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Liubov Pesotska
Written by
Liubov Pesotska
SEO Specialist at Gepard
CONTENTS
Shopify Shopify Connector

Shopify Integrations: How To Connect Your Store With PIM & Content Providers

12 min read
Published: May 31, 2022
Updated: October 25, 2024

Extending basic framework capabilities allows eCommerce merchants to enhance their activities with helpful tools and techniques inherent in many third-party apps available in the market. Sellers always seek a way to improve their e-stores with additional features and functions. Shopify is a great platform out-of-the-box, but only the sky’s the limit in getting any ecosystem upgraded.

Various compatible software add-ons constitute a standalone class of methods to boost the performance of eCommerce stores. Numerous extra functionalities appear when CRM systems, social media, marketing tools, and other specific apps start working together with your Shopify store. Basic knowledge about the most popular extensions is hardly worth ignoring by any eCommerce merchant. The present post can help figure out what is what in the realm of Shopify integrations.

What Is Shopify Integration?

Shopify integration implies providing a third-party app with access to the data of a Shopify e-store to add a specific functionality of the app to the out-of-the-box features of the underlying platform. This allows integrable software to work together with Shopify.

Most Common Integrations

Like in many other business segments, some particular market leaders are winning the competition in the niche. They are capable of doing so due to the clear value their functionalities bring to eCommerce stores. Let’s review the most common ones.

1. QuickBooks Shopify Integration

Parex Technologies offers the app to sync various data of your order info such as taxes, shipping, items, customers, and the like with just a few clicks. It facilitates processing orders manually. Since order routines are tough when sales are intense, QuickBook is helpful to decrease the time and effort you spend on the order checkout.

Payment plans of the app vary depending on the scale of your business. The “free to install” one costs $0.1 per order while $30/month has to be paid by stores with up to 2500 orders/month.

2. Hubspot Shopify Integration

Synchronization, automation, segmentation, and personalization are the capabilities that Hubspot connection provides to create a single complex view of customers in terms of marketing signals and growth strategies. The app creators claim that Hubspot integration allows store owners to generate larger organic traffic and increase revenue due to a stronger brand building.

Analyzing data on sales vs business goals along with various reporting features is also available to help merchants make data-driven decisions. The Hubspot integration requires one of the typical Shopify subscription plans beginning from $29/month for newcomers and up to $299 for advanced eCommerce professionals.

3. Shopify Facebook/Instagram Integration

Facebook, along with Instagram, needs no introduction, obviously. The social media giant covers the global user audience as little else does. Combining the sales capabilities of Shopify with user coverage of Facebook is a worthwhile idea, isn’t it? Shopify Facebook integration helps create shoppable posts on the largest social media to convert posts, stories, and other social activities into a shopping experience.

Advantages of Facebook/Instagram integration are numerous: expanding customer audience with Facebook ads, increasing conversion with a faster checkout via Shop Pay, etc.

A 14-day free trial is available.

Most Common Shopify Integrations

4. Paypal Shopify Integration

Even though PayPal is one of the default payment providers for most e-stores out there, there are some options to make such a payment gateway more convenient through plugin connection. PayPal charges you fees while your customers make transactions through it. This is a by-default condition unless you activate Shopify Payments.

However small the fee can be, it affects your profit. If you look after cents, dollars look after themselves, as they say. Use Shopify PayPal integration, and your sales will go better with such a world-famous payment provider as PayPal.

5. Shopify Stripe Integration

Stripe is one of the best-in-class payment processors for online commerce, similar to PayPal and Venmo. But unlike them both, Stripe is fully cloud-based. The technology makes Stripe reliably protected against any fraud. In addition to unprecedented security, the cloud infrastructure provides Stripe with almost unlimited scalability. The system fits both large corporations and small businesses equally well. Hence, Shopify Stripe integration is a worthwhile approach to online payments.

Actually, debit card and credit card payments are integrated into the Payments platform. Stripe participates in the payments’ processing. Some nuances are available with regard to the location of every particular e-store owner. They don’t negate the overall convenience of Stripe for Shopify merchants, however.

Connecting To Other eCommerce Platforms

Your extension potential is not limited by the specific apps that add particular functionalities to Shopify stores. Even though some other eCommerce platforms can be considered the platform’s competitors, there is a way to make them a part of its ecosystem. Two different eCommerce platforms can successfully complement each other while being integrated. API and SDK are the typical instruments that help connect your store with other eCommerce platforms. However, they are not the only ones in the process.

How Shopify Connects To Other Platforms

The platform’s creators can hardly reinvent the wheel to provide users with the means of connecting to other eCommerce platforms. The integration tools are well-known for programmers, but the same cannot be said for ordinary users.

Shopify API And Shopify SDK

Application Programming Interface (API) along with Software Development Kit (SDK) is used to provide one application with access to another app’s data. Shopify API acts as an intermediary between the platform and other eCommerce solutions. This is about making requests for info from another platform and bringing the data back.

Shopify developers regularly update APIs not to compromise the platform’s functionality. By the way, there are many types of APIs such as Shopify Admin API, Storefront API, Partner API, Payments Apps API, etc. Each of them helps add particular functionality to an existing store when the platform is integrated with some other application.

The dedicated SDK, though, is a more specific tool graspable by developers rather than ordinary users. SDK is a library that provides a website with eCommerce functionalities. SDK is usually based on some compatible API: JavaScript Buy SDK, for example, is based on Storefront API. It aims at retrieving data on products to handle carts and checkouts. It is clear that JavaScript development skills are required from users to apply JS Buy SDK to some relevant add-ons and plugins. Particular programming skills relate to other available SDKs such as Android Buy SDK, iOS Buy SDK, PHP client library, and the like.

Headless Commerce

Headless commerce is an innovative approach to sales channels provided by the Shopify Plus platform. It allows transforming any digital device into a sales channel. Desktops and smartphones are not the only gateways to online stores, therefore. The technology unties the end-user’s touchpoints from your backend infrastructure. Hence, the shopping experience becomes accessible through whatever your customers use.

This one lets your selling opportunities expand over the unlimited realm of modern gadgets while being controlled by your centralized back office. Wearables, smart mirrors, and many other devices with screens become your storefronts with headless commerce. There can never be too many sales channels, right?

How Shopify Connects With eCommerce Platforms?

Examples Of Integrating With Other eCommerce Platforms

Getting advantages from combining customer audiences of different eCommerce platforms sounds reasonable in most cases. Integrating with other eCommerce platforms can prove the approach. Those who sell goods on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and the like can significantly improve their eСommerce experience with such an approach.

The following use cases show the most popular integrations with the leading sales platforms.

Shopify Amazon Integration

The worldwide Amazon Marketplace can be legitimately characterized by a single word: multiple. Multi-currency, multi-account, multi-country, and so on. Amazon integration allows synchronizing your store with orders on Amazon. The process is fully automated to make most of your in-store accomplishments automatic: importing orders, geolocation, tax management, etc.

Shopify needs no external software to be integrated with Amazon Plus. The integration lets you configure your workflow with just a few clicks. A trial period along with a free plan is available.

Shopify Etsy Integration

No duplicate listing happens when you integrate your Shopify store with the Etsy marketplace. Highly personalized order management, along with smart automation of sales, makes Etsy integration very beneficial for those who are selling on Etsy. Your product management becomes easy with bulk uploads and real-time inventory. Multiple stocks at various locations are manageable with the location feature. Bringing Shopify listings to Etsy and vice versa make your product linkage easy to create.

The error reporting feature helps avoid problems with uploading, listing, and syncing. All features are compatible with Shopify Plus stores. A 7-day trial and free plans are available.

Shopify eBay Integration

eBay is yet another global marketplace worth integrating with to facilitate sales routines. In particular, it provides many features similar to the ones available for Shopify connections with other eCommerce platforms. They include various automated functions for efficient sales management, such as bulk product uploading, multi-stock inventory, real-time syncing of order data, and the like.

Customizable templates help edit your product range while moving your items from eBay to your Shopify store and vice versa. The eBay-inherent features such as Global Shipping Program become easily manageable and quickly accessible.

Pricing includes several options beginning from a free plan and up to $79/month, depending on your listing and turnover.

Shopify Walmart Integration

SEO-friendly listing is essential for large international marketplaces such as Walmart. The dedicated integration provides the feature: you can improve the visibility of your profile by managing the attributes of the listed items. The drag-&-drop feature for product images contributes to updating products in your Walmart store.

Promotional opportunities include custom price management to indicate the percentage by which the item’s price should be increased/decreased. Automated syncing of shipping details helps upload shipping templates to your seller account. The available analytics help monitor various aspects of your products: performance, description, rating, ranking, etc.

Pricing includes four plans beginning from a free one up to $99/month.

How Shopify Integrates With Content Service Providers

Content service providers play a significant role in the modern digital environment. Just the enormous volume of information circulating on the Internet does not allow eCommerce merchants to ignore the data aggregators such as CSPs. Proper integrations help build a bridge between your business and the vast variety of digital content.

Why Connect To A CSP?

Contemporary Internet users are picky regarding the content they consume. They will probably ignore your content unless it is well-structured and professionally created. It is always possible to process your content manually with various specific software. Needless to say that such an approach is extremely time-consuming. And time is money, as we know.

A great variety of high-quality content is the very service that content providers offer to users. Integration with CSPs allow eCommerce merchants to significantly optimize their content selection. Forget about photoshopping and endless surfing through the Internet to search for appropriate images of your products: content providers have already aggregated everything you may ever need.

On top of that, with the help of CSPs, you may get all that content directly from brands and providers, which usually gives you the most relevant, regularly updated sort of content.

Leading Content Service Providers

The following CSPs are worth considering for integration if redundant efforts in the hunt for content are not on your agenda.

Icecat

Icecat is an open product catalog that has been collaborating with about 24 000 brands for decades. The CSP has established strong partnerships with retailers and manufacturers throughout the world in various sectors: fashion & lifestyle, home appliances, consumer electronics, health & beauty, children’s products, etc. Icecat is recommended for Shopify merchants who care about improving their customers’ buying experience.

Tradeplace

Tradeplace has been mitigating the challenges of incomplete product data since 2001. Electrolux, Siemens, Bosch, LG, and Samsung constitute just a tiny part of the pool of world-famous brands available on Tradeplace. The CSP is focused on a particular range of business verticals such as consumer electronics, medical electronics, home appliances, industrial electronics, telecommunications, and IT services.

Loadbee

3D presentations, AR apps, text, images, and videos are all the available formats of customizable product content that Loadbee offers to retailer points of sales in 40 countries. The CSP provides real-time uploads and customizations of product content to enable eCommerce merchants to increase their sales by 25%. Consumers make purchasing decisions with ease, while retailers get firmer control over the content displayed via Loadbee.

GFK Etilize

GFK (Growth from Knowledge) Etilize distributes rich product content across 56 global markets. The CSP helps eСommerce merchants access data of 20 million products. Brands and manufacturers, on the other hand, can manage their product information through GFK Etilize to distribute well-optimized content to a great variety of retailers and marketplaces. A perfect shopping experience appears when multimedia, specifications, images, videos, merchandising texts, and other diverse info come from product catalogs provided by GFK Etilize.

Xplace

Xplace acts as a tool to display interactive content by POS systems of both brick-&-mortar shops and e-stores. Manufacturers and retailers benefit from digitized solutions of Xplace in various sectors such as electronics, consumer goods, food, fashion, and the like. Xplace integrates relevant data from your retail environment to improve your customers’ shopping experience along their journey from the first random visit to confident purchasing decisions.

Read more info on how to choose a content provider in this in-depth guide:

How To Choose A Content Provider?
8 min read
Anna Mrynska
Product Information Management

How To Choose A Content Service Provider?

Discover how the right content provider can make your business flourish.

content catalog content provider CSP product content

The Role Of PIM Solution In Shopify+CSP+PIM Integration

Various compatible integrations facilitate different aspects of eCommerce routines. Does this mean that management of an advanced Shopify store should turn into continuous going through Shopify-friendly apps one by one? It seems so at first sight. Moreover, the amount of manual labor will remain apparently significant in setting up the store functionality in such a case. It hardly sounds like proper optimization of eCommerce workflows, right?

However, PIM integration from Gepard allows addressing the issue from another angle. In order not to repeat the system’s description available in the corresponding website section, let’s consider what this amazing software helps accomplish if being reviewed with quite a typical situation for Shopify merchants.

According to the team at Gepard, PIM integration is a single source of truth for product data. And it facilitates numerous scenarios of eCommerce activities due to the available ready-made connections with retailers, marketplaces, content providers, and eCommerce platforms. Shopify is no exception.

Just imagine you have decided to launch your Shopify store. But it turns out that your product content has to be created manually. The same relates to all updates in product listing and pricing. You start exploring the available options to solve the challenge.

Manufacturers and content providers can deliver tons of relevant content. Up-to-date pricing and stock can be synced by suppliers automatically. An eureka moment? Unfortunately not: your out-of-the-box platform does not support the synchronizations by default. An effective approach exists, nonetheless. Your formula for success is simple: Shopify + CSP + PIM integration.

PIM (Product Information Management) is a comprehensive eCommerce solution that allows you to distribute well-structured product data across various sales channels in a few clicks. Providing a convenient automation tool – Gepard Shopify Connector – PIM helps synchronize and unify product content distribution across all connected solutions. It lets visualize data workflows and automate tasks while the special Trigger-Condition-Action algorithm allows creating handy custom connectors.

An underlying Shopify API allows efficiently bridging the gap between all available data sources and the main store content hub. With a heavy dose of versatile automation of data flows added on top, this spawns many much-sought after benefits, such as simple and fast data updates with previews, data restoration via Storefront API, and in-depth data management via GraphQL Admin API.

As a result, merchants get less manual work to handle and significantly decrease the cost of product management which affects both sales and ROI rates most positively.

FAQ

How To Integrate A Third-Party Payment Gateway To Shopify?

Payment integrations allow merchants to choose from about 100 payment providers worldwide. There is a list of countries with their local payment providers enabling you to realize peculiar features of each of them. In general, three types of payment gateways are available: hosted (redirect customers to a standalone payment page beyond the store’s website), self-hosted (the collected payment data is processed off-site through the store’s backend), and non-hosted (payment processing is handled on-site).

Shopify Help Center offers a detailed guide on integrating third-party payment gateways to Shopify. A step-by-step procedure is carefully described with corresponding examples and illustrative screenshots.

How To Update Shopify Product Data In Bulk?

Integrations with various eCommerce platforms allow updating product data in bulk. Such a feature is available in Shopify Amazon integration, Shopify eBay integration, Shopify Etsy integration, etc. Besides, some specific eCommerce apps integrated with the platform also provide bulk product updates. At the same time, no universal approach to this feature is available out of the box.

The best way to meet the challenge is to apply a unified product content database to the issue. We mean PIM integration that helps Shopify merchants manage their listings without being tied to any particular third-party platform. Avoid manual uploading of your products with PIM to reduce product management costs and enhance your store performance.

How To Enrich Product Information In A Shopify Store?

Product information should remain up-to-date at any moment when your customers visit your store. However, it does not mean that you should spend day and night on the Internet to search for the most recent changes occurring with the products available in your database. Proper integrations help enrich your product info with much less effort.

A universal approach to the issue implies using specially created software such as the PIM (Product Information Management) solution from Gepard. PIM integration helps eCommerce merchants enrich any product-related information in a few clicks to distribute up-to-date product content across various sales channels.

Extend The Right Way – Use An Interconnected PIM Approach

Shopify is one of the most powerful platforms for eCommerce merchants nowadays. At the same time, out-of-the-box platform capabilities can hardly represent everything a merchant may need for cost-efficient operation at scale. Available integrations provide numerous opportunities to optimize your eCommerce routines with various useful features of third-party apps, marketplaces, content providers, and eCommerce platforms.

For all the variety of choices, however, there is a universal approach to making your store highly automated and broadly customizable. The formula looks like Shopify + CSP + PIM integration. Content service providers help avoid redundant efforts in the search for well-structured, high-quality product content.

The critical element of the formula is the Product Information Management (PIM) solution, a unified product content database enabling merchants to enrich any product-related information in a few clicks. This single source of truth for product data allows Shopify merchants to easily update product content in a smooth workflow.

It comes in especially handy for distributors and brands that sell large volumes of widely ranged products and are in need of efficient content syndication for its rapid distribution across various sales channels.

To master numerous capabilities of the Product Information Management software, it is worth requesting a personal demo of Gepard PIM. Contact us today to figure out how the advanced PIM integration can boost your eCommerce business.

How To Push Product Data To Shopify?

 

 

Liubov Pesotska
Written by Liubov Pesotska
SEO Specialist at Gepard
Has an experience in PR and SEO. Inspired by everything new: places, people, ideas. Believes in turquoise organizations and the power of community.

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