Pickware lets you manage the stock of your Shopify shop centrally in Pickware. So that you always keep track of your stock levels and your online shop always displays up-to-date stock information, stock changes are synced from Pickware to Shopify in real time.

If you use Pickware for warehouse management, we recommend using Pickware as the system that manages stock. Stock changes are then made in Pickware and automatically transferred to Shopify.

The stock sync 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 through orders, goods receipts, stock transfers, stocktakes, or manual stock corrections.

The automatic stock export ensures that Shopify displays exactly the stock that is held in Pickware, taking all warehouses and reservations into account.

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

For each Sales Channel, you select a Shopify location to which the stock is transferred.

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

Import stock from Shopify and continue

Imports the current stock from Shopify into 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 bin location "Unknown".

Transfer current stock to Shopify and continue

Transfers the current stock of all products from Pickware to Shopify once. Make sure the stock maintained in Pickware is correct before you start 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 synced with your Shopify shop in real time.

You can view all manually triggered stock sync processes under Settings → Shop → Import/Export (Pickware). Using the filter icon on the right, you can filter by the profile you want (Shopify stock import or Shopify stock export).

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

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

If you work with locations, the switch for the stock export is no longer on the Sales Channel. You can find it under Warehousing → Locations on the detail page of the respective location in the Shopify location mappings card. Read more in How do I assign Shopify locations to my Pickware locations?.

In Pickware, on the other hand, you can use multiple warehouses. When you activate the automatic stock export, the stock of all warehouses whose stock is configured as Stock 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 that is 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. Exactly this amount is transferred to Shopify as the available stock.

For the sync to Shopify, Pickware also takes information from Shopify into account when calculating the available stock, e.g. reservations and unavailable inventory at the connected location. This means that reservations that can arise, for example, from draft orders or orders that have not (yet) been imported into Pickware are also taken into account.

If you use a multi-shop setup, meaning you have connected multiple Shopify shops to Pickware, the availability of a product is kept in sync across shops. Reservations/sales in one shop are taken into account in the other shops within a short time, so that overselling in a multi-shop scenario is significantly reduced.

So 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 can differ from the physical stock in a multi-shop scenario. The Available value is what matters for sales.

If the stock export is switched off, goods receipts, stocktakes, and other stock changes from Pickware are not transferred to Shopify. Conversely, stock changes you make in Shopify do not reach Pickware. The stock in both systems then drifts apart.

When you switch the export back on, you transfer the stock to Shopify once. To do this, choose Transfer current stock to Shopify and continue in the dialog. For a single product, a small correction booking in Pickware also triggers the transfer.

If you want to maintain your stock in Shopify, Pickware does not automatically adopt changes from Shopify. You then have to repeat the import from Shopify manually for every stock change:

The import overwrites all stock in Pickware. The quantities are booked into the default warehouse, there to the default bin location or, if there is none, to Unknown.

So that you can process and ship orders in Pickware, relevant orders from Shopify should be imported into Pickware.

For the pure stock sync to Shopify, however, it is no longer strictly necessary for every open order to already exist in Pickware, since Pickware takes reservations into account for the stock calculation directly from Shopify. This avoids incorrect availability — especially with high order volumes.

In some cases, stock changes become visible immediately:

All other changes to stock, such as goods receipts, stocking, destocking, changes from stocktakes, etc., are also synced directly (usually within a few seconds) to Shopify by the automatic real-time stock export.

If you import orders into Shopify via Matrixify, the Inventory Behaviour setting controls whether Shopify reserves stock for these orders. The default is bypass ("Do not claim inventory"), which creates orders without a stock reservation. Pickware adopts the reservations from Shopify.

Which setting is correct depends on whether the imported orders are still to be shipped or are only being carried over as history.

These orders tie up goods from your warehouse and must therefore reserve stock. Use decrement_obeying_policy or decrement_ignoring_policy as the Inventory Behaviour. The bypass setting is not suitable here: if the reservation is missing in Shopify, no stock is reserved in Pickware either, and products appear as available in the Shopify shop even though the imported orders would actually tie them up.

If you are transferring orders that have already been paid and shipped from a previous system to Shopify only for documentation purposes, bypass is the appropriate setting. These orders were not shipped from your current stock and should therefore not change it either.

Since no stock is reserved for them in Shopify, Pickware also does not book out any stock when these orders are fulfilled. Check this with a single order before you transfer the entire data set in the full import.

If you have activated the order import for your Shopify Sales Channel in Pickware:

With Pickware for Shopify, no manual stock sync is necessary – everything runs automatically in the background.