Your store and your ERP, finally telling the same story.

Sage 200 is the ERP a lot of UK wholesalers and manufacturers grew into: stock across several warehouses, sales orders, purchase orders, customer accounts with their own price bands and credit limits. It is often the system that has to be right, so the store reads from it rather than competing with it.

Most Sage 200 to Shopify or Magento connections are built on a connector product, such as those from Zynk or Codeless Platforms, or directly on the Sage 200 API. A connector is usually the right start. The work tends to be in what the connector doesn’t know: price bands mapped to customer groups, kits sold as one product and stocked as several, and orders that must land in Sage with the right account, tax code and warehouse.

Sage 50 is accounting software first. Many smaller stores use it for invoices and stock valuation, and the store is connected so that sales, refunds and fees post into the books without being keyed in.

Because Sage 50 is usually installed on a desktop or a server in the office rather than in the cloud, connections run through a connector or a sync tool on that machine. That is fine, as long as someone knows the sync exists, where its logs are, and what happens when the office PC is off for a week.

Sage Intacct is a cloud finance system for businesses that have outgrown an accounts package: several entities, dimensions for reporting, and proper revenue recognition. From a store it usually wants summarised sales, refunds, fees and payouts, posted in a shape the finance team can reconcile, rather than every line of every order.

NetSuite is Oracle’s cloud ERP, common with brands selling through several channels and more than one country. It has a full API (SuiteTalk) and its own scripting (SuiteScript), and there are established connectors, such as Celigo’s, that handle the standard order, item and inventory flows.

A NetSuite connector is a good answer when your records look like the connector’s. The custom work is usually in item records that don’t map cleanly to Shopify variants, subsidiaries and currencies, fulfilment across locations, and custom fields that a report or a warehouse process depends on.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is the Microsoft ERP most small and mid-sized businesses meet. Microsoft publishes its own Shopify connector, which covers products, customers, orders and stock for straightforward setups.

Where the business differs from what that connector expects, such as B2B price lists, a Magento or WooCommerce store rather than Shopify, or extensions a Business Central partner has added, the connection is built or extended against Business Central’s APIs. I connect the store to Business Central; configuring Business Central itself stays with your Microsoft partner.

Odoo is an open-source business suite with apps for sales, inventory, purchasing, accounting and more, used by growing businesses that want one system instead of five. It has its own ecommerce, but many businesses keep Shopify or Magento as the storefront and connect it to Odoo for stock, orders and invoicing.

Odoo has connectors for Shopify and a well-documented API. The custom work is usually in variants and product attributes, multi-warehouse stock, and Odoo modules your partner has customised, which a standard connector doesn’t know about.

Xero is where a lot of UK stores keep their books. The usual goal is not to push every order into Xero but to post clean, reconcilable summaries: sales by channel and tax rate, refunds, payment provider fees and payouts. Tools such as A2X do this well for Shopify and Amazon, and often that is all that is needed.

Custom work comes in when the store is Magento or a bespoke build, when trade invoices must be raised in Xero against real contacts, or when stock is tracked in Xero and has to reach the website.

QuickBooks Online plays the same role as Xero for many businesses: invoices, payments and the numbers the accountant needs. Connecting a store to it is mostly about agreeing what posts as what, and at what level of detail, so the accounts reconcile with the payment provider at month end.