, descriptions, images and inventory levels stay aligned without manual intervention. When an order is placed on Shopify, it appears in Business Central automatically, ready for fulfilment processing.
The connector supports multiple Shopify stores from a single Business Central environment. This is valuable for businesses that operate separate storefronts for different brands, markets or customer segments. Each store maps to its own configuration within Business Central, with separate pricing, inventory locations and fulfilment rules.
Product Sync
Bi-directional product synchronisation including prices, descriptions, images, variants and inventory levels. Changes made in either system are reflected in the other without manual data entry.
Order Import
Shopify orders are imported into Business Central as sales orders, complete with customer details, line items, shipping information and payment references. Fulfilment status flows back to Shopify automatically.
Inventory Levels
Real-time inventory synchronisation prevents overselling. When stock is sold in any channel, availability is updated across all connected stores immediately, eliminating the lag that causes customer disappointment.
Returns Processing
Returns and refunds initiated on Shopify create corresponding credit memos in Business Central. Returned stock is received back into inventory with appropriate adjustments to revenue and cost of sales.
One inventory, multiple sales channels
Modern ecommerce rarely operates through a single channel. You might sell through your own Shopify store, Amazon, eBay, WooCommerce, Magento, trade accounts and possibly a physical retail location. Each channel has its own pricing, promotion rules and fulfilment requirements. Business Central manages this complexity by serving as the single source of truth for inventory, pricing and customer data.
Inventory allocation across channels can be managed through location-based stock or through a single pool with real-time availability calculations. The approach depends on your fulfilment model, whether you ship from a central warehouse, use third-party logistics or operate a hybrid model.
Complex pricing structures are handled through price lists, customer price groups and discount structures. A product might have different prices on your website, Amazon and for trade customers, all managed within Business Central and synchronised to the relevant channels.
Common Challenge
"We oversell on Amazon every week because stock levels are always out of date." Business Central synchronises inventory in real time across all channels, so a sale on one platform immediately reduces availability everywhere.
Common Challenge
"Managing different prices across channels is a manual nightmare." Business Central's pricing engine supports channel-specific price lists, so you maintain pricing rules once and they flow to each sales channel automatically.
From order to despatch, automated
Fulfilment speed directly affects customer satisfaction and repeat purchase rates. Business Central's warehouse management capabilities range from basic pick-and-pack operations to advanced directed warehouse management with zones, bins, pick routes and barcode scanning.
For ecommerce businesses processing high volumes of small orders, the system generates pick lists that optimise the route through the warehouse, reducing the time per order. Barcode scanning validates each pick, ensuring accuracy. Packing and shipping integration creates despatch notifications and tracking updates that flow back to the sales channel.
Demand planning uses historical sales data and current order patterns to forecast stock requirements. Automated reorder points and reorder quantities ensure that popular items are replenished before stockouts occur. Seasonal patterns can be factored into forecasts, which is critical for ecommerce businesses with significant trading peaks.
Know which channels actually make you money
Revenue is not the same as profit. A channel with high revenue but significant fees, returns and shipping costs might be less profitable than a lower-volume direct channel. Business Central captures all the data needed to calculate true profitability by channel, by product and by customer segment.
Marketplace fees, shipping costs, returns rates and promotional discounts are all captured against the relevant transactions. Dimension analysis enables you to report profitability by channel, product category, customer segment and time period. This information drives better decisions about where to invest marketing spend, which channels to grow and which products to promote.
Astral Reports provides template-based financial reports that can be configured to show channel profitability alongside standard management accounts. These reports are generated directly from Business Central data, eliminating the need for manual consolidation in spreadsheets.
Further Ecommerce Configuration
For operations managers and technical evaluators who want to understand the platform capabilities in more detail.
The native Shopify connector in Business Central supports multiple Shopify stores from a single environment. Each store is configured as a separate Shopify Shop entity with its own synchronisation settings for products, customers, orders and inventory. Synchronisation frequency is configurable, from manual on-demand sync to scheduled automatic synchronisation at defined intervals.
Product mapping supports both automatic creation and manual linking of products between the two systems. Variant handling maps Shopify variants to Business Central item variants, maintaining consistency across sizes, colours and other product attributes.
For channels beyond Shopify, including WooCommerce, Magento, Amazon and eBay, Business Central provides a comprehensive REST API that enables integration with marketplace platforms, third-party logistics providers and custom storefronts. Numerous BC extensions exist for these platforms, and Tres Tria can assist with integration regardless of which ecommerce platform you use. The API supports standard OData queries for reading data and JSON payloads for creating and updating records. This enables real-time or near-real-time integration with virtually any platform that supports web services.
Power Automate connectors provide a low-code integration option for simpler scenarios, enabling order import from email or file-based sources without custom development.
For ecommerce businesses selling internationally, Business Central supports multi-territory operations from a single platform. Tres Tria deploys a standardised BC configuration across territories with local adaptations, coordinating the entire multi-territory rollout from a single project management structure.
Key capabilities for international ecommerce include:
- Multi-currency storefronts – each Shopify store can operate in its local currency, with Business Central handling the currency conversion and consolidated financial reporting in your group currency
- Cross-border fulfilment – inventory across multiple country warehouses is visible in a single view, enabling intelligent fulfilment routing based on proximity, stock availability and shipping cost
- International tax rules – VAT, sales tax and customs duties are configured per territory, ensuring correct tax treatment on every transaction regardless of where the order originates or ships from
- Marketplace-specific localisation – Amazon, eBay, Magento, WooCommerce and other marketplaces have territory-specific requirements for product listings, pricing and fulfilment that are managed through Business Central's multi-entity architecture
Our Enterprise tier, starting at £50,000, is specifically designed for international ecommerce operations with multi-territory requirements.
Why ecommerce businesses choose Tres Tria
Ecommerce implementations require a partner who understands the operational tempo of online retail. Orders do not wait for office hours, and fulfilment delays cost you customers. We configure Business Central to support the speed and accuracy that ecommerce demands.
- Shopify connector configuration and testing as part of every ecommerce implementation
- Multi-channel inventory architecture designed for your specific fulfilment model
- Warehouse management configuration from basic pick-and-pack to directed warehouse
- Channel profitability reporting with Power BI dashboards
- Astral 365 extensions on Microsoft AppSource for payments, recurring billing and reporting
- Published starting price of £25,000 for Essentials implementations
- Support Minutes model with small changes potentially live within an hour
"Overselling dropped to zero within a week of going live. The Shopify connector works reliably and the inventory sync is genuinely real time. Our customer service complaints about availability have essentially disappeared."
Ready to Streamline Your Ecommerce Operations?
Speak with a Business Central specialist who understands ecommerce. We will show you how the Shopify connector and warehouse management work together to eliminate overselling and accelerate fulfilment.