Shopify Clover integration that keeps the register and the online shop in step

Shopify and Clover can each carry the whole product record (name, price, photos, sizes and colours), and we can create and update on either. Most pairings don’t offer that choice, and having it means making one: pick the side you’ll type into and treat the other as the copy.

For most shops that’s Shopify, because a website needs the long description and the second photograph anyway and a register doesn’t. If your range starts life at the counter, though (you buy it, you price it, it’s on the shelf that afternoon), then Clover is the more natural home and the site can follow it.

Either way round works. What causes trouble is not deciding, then spending a fortnight where half the catalogue was last touched in one place and half in the other.

Clover pushes to us as each sale completes and Shopify does the same, so either side corrects the other in under a second. That matters more here than on a pairing of two websites because of the shape of the trade: a counter can do a fortnight of one item in a single Saturday hour, and there’s no quiet stretch between those sales for a timer to fit into.

So the case that breaks other setups (the same SKU going twice inside a minute, once online and once at the counter) is the ordinary case on this pairing rather than the awkward one. The second sale isn’t waiting on a scheduled look, because there isn’t one.

What still needs a decision from you is what the website should do when the shelf empties at three in the afternoon. We’ll take Shopify to zero. Whether that reads as sold out or as a lost order is a question about your shop, not about the sync.

Most Clover catalogues were built at the counter, one item at a time, by somebody halfway through serving a customer. Clover doesn’t insist on a SKU when you work that way, so a 400-item till catalogue can arrive with 400 blanks in the single field we match products on. Nothing else about this connection matters until that’s dealt with.

What happens next is visible rather than quiet. A variant with no SKU is left out and shown to you as unmatched, so what you get is a list of exactly which items need one, not a shop that syncs 60% of itself and looks finished.

There are two ways through it. Switch on automatic SKU creation during setup and we’ll generate one per item; it’s off by default, because a code we invented is still a code somebody has to read off a picking list. Or choose the scheme yourself first: our free SKU generator builds one per variant and shows which channels would trim it.

Search for a Clover and Shopify integration and you get two kinds of answer, and which one you actually want settles everything else. Clover’s own Payments plugin is free, covers the United States and Canada, and lets a Shopify online store take card payments, Apple Pay and Google Pay included, against the Clover merchant account you already reconcile. If that was the question, the plugin is the answer and it comes from Clover, not from us.

What a payment plugin does not do is touch the catalogue. It creates no item and corrects no quantity, and Clover’s own documentation notes it is not two-way, which is why it asks you to void an order on the Shopify side. Sell the last of something across the counter and the website carries on offering it, because nothing in a payment method was ever looking at the shelf.

That gap is the part we fill, and the two sit alongside each other without overlapping: one is a way of taking money at the checkout, the other is a single stock count shared between the register and the site. Plenty of shops run the plugin for the payments and us for the numbers.