Connect Shopify
The Shopify connection is what makes order journeys, cart recovery, product catalogue and store economics work. It is an app install, so the flow always starts and finishes in Shopify admin.
Connect Shopify from Settings → Connections → Shopify, or by opening TopEdge from Shopify admin. You approve the app’s permissions once in Shopify, TopEdge registers its webhooks, and orders start syncing within a minute or two. You never type your store domain — the install is always approved inside Shopify.
Before you start
- Shopify admin or staff access with permission to install apps.
- A store on a plan that allows app installs (development stores are fine for testing).
- If you also use a third-party checkout, access to that provider’s dashboard for the webhook step.
Install the app
- Start the connect flow Settings → Connections → Shopify → Connect. You can also start from Shopify admin → Apps → TopEdge, which lands you back in the dashboard afterwards.
- Approve the permissions in Shopify Shopify shows the full permission list. Approve all of them — a partial grant leaves specific features silently broken rather than visibly disabled. See what each permission is for below.
- Wait for webhooks to register TopEdge subscribes to the order, fulfilment, checkout and app-lifecycle webhooks it needs. This happens automatically right after the install.
- Verify orders sync Open Orders and press Sync. Live orders should appear within one to two minutes.
- Install storefront tracking Only needed for cart recovery and browse events. Store growth → Website tracking installs the theme embed, web pixel and checkout extension — see Store growth.
What the permissions are for
Shopify asks you to approve everything at once, so it helps to know what each group unlocks. Nothing here writes to your products or your customers.
| Permission group | What it enables |
|---|---|
| Orders (read and write) | Order journeys and triggers, commerce analytics, and the order actions you take from the inbox — tag, cancel, mark paid. |
| Products and inventory | Product catalogue for flows and message templates, stock levels, and setting quantities from the Stock screen. |
| Customers and checkouts | Audience CRM, identity matching by phone number, and abandoned checkout detection for cart recovery. |
| Fulfilments | Shipped and delivered journeys, tracking numbers, and creating fulfilments from the Orders screen. |
| Draft orders and discounts | COD → prepaid payment links and cart recovery invoices, plus issuing recovery discount codes. |
| Pixels and customer events | The storefront web pixel that captures carts and browse events. |
| Themes (read only) | Detecting whether the TopEdge opt-in app embed is enabled on your live theme. TopEdge never edits theme files. |
| Reports and payouts (read only) | Session and payout figures shown in Insights. Read-only, and never used to move money. |
How to check it worked
- The Shopify card reads Connected and shows your store domain.
- Orders lists real orders after a Sync.
- Product search returns your catalogue.
- For cart recovery: every layer on Store growth → Website tracking is green.
If something goes wrong
- Shopify card shows Reconnect, or fulfilments are missing
- Settings → Shopify → Reconnect and approve the full permission list again.
- Open Orders → Sync and wait a couple of minutes.
- Missing shipped or delivered messages are nearly always missing fulfilment permissions — reconnecting fixes it.
- Orders table stays empty after connecting
- Press Sync on the Orders screen; the first load is a backfill, not a webhook.
- Confirm the connected store domain is the store you are actually looking at in Shopify admin.
- If you connected several stores while testing, make sure this workspace owns the right one.
- Dashboard numbers do not match Shopify analytics
- Compare the same date range and the same definition — Shopify’s total sales includes shipping and tax, while store economics reports net of cost.
- Press Sync to backfill any orders that arrived while the connection was down.
- Orders placed before you connected are backfilled, but only for the window the sync covers.
- You uninstalled from Shopify but TopEdge still shows Connected
- Reload the dashboard — connection state is cached briefly.
- If it persists, press Reconnect and then disconnect cleanly from Settings.
- Uninstalling in Shopify revokes the token, so no further data moves either way regardless of what the card says.
- Store growth — Tracking layers and cart capture.
- Order status updates — The first journey to switch on.
- Shopify WhatsApp integration — How the integration works, in product terms.
Frequently asked questions
Does TopEdge edit my Shopify theme?
No. Storefront tracking installs through Shopify app embeds and the web pixel extension, both of which are managed in the theme editor and removed cleanly when you disable them. TopEdge reads your theme only to check whether the opt-in embed is enabled.
Why does Shopify ask me to reconnect?
Shopify requires a fresh approval whenever an app starts using a capability you have not already granted. Until you approve it, the features relying on that capability stop working — missing shipped and delivered messages are the usual symptom.
Can I connect more than one Shopify store?
Each workspace binds to one Shopify store, so a second store needs its own workspace. Connecting a different store to an existing workspace releases the previous binding, which is why test stores should be disconnected before you connect the real one.
Updated 2026-10-04