How Shopify Sync Works

Shopify holds an available quantity for every variant at every location, and Ardent Seller pushes to each mapped location separately. When a production run finishes at your workshop, the workshop's Shopify location goes up; when you sell at a market from the market's stock, only that location goes down. The push sends the on-hand quantity at the mapped Ardent Seller location minus your Safety Buffer, a per-connection reserve that protects you from overselling. Locations you have not mapped, or switched off on the Locations tab, are never written to.

If a variant is not yet stocked at a location, Ardent Seller activates it there before setting the quantity. If Shopify refuses (for example, the location is deactivated or the variant's inventory is not tracked), the push fails visibly in the sync log rather than silently doing nothing. The same product listed on Etsy and on your store shares one inventory item; the safety buffer is what keeps two channels from overselling it.

You don't need to run syncs by hand, but you can. Open your connection from Settings → Integrations (open Integrations) to find:

• "Sync All" — runs every sync type now (available while the connection is active).
• "Sync Options" — a dropdown to run one type: "Sync Listings", "Sync Sales", or "Push Inventory".
• "Backfill History" — imports older orders: last 3, 30, 60, or 90 days, 6 months, a year, or a custom range.
• "Refresh from store" on the Locations tab — pulls the location list again after you add or rename locations in Shopify.
• "Pause Sync" and "Resume Sync" — stop and restart all scheduled syncing without disconnecting.

Manual syncs run in the background and may take a few minutes; the last-sync cards on the connection page show when each type last ran ("Just now", "5m ago", or "Never synced").

Imported orders count toward your plan's monthly transaction limit. If a sales sync would exceed it, the extra orders are queued, not lost; they import automatically when capacity is available, or sooner if you upgrade. Historical backfills cap themselves at 75% of your monthly limit to leave room for manual transactions. See Billing & Plans for how limits work on each plan, including plans billed through Shopify.

Every day at 02:00 UTC, Ardent Seller compares the quantity it expects for each linked variant at each mapped location against the quantity Shopify actually holds, and records any difference in the sync log with a reason: units on unpaid orders, orders queued by your transaction limit, a stock change made directly in Shopify, or plain timing skew between the two systems.

Small gaps caused by sync timing clear on their own within a day and never need action. Reconciliation also recovers orders the regular sync missed by queueing them automatically. A difference that persists usually means stock was adjusted in Shopify by hand; the sync log entry names the variant and location so you can decide which side is right.

The connection's Sync Log tab records sync operations that found new data or encountered errors; routine checks with no new data are not logged, and entries are removed over time based on your audit trail retention setting. Each entry shows an operation type ("Sale Sync", "Inventory Push", "Listing Sync", "Photo Sync", "Reconciliation", "Backfill", and so on) and a status:

• Success — everything processed.
• Partial — "Some items succeeded, some failed"; the processed column shows the ok, failed, and skipped counts.
• Failed — the operation didn't complete; repeated failures pause syncing temporarily.
• Skipped — "Skipped due to rate limit, fair use, etc." — usually no action needed.