If you’re an ecommerce brand, chances are you’ve heard of Faire.
Faire is the world’s largest and most popular wholesale marketplace. It brings together consumer product brand owners to sell their products and services to wholesale retailers.
Similarly, Shopify is one of the most popular commerce platforms in general. It offers tools to help you build a website, sell direct to consumers online, sell offline with POS systems, manage wholesale and direct B2B sales, and more.
Whether you’re already selling on Faire or hoping to get set up on the platform, this article will show you how to integrate your Faire store and your Shopify store so you can sync orders, inventory, shipments, and your product catalog between the two platforms.
Let’s take a look at some of the best tools out there to help you get started with integrating Faire and Shopify.
Why Integrate Faire with Shopify?
Integrating Faire with Shopify gives you access to a wide range of features and benefits.
For starters, it saves you all the time, money, and errors spent doing manual order entry by automating these tasks.
You can easily sync your inventory levels between Shopify and Faire, which makes it easier for accurate forecasting and avoids backorder, out-of-stock, and oversell situations. Similarly, you can sync your product catalog and customer lists between Shopify and Faire as well. And you’ll get your Faire payout faster because the integration automatically sends order tracking info from Shopify back to Faire.
The 5 Best Faire Shopify Integration Tools in 2024
- Syncware
- Faire: Sell Wholesale app on Shopify
- Enterprise automation platforms
- Fulfillment Bridge Integration App
- Custom integration
1. Syncware
Syncware is cloud-based software that enables a two-way sync between Shopify and Faire for orders, shipments, and inventory.
Syncware integrates with 200+ systems but is especially powerful for b2b ecommerce businesses selling wholesale to retailers, via sales reps, and on wholesale marketplaces like Faire.
Syncware connects Faire to all your current systems:
- Automatically pass orders to your fulfillment system
- Update inventory levels in real-time
- Push tracking information back to Faire once orders are shipped
- Ensure accurate financials are captured
- Sync customers and products between Faire and your ERP
By tracking the quantity of products you have available, you prevent overselling. Tracking information helps you provide better customer support and order fulfillment and gets your payout faster. And of course, financial data syncing is crucial for accurate accounting.
Syncware’s Faire-Shopify integration is easy to set up (sign up to get started) and is simply priced:
- $50 per month each for Faire and Shopify (other integrations range from $50-150/per month)
- +$250 one-time setup fee
- +$99 one-time setup fee + $0.50 per order for any EDI connection
2. Faire: Sell Wholesale app on Shopify
Shopify actually offers a native Faire app in their App Store and this is quite useful for those just getting started selling on Faire’s marketplace. You can sync inventory from Shopify to Faire, sync orders from Faire to Shopify, and import selected products from Shopify directly to Faire (catalog import).
It’s a good starting place but its order sync is one-way so while you can send orders from Faire to Shopify, the shipment tracking info is not sent back in order to automate and expedite your Faire payout. The catalog sync pulls all products from Shopify to Faire but with no settings to filter or exclude products (e.g. products that cannot be sold wholesale).
So again, this one may solve some of your integration problems, but you’ll still likely need to use another platform with more advanced configurations, intelligent automation, and the ability to integrate with your ERP and accounting software.
3. Workato, Celigo, and other enterprise automation platforms
Enterprise automation platforms or iPaaS (Internet Platform as a Service) platforms have risen in prominence over the past few years.
Some automation and integration platforms, such as Zapier, are high-touch and require a lot of manual work to set up integrations. Technically, you could set up a Faire and Shopify integration with this type of platform, but it would require extensive knowledge about APIs and webhooks. And you’d have to set up a custom workflow for every sync you require (e.g. orders, inventory, shipments, products, etc.). This is almost as much work as manual data entry.
On the higher end of price, you have enterprise automation platforms like Workato, Celigo, and Mulesoft. These are built for company-wide automation and integration, from HR onboarding use cases all the way to marketing and sales automations, and of course, e-commerce integrations like Faire Shopify syncing.
These iPaas platforms can be incredibly robust, but they often require developers or IT professionals to set up recipes and workflows and do quality assurance. These tools are also expensive, starting at $1k+ per month depending on your specific needs.
If you’re a large brand, this may be worthwhile, but for many smaller brands and entrepreneurs, these solutions are a bit hard to manage and to justify the cost.
4. Fulfillment Bridge Integration App
Fulfillment Bridge offers an integration app that helps simplify shipping logistics between Shopify and Faire by allowing users to connect multiple warehouses on either side of their ecosystem.
With this tool, users can easily route orders based on where they need to be fulfilled—whether that’s in-house or through a third-party fulfillment center—saving time and money in the process.
Plus, this integration comes complete with automated tracking updates so customers always know where their order is at any given time.
This way of integrating Shopify and Faire is much more suited for shipping and fulfillment, and less so catered toward inventory management, payouts, and accounting information. So even if you use this integration option, you’ll likely still need another middleware solution to make sure your product inventory data is synced between stores, your financial data is passed in a secure way, and your ERP and CRM systems are connected.
5. Custom integration
Finally, if you have the resources, you can build a custom integration between Faire and Shopify.
This involves custom software development that connects to Shopify and Faire API endpoints so that your internal company data can be synced.
For most brands, this is not feasible. The time and money it takes to build a middleware integration are quite extensive and are probably better utilized improving your customer and website experience and growing your sales channels. It can get complicated and be prone to mistakes when you try to process both online and offline orders as well.
Additionally, most small brands don’t have access to these levels of resources. And, if you do, maintaining the connection requires ongoing expense as Shopify and Faire’s API endpoints change very regularly. There’s also the issue of reliability and secure syncing. You’d have to make hundreds of API requests, which may be nearly as expensive as just using a 3rd party product.
However, if you have the resources and time to build your own custom integrations, this does give you the ability to own all of your data and customize how you’re dealing with it.
What to Look for in a Faire Shopify Integration
When comparing Faire and Shopify integration options, there are a few key features you’ll want to look for.
Does it sync sales orders from Faire to Shopify?
First up, does it sync the sale you make on the Faire marketplace and send that data to your Shopify account?
This is one of the mandatory boxes you need to check to get utility out of a Faire Shopify integration. If this feature doesn’t exist, it’s not going to be a valuable integration.
Luckily, all of the integrations listed in this article serve that purpose.
Does it sync inventory from Shopify to Faire?
Next, does the integration automatically sync the inventory quantity you have in Shopify with the inventory quantity you have on Faire?
This is incredibly important so you don’t make sales on items you don’t actually have in stock (which can happen when this is done manually).
This data sync will prevent backorders and save you time activating and deactivating products on Faire, especially if you manage many SKUs.
Does it sync shipment info from Shopify to Faire?
Next, are you able to get shipment tracking info back to Faire when the shipping process begins?
This is critical for getting your payout from Faire; and helpful from a customer service and messaging automation standpoint, especially if you offer shipment tracking and order updates.
Does it do bidirectional data syncing between Faire and Shopify?
When you connect Faire and Shopify, does the data flow only one way or does it flow back and forth between the systems?
This is more important than you would imagine. Essentially, when you start selling products through many channels, this creates complexity. This complexity comes from things like inventory management on multiple platforms.
But it also comes in the form of different data coding for SKUs and financial data on different platforms. Something as simple as how a date is written could be done three different ways on three different platforms.
This data incongruity starts to add up. So you want to make sure that you have a bidirectional data sync to correct and homogenize your data when it comes to your own ERP software or accounting software.
Does it integrate with other key business systems?
In addition to syncing your order, inventory, and shipment data, a great integration platform will also allow you to connect Faire and Shopify to any other key business systems you’re using. This may include your ERP or financial accounting software, fulfillment and logistics suppliers, and even your marketing and sales tools.
The more you can accomplish with one platform, the less manual effort will be involved. You’ll also avoid incurring “tech debt” by trying to replicate these data syncs across multiple systems.
iPaas platforms can do this well, as they are quite agnostic as to the connectors you set up, but they can be burdensome in costs and resource requirements. Syncware and ecommerce middleware can be a better solution as they’re more lightweight, purpose-built for sellers, and less costly.
How affordable is it?
Obviously, cost is an issue.
If you’re a new ecommerce startup, it’s unlikely you want to shell out thousands of dollars a month to sell on a new channel, even if the opportunity is there to increase overall revenue.
Similarly, if you were considering hiring developers to build your own custom integrations, you have to calculate not just the time and cost of hiring these people, but the management cost to keep these connections up and running.
Sometimes, you get what you pay for. You might be able to do this cheaply in a native app or Shopify app store integrator, but it might suffer from data quality issues or data integrity issues. Similarly, you could set up workflow automation using Zapier, but the integrations may break and leave you scrambling to patch things together.
Is the integration specifically built for e-commerce businesses?
Many automation platforms are built to serve generic and wide ranging use cases. They’re purchased by an IT department at a large company and rolled out through the organization. They might serve marketing automation purposes (i.e. automating review requests from customers), HR onboarding purposes (i.e. employee onboarding and offboarding), and data integration.
If you’re a large enterprise with many automation needs, this could be a benefit.
But for many brands who just want to expand into multiple sales channels, this can be overkill. It can also predicate the hiring of IT and development resources that increase the cost of selling on these new platforms (like Faire).
One thing to account for is whether the solution you’re considering has been specifically built for e-commerce brands like yours.
For example, Syncware is built by and for B2B e-commerce brands. The product includes advanced configurations specifically designed for wholesale sellers offering a simpler solution for those looking to integrate Shopify and Faire.
Integrate Faire and Shopify before you outgrow manual entry
Integrating Shopify with Faire is a great way for growing sellers and e-commerce owners to expand their reach and grow their businesses quickly and efficiently.
You may be looking for a tool to sync existing products or one that will help streamline order processing workflows, but there are plenty of options available that make it to these two powerful platforms.
So if you want to sell on Faire, don’t wait to look into integrations. Integrating Faire and Shopify will ensure that, as your revenue and sales grow, you can handle increasing order volume so you can remain focused on growing and adding sales channels.
