What to ask a Shopify integration vendor

Evaluating an integration on a demonstration tells you how it looks. These questions tell you whether it will close your books.

They are ordered so that a weak answer to an early one makes the later ones academic.

The four that settle it

Do you read my payment gateway's settlement data, or only Shopify?

Shopify holds no fee or settlement data for a Malaysian store, because Shopify Payments is unavailable here. A product reading only Shopify cannot tell you what a payment cost or when you were paid — see the three-way match a Malaysian store needs.

A good answer names specific Malaysian gateways and how it receives their data.

Which Malaysian gateways do you support, and how?

Specific names, and whether by API, scheduled file or portal export. Any of the three works if the data is complete — see gateway API or settlement file.

A weak answer is a general claim about supporting payment gateways.

Can you show me a payout decomposed to its transactions?

The core capability. One bank credit, every transaction inside it, fees, refunds, chargebacks, reserve movements, arithmetic closing exactly — see decomposing a payout line by line.

Ask to see it on real data rather than a prepared example.

How do you handle the third-party transaction fee?

Charged because payment did not go through Shopify Payments, unavoidable in Malaysia, and a real cost line. A vendor who does not recognise the question has not implemented a Malaysian store — see the Shopify third-party gateway fee explained.

The four about completeness

How do you detect a missed webhook?

The correct answer involves a periodic full pull compared against held records. Webhooks alone means eventual silent gaps — see Shopify webhooks and why they are not enough.

Do you have approval to read orders beyond the default historical window?

Determines whether history can be brought in, and whether a refund on an older order can find its parent — see the Shopify sixty-day order window.

What happens when a Shopify API version retires?

They should have been through it. Ask what broke last time and how customers were told — see Shopify API versioning and what breaks.

What reaches a person, and how often?

Every system produces exceptions. A vendor claiming none is describing a system that resolves ambiguity by guessing — see the exception queue and how to size it.

The four about your actual numbers

Do you bring in courier costs?

Delivery is the second largest cost on most orders. Without it, margin per order is incomplete — see capturing the consignment note against the order.

How do you handle order-level discounts across lines?

The correct answer is reading Shopify's own allocation rather than recomputing it — see Shopify discounts, taxes and line-level allocation.

What do you do with a payment that has no matching order?

Should be an exception raised for a decision, never an automatic match on the closest candidate — see matching orders to transactions to payouts.

Can I export everything, and what happens if I leave?

Your transaction history is your supporting documentation. Settle this before signing — see leaving Shopify and taking your data.

What the answers tell you

Three patterns worth recognising.

A vendor who has done this in Malaysia answers the Shopify Payments question immediately, names gateways specifically, and has a view on which produce good settlement data. This is unfakeable — it comes from implementations rather than from documentation.

A vendor with a Shopify-only product answers the first four generally and the middle four well. They have built something competent with a boundary they may not have articulated.

A vendor selling a demonstration answers everything positively and cannot show a decomposed payout on real data. The tell is that specifics get deflected to a later conversation.

The test that beats the questions

If you do one thing, do this: give them a real month of your data and ask them to reconcile it.

One month of Shopify orders, the matching gateway settlements, the bank statement. Ask for every payout decomposed and every exception listed.

A capable product does it and shows you a short exception list you can understand. An incapable one produces something that does not tie, or asks for a subset of the data that happens to be the part it handles.

That exercise takes a few days and it settles the question more reliably than any number of answers — see how to evaluate AI accounting software.

Common questions

What is the single most important question to ask a Shopify integration vendor?

Whether they read your payment gateway's settlement data or only Shopify. Because Shopify Payments is unavailable in Malaysia, Shopify holds no fee or settlement information, so a product reading only Shopify cannot say what a payment cost or when you were paid — which is most of what reconciliation needs.

How can you tell whether a vendor has implemented a Malaysian store?

They answer the Shopify Payments question immediately, name specific Malaysian gateways rather than claiming general support, and have a view on which ones produce good settlement data. That knowledge comes from actual implementations and is difficult to fake from documentation.

What should a vendor say about exceptions?

That some volume reaches a person, with a figure and a description of what kinds of items. A vendor claiming no exceptions at all is describing a system that resolves ambiguity by guessing, which produces confident wrong allocations that are harder to find later than an open exception would have been.

What is the most reliable evaluation?

Give the vendor a real month of your own data — Shopify orders, the matching gateway settlements and the bank statement — and ask them to reconcile it, decomposing every payout and listing every exception. A capable product does it and shows a short, understandable exception list; an incapable one produces something that does not tie.

Related: build or buy a Shopify integration · how to evaluate AI accounting software · what APIs you need for Shopify reconciliation