Optimizing order management is a crucial factor in achieving success in the world of enterprise commerce. As businesses scale, managing orders across the omnichannel spectrum — like same-day delivery, buy online pickup in-store, and ship-from-store — while ensuring accurate inventory visibility and a seamless customer experience becomes increasingly complex.
In 2024, Shopify and Manhattan Associates announced a partnership that combines the power of Shopify with Manhattan's advanced order management solution, Manhattan Active Omni™. Available for Shopify merchants to use today, this integration is designed to equip businesses with the tools they need to streamline operations and elevate customer satisfaction with ship-to-address orders. It provides a seamless integration between Shopify and Manhattan Active Omni by synchronizing inventory, orders, and payment information across both platforms.
This article will provide a technical overview with details on the specific capabilities provided by the Manhattan Active Omni integration for Shopify, and outline how the integration empowers enterprise businesses by combining the commerce capabilities of Shopify with the industry-leading order management capabilities provided by Manhattan Active Omni.
Key features and capabilities
The Manhattan Active Omni integration for Shopify offers several key features and capabilities, including:
-
Inventory synchronization: Tracking inventory across multiple sales channels and locations is a constant challenge for enterprise businesses. Inaccurate inventory information leads to high holding costs, stockouts, disappointed customers, lost sales, and logistical headaches. With the Manhattan Active Omni integration for Shopify, inventory is automatically synchronized with Manhattan Active Omni, which serves as the central source of truth for inventory data, and Shopify, where customers engage and place orders. Merchants can define inventory thresholds (low, medium, or high) within Manhattan Active Omni, which will trigger an automatic inventory update to Shopify when reached, ensuring that what customers see on the Shopify storefront accurately reflects near real-time inventory availability.
The integration also leverages Manhattan's advanced inventory management capabilities, such as inventory segmentation. By creating a designated "View" in the order management system’s Available to Commerce (ATC)™ feature, businesses can specify which segments of their inventory are shared with Shopify. For example, businesses can separate wholesale inventory from retail inventory, expose both on-hand inventory and future inventory that may be in transit, as well as protect inventory for different selling channels. This ensures efficient inventory allocation and prevents stockouts and overselling across channels.
-
Order synchronization: As customers place orders through Shopify, the Manhattan Active Omni integration for Shopify seamlessly transmits important order information to the order management system for fulfillment and processing. This eliminates the need for a bespoke order integration solution and greatly reduces development effort required to process Shopify orders via Manhattan Active Omni, while helping to ensure accuracy and consistency across both systems.
-
Shopify webhooks: Webhooks play a crucial role in enabling real-time order synchronization, and are essentially automated notifications that are triggered whenever a specific event occurs, such as order creation, cancellation, deletion, or modification. Shopify webhooks transmit detailed data related to order events, providing Manhattan Active Omni with the information needed to route and process each order appropriately and ensuring both platforms remain in sync. This automation allows businesses to track orders throughout their lifecycle, from initial placement to final delivery, ensuring transparency and efficiency in their fulfillment processes.
-
Payment flow (payment capture and refund): Smooth payment processing is essential for any order management workflow, and the Manhattan Active Omni integration for Shopify ensures transactions initiated from Shopify are synchronized so Manhattan Active Omni can orchestrate the next stages of the payments lifecycle.
Manhattan Active Omni manages the payment capture and refund processes for orders across all sales channels, including those placed via Shopify. When a payment capture or refund transaction is initiated for a Shopify order, Manhattan Active Omni initiates the orderCapture or refundCreate mutation on the Shopify GraphQL API which triggers the corresponding payment operation within Shopify. Utilizing GraphQL mutations to synchronize payment operations automatically ensures that both Shopify and Manhattan Active Omni have accurate and up-to-date financial records, which eliminates the need for manual reconciliation and reduces the risk of discrepancies.
- Shop Pay: With the Manhattan Active Omni integration for Shopify, businesses are now able to support payment processing through Shop Pay for orders placed via external commerce platforms. By implementing the Shop Pay Component provided by Shopify as a payment method within the external checkout, our integration allows businesses to take advantage of the same integrated payment flows between Manhattan Active Omni and Shopify for Shop Pay orders. When an order is placed via external checkout using Shop Pay, the payment flow is completed in the same manner as if the order was placed on Shopify directly.
Technical architecture diagrams
In this section, we will explore the key integration flows between Manhattan Active Omni and Shopify, offering a comprehensive overview of how data entities interact across these platforms. Each diagram will illustrate the synchronization processes for inventory, orders, and payments, highlighting the seamless connectivity that enhances operational efficiency for businesses leveraging both systems.
-
Enterprise Architecture View: This diagram provides a high-level overview of the data entities and integration flows that are supported by the Manhattan Active Omni integration for Shopify, outlining each connection point between the two platforms provided by the integration, and showing the data flowing from one platform to the other.
-
Inventory Synchronization Flow: This diagram outlines the flow of inventory data updates from Manhattan Active Omni to Shopify, triggered by predefined inventory thresholds. When an inventory threshold is triggered, Manhattan Active Omni initiates a call to the inventorySetQuantities mutation available on the Shopify GraphQL API to synchronize the inventory update with Shopify.
-
Order Synchronization Flow: The following diagram outlines the process for synchronizing newly-created Shopify orders to Manhattan via Shopify webhooks.
-
Payment Flow: This diagram outlines the payment capture and refund operations that can be triggered within Manhattan Active Omni and the corresponding calls to the Shopify orderCapture and refundCreate GraphQL API mutations that are used to trigger the corresponding settlement within Shopify.
Order management benefits for enterprise commerce
Integrating Shopify with the advanced order management capabilities provided by Manhattan Active Omni offers several key advantages for enterprise commerce businesses:
-
Optimal order fulfillment: The efficiency provided by an automated order management solution that is integrated across all sales channels directly impacts customer satisfaction and can boost an enterprise’s bottom line. Manhattan Active Omni excels at intelligently orchestrating and automating order fulfillment, evaluating factors such as customer proximity, shipping costs, and delivery preferences while dynamically incorporating real-time inventory levels across locations (including stores, warehouses, and third-party logistics providers). It also autonomously monitors orders as they progress from intake to fulfillment, ensuring real-time actions based on configured rules and available-to-promise (ATP) principles, and uses this information to dynamically select the most optimal fulfillment location for each order. This sophisticated approach to order routing not only streamlines logistics but can also significantly reduce shipping costs, improve delivery times, and allow for greater flexibility in meeting diverse customer demands.
-
Improved conversion through accurate availability and reliable fulfillment: The Manhattan Active Omni integration for Shopify provides customers accurate, dynamic visibility into item availability and dependable delivery promising across sales channels and fulfillment locations. By empowering customers with accurate and timely access to precise inventory information and providing retailers with the ability to efficiently manage end-to-end fulfillment cycles, businesses can leverage this integration to enhance the customer experience and drive retention. Precise promising and optimized fulfillment are proven enablers of healthier conversion rates, delivering top-line benefits to enterprise retailers.
-
Lower costs through reduced integration effort: This integration is purpose-built to dramatically reduce the development effort required to join Shopify’s eCommerce solution and Manhattan Active Omni. Through pre-configured data mapping and transformation, pre-built connectors and APIs, plus pre-defined business logic and workflows, enterprise retailers can quickly and confidently fuse two industry-leading platforms with significant reductions in data mapping, coding time, testing, and implementation effort.
- Measurable gains in efficiency and profitability: Manhattan Active Omni’s industry-leading promising and fulfillment capabilities allow retailers to derive substantial improvements in efficiency and profitability. Dynamic inventory visibility across all sales channels, combined with machine learning for optimized fulfillment and predictive order promising, enables businesses to streamline order processing and reduce shipping costs through optimized routing and consolidation, while delivering against exacting customer demands. Lower operational expenses paired with better ordering experiences can lead to higher profitability for enterprises that may be challenged to drive efficiency within their fulfillment functions.
- Scalability and flexibility to meet future demands: Enterprise order management solutions must have the ability to adapt and scale efficiently in order to maintain the pace of growth seen throughout enterprise commerce today. Manhattan Active Omni provides the scalability and flexibility needed to accommodate growing enterprises, and its modular structure allows businesses to easily integrate new modules or features (such as customer service & engagement capabilities and warehouse management solutions) as their needs evolve. This ensures that businesses using Manhattan Active Omni can quickly adapt and capitalize on new opportunities without being hindered by technical constraints.
Best practices for winning order management on Shopify and Manhattan Active Omni
The Manhattan Active Omni integration for Shopify provides a comprehensive and powerful solution that addresses many of the complexities of order management for enterprise commerce businesses. By leveraging real-time inventory visibility, intelligent order orchestration, streamlined fulfillment, optimized payment processing and automation, this solution provides enterprise businesses with the tools they need to scale their operations, delight their customers, and drive sustained growth and profitability.
Additionally, here are just a few best practices for creating a winning order management strategy with Shopify and Manhattan Active Omni:
- Gather, baseline, analyze, and track key order management metrics such as fulfillment and pick-up times, service levels, inventory accuracy, and capacity across sales channels, fulfilment methods, distribution centers, and partners. Manhattan Active Omni provides retailers with convenient, in-application access to actionable metrics through Fulfillment Insights and Postgame Spotlight, two powerful analytics tools that reduce the manual effort required to understand how well your fulfillment function is performing.
- Set accurate and realistic fulfillment goals as part of your company’s sales and operations planning process, including costs associated with fulfilling orders, inventory accuracy, and stockouts and shorts across all sales channels and fulfillment locations, to help identify areas of strength and opportunity.
- Streamline your business processes and data integration in order to optimize the number of steps to track and trace orders, minimize touchpoints, and granularize your data ingestion and dissemination to obtain better reporting and analytics, enabling your organization to make informed decisions that delight your end consumers.
- Monitor and continuously improve your processes: your Shopify store is a treasure trove of data across your end-to-end order cycles, financial flows, demand-forecast accuracy and customer feedback. Your business can benefit by monitoring, analyzing and continuously improving your processes to move the needle on customer value generation.
To learn more about Shopify’s enterprise technology partnerships with Manhattan and other leading partners, visit our Partner Directory.
