How to connect Accredo to Shopify

If you’re an Accredo customer running a Shopify storefront, the gap between the two has historically been the worst part of your week. Stock levels drift. Prices show one thing on the site and another on the invoice. New customers in Shopify need keying into Accredo. Returns become a research project.

This guide walks through what a proper Accredo–Shopify integration actually looks like — what you sync, in which direction, and where the gotchas live.

What you actually want to sync

Five entity types matter:

Products (SKU, description, weight, classification) — Accredo IC is master.
Prices — usually Accredo-master, sometimes per-customer (Special Pricing).
Inventory levels — Accredo IC is master, but it’s the most expensive thing to sync because it changes constantly.
Customers (debtors) — Accredo AR is master for B2B; Shopify is master for first-time DTC visitors who later convert to credit accounts.
Orders — Shopify-originated orders flow into Accredo OE; Accredo-originated orders rarely flow back.

Direction matters. A two-way sync that doesn’t have a clear master per field is how you end up with a Saturday-morning data-recovery exercise. Pick one source of truth per field and write that down.

Real-time vs nightly

Most off-the-shelf Accredo–Shopify connectors are nightly — they run a script overnight to push the day’s changes. That works for product catalogues but not for inventory or pricing. If a customer puts 50 units in their cart at 4pm and your stock-on-hand shows 49 by 5pm, you’ve oversold and you’ll find out in the morning.

The Rapido connector is real-time: when stock changes in Accredo, Shopify reflects it in seconds. Same for prices, customer balances, and back-order status. We move data quicker than you can blink — anything else creates a bad customer experience.

Special Pricing → Shopify B2B catalogs

Accredo’s Special Pricing module is a strength most off-the-shelf connectors ignore. Trade customers have negotiated prices; their Shopify experience needs to honour those prices when they log in.

Shopify Plus exposes customer-level pricing through B2B catalogs assigned to companies and company locations — fixed prices, percentage adjustments, and quantity-break rules per buyer. Rapido pushes Special Pricing into Shopify catalogs so the right price shows the moment the right customer signs in. Without that mapping, your trade customers see retail prices, get annoyed, and call you instead of self-serving.

Where the typical hand-rolled integration breaks

Three patterns we see often when teams DIY this:

One-way push, no acknowledgement. Push happens, Shopify accepts, but if something fails downstream nothing tells Accredo. Stock drifts silently.
Customer-matching by email only. Same person signs up twice with two emails, two debtor records get created, balances split. Match on a stable ID (account number, ABN/NZBN) plus email as a fallback.
Tax handling. GST is a hard problem if your Accredo setup mixes inclusive and exclusive prices, or if you sell to tax-exempt customers. The connector needs to know which is which.

A real connector handles all of these explicitly. It’s not glamorous; it’s where the actual value is.

What the Rapido connector covers

Real-time products, prices, inventory, customers, orders, returns
Customer-specific (Special Pricing) propagation into Shopify
Multi-location stock if you’re on Saturn
Tax handling that respects Accredo’s tax codes
Returns (RMAs) flowing back into Accredo
Customer balances and statements visible inside the storefront via the B2B Portal

It’s already running for thousands of users at NZ’s biggest brands. The plumbing on our side runs through the Accredo Web Service API (OData v4 / JSON) so price, stock and order events surface in seconds, not overnight.

What about the customer-facing portal?

Shopify is great as a storefront. It’s not great as a B2B account management tool — there’s no native concept of “show me my open invoices, my statement, my back-orders, my approved credit limit.”

That’s what the Rapido B2B Portal is for. It runs on its own domain, branded as you, with live Accredo data. Customers can self-serve their account info; Shopify continues to be the place they buy.

You don’t need both. Plenty of Rapido customers run the Shopify connector only, and use Shopify Customer Accounts for the basic stuff. But if your customers ask for statements, invoice downloads, back-order visibility, or repeat-order workflows, the portal is the answer.

Get started

The first step is a 30-minute discovery call. We connect to your Accredo and Shopify, scope what you want to sync, and come back with a real number. Book the call.