Question
If I edit a product in Shopify (i.e. price, etc.), how is this reflected in Retail Pro? Is the price also updated in Retail Pro? Or should we treat Retail Pro as the master database/system?
Answer
Here’s how a common integration of ours works between Retail Pro and Shopify. Products flow from Retail Pro to Shopify as shown in the diagram below. Once in Shopify, you can manage all the data except for Price, Sale Price and Quantity on Hand (inventory). These values are managed by Retail Pro. So yes, Retail Pro is the “master” for price and inventory, and Shopify is the “slave.” Another way of saying the same thing can be said like this: once a product has been added to Shopify, we only update price and inventory from that point forward. Editing products in Shopify are not reflected in Retail Pro whatsoever. As you can also see from the diagram, the arrow for Products points from Retail Pro to Shopify, which means this information flows in only one direction.
Note: Our Integrator does allow us to copy over the price of items from Retail Pro to Shopify initially and never update it again after that point. This allows you to manage all the prices of your products in Shopify instead of Retail Pro. Customers asking us to do this usually have special needs around pricing such as Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policy.