Connecting B2B commerce for Morphy Richards.

01 / Consultation and discovery

Understand the operation before connecting the systems.

The consultation stage focused on how the trade business works. We worked through the relationship between a company, its sell-to locations, the people authorised to buy and the catalogues that determine their prices. A branch-level pricing arrangement needs to survive the journey from Business Central into Shopify without losing its meaning.

Technical reviews also covered the division of responsibility between the storefront and the back office. Shopify provides the order-placement channel; Business Central remains responsible for the wider order-management and invoicing processes. We discussed contact eligibility, address ownership, tax presentation and fulfilment references so the integration reflected the operation it would serve.

Working with the Business Central supplier, we turned those conversations into practical data contracts: expected columns, identifiers, file naming, delivery paths and validation rules. Sample files gave us a basis for proving the proposed process and identifying gaps before relying on it in production.

02 / The integration

Join up the data behind the buying experience.

Morphy Connect processes six core inbound feed domains: companies, company locations, customers, catalogues, catalogue pricing and items/inventory. Each has its own validation and mapping requirements, but they work together as one trading model. A price is only useful when the product, catalogue and buying location can all be resolved correctly.

The platform maps Business Central references to Shopify entities and uses SKU as the shared product identifier. It checks dependencies so that a missing company, location or product reference can be identified as a specific issue. The aim is to make data problems actionable, rather than leave an operator guessing why a synchronisation did not finish.

We built the outbound and return journeys too. Shopify order events enter an export workflow for Business Central, with delivery and acknowledgement evidence. Tracking updates are mapped back to the relevant Shopify fulfilment, including support for partial shipments and line-level references.

• Companies, delivery locations and buyer contacts
• Catalogue assignments and location-specific pricing
• Product fields, stock availability and RRP
• Order export and Business Central acknowledgement handling
• Shipment and tracking updates returned to Shopify

03 / The bespoke platform

Give the team a control centre they can use.

The integration is supported by a dedicated Laravel and React application. Its dashboard brings together connection health, feed status and recent activity, helping operators distinguish a healthy feed from one that is processing, stale or in need of attention.

Every processing run has a detail view with its stage history, source-file information, record counts and validation or synchronisation results. Operators can investigate the records behind a warning, export failure details and compare the source counts with the processing outcomes. A completed folder check is shown separately from an actual data-processing run, so checking for a file does not imply that new data has been applied.

Recovery is part of the interface. Authorised users can request reprocessing of failed records or replay a source file when appropriate, with child runs linked back to their origin. Permissions control access to operational actions, while the audit log records meaningful changes and manual interventions.

This gives support conversations a concrete starting point: the run, the affected records and the action taken. It also makes the platform useful beyond the initial build, when the people operating the integration need to understand a problem without reconstructing it from server logs.

04 / Testing and refinement

Test the exceptions as well as the successful journey.

We tested the platform at several levels, from individual validation and mapping rules to feed processing and operator workflows. The automated suite covers the integration's behaviour around source data, Shopify responses, run states and recovery actions. The UAT framework also provides a shared checklist for checking business scenarios and recording evidence.

The failure cases matter just as much as a clean import. Tests cover missing identifiers, unknown references, stale stock information, malformed prices and temporary service failures. They check that affected records receive a useful outcome and that valid records can continue where the processing policy allows it.

Order and tracking work required attention to the references passed between systems. We built checks around webhook verification, outbound order delivery, acknowledgements and tracking updates, alongside recovery and throughput rehearsal tools. Testing and issue resolution continued as the integration moved into live operation.

05 / Go-live and operations

Take the build into day-to-day use.

The project progressed through consultation, development and testing into go-live. Production operation brought the scheduling, background workers and monitoring together so the core feeds could run regularly, with the control centre providing visibility over their outcomes.

The six core feeds were configured on a 15-minute schedule. New source files are processed through queued work, while readiness checks and run claims help prevent overlapping work from causing conflicting processing. Larger pricing runs use durable record progress so work can resume without losing the history of records already handled.

We also prepared operational documentation covering daily checks, investigation, recovery and incident handling. The delivery included cutover and rollback planning, giving the team a defined route for moving into production and responding if a problem arose.

06 / Support after launch

Keep improving the connection with real operational evidence.

Live operation has informed further improvements to scheduling, pricing throughput and the operator experience. We refined the way the platform presents feed activity, separates file checks from processing runs and exposes the records that need attention.

RRP support is one example of the work spanning the integration and storefront. We added a dedicated Shopify money metafield for recommended retail price and the corresponding storefront display, keeping it separate from selling prices and catalogue compare-at prices.

Another example involved removing old catalogue compare-at values when a feed supplied a blank. Testing showed that sending an empty value alone did not clear the existing Shopify data. We changed the update strategy, deployed the fix and checked the resulting catalogue values while verifying that selling prices and RRP were preserved.

That is the value of maintaining the whole connection: business rules, data processing, operator tools and Shopify behaviour can be investigated together. Morphy Connect provides a foundation we can continue to improve as the trade operation develops.