Pickware lets you manage the stock of your Shopify shop centrally in Pickware. So you always have an overview of your stock levels and your online shop always shows up-to-date inventory information, stock changes are synchronized from Pickware to Shopify in real time.

If you use Pickware for warehouse management, it's recommended to use Pickware as the stock-leading system. Stock changes are then made in Pickware and automatically transferred to Shopify.

Inventory synchronization controls how stock is transferred between Pickware and Shopify. The export happens automatically and in real time as soon as the available stock of a product changes in Pickware, for example due to orders, goods receipts, stock transfers, stocktakings, or manual stock corrections.

The automatic inventory export ensures that Shopify always shows exactly the stock level that Pickware maintains, taking into account all warehouses and reservations.

When you activate automatic inventory export, you can choose whether to perform an initial inventory sync — either from Shopify to Pickware or from Pickware to Shopify.

For each Sales Channel, you choose a Shopify location to which the stock will be transferred.

When you activate the inventory export, you're guided through a step-by-step process. Depending on whether you've maintained stock in Shopify or in Pickware, you have two options available:

Import stock from Shopify and continue

Imports the current stock from Shopify to Pickware once. This import overwrites the existing stock in Pickware. The imported quantities are assigned to the default warehouse, if one exists, otherwise they are assigned to the "Unknown" storage location.

Transfer current stock to Shopify and continue

Transfers the current stock of all products from Pickware to Shopify once. Make sure the stock levels maintained in Pickware are correct before starting the export. After the export starts, the stock of all products is updated in the background. This process can take a few minutes.

After activation, changes to the available stock are synchronized with your Shopify shop in real time.

You can view all manually triggered inventory sync processes under Settings → Shop → Import/Export (Pickware). On the right, you can use the filter icon to filter for the desired profile (Shopify inventory import or Shopify inventory export).

Here you can see, for example, whether the export/import was completed successfully, and you can download the CSV file using the download button on the far right. Within the file, you can also see exactly where each error occurred.

In Shopify, you can maintain multiple locations and connect a Shopify location with a Sales Channel in your Pickware Admin. The selected Shopify location is the location to and from which stock is transferred during inventory synchronization. The Shopify location can be selected in the Sales Channel settings of your Pickware Admin in the Inventory sync tab. You can find more information here.

In Pickware, on the other hand, you can use multiple warehouses. When you activate automatic inventory export, the stock of all warehouses whose stock is configured as available online is transferred to the one connected Shopify location.

The available stock is calculated in Pickware and then transferred to Shopify. This is the stock released for sale to customers. The available stock is made up as follows:

Example: If you have 10 items in stock and 2 orders are still open, the available stock is 8 units. This exact value is transferred to Shopify as the available stock.

For synchronization with Shopify, Pickware also takes into account additional information from Shopify when calculating the available stock, e.g., reservations and unavailable inventory at the connected location. This also accounts for reservations that may result from, for example, draft orders or orders that have not (yet) been imported into Pickware.

If you use a multi-shop setup, meaning you have multiple Shopify shops connected to Pickware, the availability of a product is kept in sync across shops. Reservations/sales in one shop are reflected in the other shops within a short time, significantly reducing overselling in multi-shop scenarios.

To ensure that the availability (Available) is correct in all shops, Pickware can also adjust the On hand value in connected shops. As a result, On hand may differ from the physical stock in multi-shop scenarios. The Available value is decisive for sales.

To be able to process and ship orders in Pickware, relevant orders from Shopify should be imported into Pickware. However, for pure inventory synchronization with Shopify, it's no longer strictly necessary for every open order to already be in Pickware, since Pickware takes reservations for stock calculation directly from Shopify. This prevents incorrect availability — especially with high order volume.

In some cases, changes to stock are immediately visible:

All other changes to stock, such as goods receipts, put-aways, pick-ups, changes due to stocktaking, etc., are also synchronized directly to Shopify through the automatic real-time inventory export (usually within a few seconds).

When importing orders via Matrixify, it can happen that no stock is reserved in Shopify. The reason is the Matrixify default setting bypass under Inventory Behaviour, which creates orders without stock reservation. Pickware takes over the reservations from Shopify — if they're missing there, no stock is reserved in Pickware either, and products appear as available in the Shopify shop even though the imported orders would actually be reserving them.

To ensure that Shopify reserves stock correctly, you should use either decrement_obeying_policy or decrement_ignoring_policy as the Inventory Behaviour during Matrixify import. The setting bypass should not be used.

If you've activated order import for your Shopify Sales Channel in Pickware:

With Pickware for Shopify, no manual inventory synchronization is necessary — everything runs automatically in the background.