Their purchase order becomes a Shopify order
Buyer, ship-to and lines resolved against the B2B company location and the price list that applies to it, rather than your online store's default pricing.
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Shopify
EDI
A retailer has told you to trade on EDI and given you a date. Shopify has no EDI of its own, so all of the work lands on your side: their purchase orders becoming real orders, your dispatches becoming ASNs that pass their routing guide, your invoices matching the PO they think they sent. Cogent² builds that layer, runs it, and holds the evidence when a deduction lands. You carry on selling on Shopify.
What it costs when the paperwork is late
A retailer's deduction is not a fine you can argue on the phone. It turns up on a remittance months later, netted off an invoice you already counted as revenue, quoting a routing guide clause and a date. Each category below is a document or a timestamp. If it was captured, you have a case. If nobody captured it, you pay.
- Late ASN
- ASN non-compliance
- Routing guide
- Labelling
- Fill rate
- Short ship
- PO accuracy
- Delivery window
- Invoice discrepancy
How fast you can start trading with them
The date the retailer gave you is the constraint, and most of it is spent waiting: their spec arrives as a PDF, their test cycle runs on their calendar. We do not hold a pre-built library of trading partner configurations and we will not claim one. We read the partner's own files and infer the profile from them, which is why a partner nobody has a configuration for does not add weeks.
- You send us a handful of their real documents. That is the whole ask of you
- We come back with the proposed mapping and the evidence behind every field
- An operator signs it off before anything runs against a live partner
- Your Shopify B2B catalogues and price lists are mapped as part of this, not discovered later
- Their test cycle still governs go-live. We shorten our side of it, never theirs
The documents, and where they land in Shopify
If you will not be the one running this, the short version is that every document a retailer expects has a real home in Shopify, and the two that generate most deductions are handled explicitly. The detail below is for whoever will run it.
You acknowledge it, in their window
Accept, reject or amend at line level, inside the window the routing guide allows. Missing the window is itself a deduction.
Your dispatch becomes their ASN
The one that gets you fined. Shopify's fulfilment object holds tracking and line items but no carton hierarchy and no SSCC, so that detail is held beside it and the ASN is assembled from both.
Your invoice, priced to their PO
Priced against the purchase order they actually sent, so a price discrepancy deduction never gets raised in the first place.
They change the order after you picked it
Applied against an order that may already be partly fulfilled, rather than silently overwriting what your warehouse is holding.
What you can actually promise them
Availability by location, so a partner is never promised stock sitting in a warehouse they cannot draw from.
What is selling once it is on their shelf
Sell-through back from the retailer. Usually the earliest honest signal that a line is dying at shelf.
Proof it arrived at all
Watched in both directions. A missing 997 is the earliest sign a document never landed, and it is the difference between a quiet week and a silent failure.
Others by partner requirement: 820 remittance advice, and 940 and 945 when a third-party warehouse ships on your behalf. The final list is set per trading partner during onboarding.
Standards and transport
Nobody competes on translating EDI any more, and we will not pretend to. Parse and map are table stakes, which is why this is the shortest section on the page. What decides whether the relationship holds is the connection into Shopify underneath it, and whether anyone notices when it stops.
- X12
- EDIFACT
- AS2
- SFTP
- Cloud storage
BEG03
order.poNumberpartner PO number
N1*ST
companyLocationB2B buyer, not a consumer address
PO107
variantvia barcode, then SKU cross-reference
PO104
priceprice list wins on conflict
DTM*002
requestedDeliveryDatedrives the ASN window
Five of five fields evidenced from three sample files. Awaiting operator sign-off.
Nobody at your end has to become an EDI expert
Every serious vendor in this category sells a managed tier, because when a retailer changes their spec on a Friday afternoon somebody has to answer for it. The alternative is hiring for a skill you will need badly twice a year. Ours is staffed by the same operators who run your Shopify integration.
Watched, not just logged
A flow that has gone quiet raises a flag. A missing acknowledgement does not wait for your buyer to phone you about a late delivery.
A named operator, not a queue
A broken live flow goes to someone who already knows your setup and can change it that day.
They talk to the partner
When a retailer's spec changes, the conversation is ours to have. You hear the outcome, not the thread.
Related
Shopify Integration iPaaS AgencyThe wider Shopify integration practice, beyond EDI documents./collections/shopify-integration-ipaas-agency
Ecommerce EDIThe other twelve commerce platforms in the EDI section./collections/ecommerce-edi
Shopify App DevelopmentCustom apps and the Admin API work an EDI mapping sits on./collections/shopify-app-development-agency
Shopify EDI questions
Our buyer has given us a deadline. Can you hit it?
Usually, and the honest constraint is rarely us. Send us a handful of their live documents and we will come back with the mapping and a view on the date before you commit to anything. The part we cannot compress is the retailer's own test cycle, which runs on their calendar, so the earlier we see the files the more of your runway survives.
Do we need to hire someone who knows EDI?
No, and we would talk you out of it. It is a skill you need intensely during onboarding and then twice a year when a partner changes a spec. That is a poor shape for a permanent hire and a good shape for a managed tier.
Does Shopify support EDI natively?
No. Shopify has no EDI capability of its own, in any plan. Every Shopify merchant trading on EDI is running a layer beside it that translates documents and reads and writes through the Admin API. The question is only whether that layer is built and watched properly.
Do we have to replace our existing EDI provider?
No. If your documents already flow, the work is usually on the Shopify side of the boundary rather than the translation side. We are often brought in beside an incumbent to fix the mapping into Shopify, and only later asked to take the whole thing on.
How does the ASN carry carton detail when Shopify does not hold it?
Shopify's fulfilment object records line items and tracking, but not pack hierarchy or SSCC labels, so an 856 built from fulfilment alone will fail most routing guides. We hold the carton structure alongside the fulfilment and assemble the 856 from both. Where a third-party warehouse packs the order, that detail comes from their 945.
How do partner SKUs map to our variants?
Barcode first, then a SKU cross-reference for partners who use their own article numbers. Onboarding surfaces every line that cannot be resolved, rather than letting it fail silently at the point an order arrives.
What happens with Shopify B2B price lists?
The price list that applies to the buyer's company location wins over the price on the incoming purchase order, and any difference is raised during onboarding rather than discovered on an invoice discrepancy deduction later.
Need help with this?
Talk to a Cogent2 operator who has actually delivered this work. We will help you scope, plan and ship — without the agency overhead.