Keep Shopify as your shop and add everything else around it

A good number of merchants arrive here already running Shopify and with no intention of leaving, which is entirely reasonable — it is a good shop platform. What it is not is a multichannel stock system, and the apps that claim to bolt that on generally want to become the centre of your operation.

Qwikr’s position with Shopify is deliberately the other way round: Shopify keeps the shop, and usually keeps the stock record too.

Nominate Shopify as the truth

Where the warehouse is effectively run through Shopify, Shopify should hold the record. Qwikr reads its stock, distributes that figure to Amazon, eBay, Etsy and TikTok Shop, and never writes back a number Shopify already knows.

The strict half of the rule is the important one: when Shopify holds the record, Qwikr sends it stock changes that came from sales and nothing else. Not an import, not a supplier feed, not a bulk edit — those would overwrite the very figures everything else is being reconciled against.

The failure that rule exists to prevent

It was found the hard way, and it is worth describing because it is invisible until it is expensive.

A marketplace sale was being dispatched without being flagged as a sale. The safety rule saw a stock change that was not a sale, arriving at the channel that holds the record, and correctly refused it. Shopify was never told about the Amazon and eBay sales.

Nothing failed. No error, no failed job, nothing in the sync log — the refusal was recorded below the level production logs at. The only visible symptom appeared later: the next Shopify sale hit a figure Qwikr had already decremented, and logged a shortfall that read like bad stock data. It got blamed on the merchant’s counts for weeks.

Nine SKUs had drifted, each low by exactly what had sold elsewhere. There is now a test pinning that a marketplace sale is flagged as a sale, because the cost of that one missing argument was a fortnight of wrong conclusions.

No Qwikr storefront unless you want one

If Shopify is your shop, generating a second storefront is not a feature — it is publishing a site nobody will visit. Set your primary storefront to Shopify and Qwikr stops publishing one, while marketplace sync, stock, orders and reporting carry on exactly as before.

That is usually the whole reason those merchants are here, and a platform that insists on owning your storefront to be useful is solving its own problem rather than yours.

Both directions, honestly described

Orders flow from Shopify into Qwikr, so your reporting covers every channel in one place. Stock flows in whichever direction you nominated. Products can be imported to seed your catalogue.

One thing to watch on import: a product that was deactivated and later returns needs to be reactivated, not skipped as already-seen. An importer that only sets status on first creation will strand returning products on frozen stock forever — it was a real bug here, and the symptom was hundreds of marketplace listings quietly sitting on figures that never moved again.