Shopify Retail EDI Readiness Checklist: 24 Questions Before You Sign

Most EDI vendor demos look identical, because every vendor can show you an 850 arriving. The differences show up in the parts nobody demos: who owns the container code sequence, what happens when a 997 never arrives, and whether a retail PO commits inventory your storefront can still sell. These are the 24 questions that separate vendors, in six groups. Ask them of the vendor, your 3PL, and your own operation — the third one is where most brands find the gap.

This checklist is ungated on purpose. We publish our pricing too.

1. Trading partner scope

The most expensive discovery is that your vendor is not live with your retailer.

1. Which of my specific retailers are you already certified and in production with? Not “we support Walmart” — live, today, with named references. Our per-retailer requirements give you the list to read out.
2. What does adding a new trading partner cost, in money and in weeks? Get both numbers. Per-partner setup fees are where EDI pricing hides.
3. Which transaction sets are included at my tier? An 850, 855, 856, and 810 cover a basic program. An 860 change order, 997 functional acknowledgment, 852 sales data, or 846 inventory advice may cost extra or may not be supported.
4. Who handles the retailer certification testing? You, them, or a paid professional services engagement.

2. Identifiers and data

Boring, and the source of most first-program failures.

5. Do I have GS1-issued GTINs behind my UPCs? Selling through retailers means official GS1 numbers, not made-up barcodes. This is a registration task with a lead time.
6. What identifiers does each retailer require, and where do they live in Shopify? Vendor numbers, buyer part numbers, and store or DC numbers rarely map cleanly onto Shopify’s product fields, and metafields are usually the answer.
7. Who maintains the SKU-to-buyer-part-number mapping when the retailer changes it? They will change it.
8. How are units of measure and case packs represented? Retailers order cases; Shopify tracks eaches. Getting this conversion wrong produces a shortage chargeback that looks like a shipping error.

3. Inventory and allocation

The group brands skip, and the one that costs the most.

9. When a retail PO is accepted, does it commit inventory against the same record my storefront reads? If the answer involves a nightly sync, you can oversell inside the gap.
10. How do I hold stock for a PO that ships in six weeks? Shopify’s native options are a draft order with reserved items and an expiry, or manually moving units into an unavailable state. Know which one the vendor expects you to use.
11. What happens when DTC, wholesale, and retail draw down the same pool? Ask them to describe the failure mode rather than the feature.
12. Does retail demand appear in my forecast? A Shopify-only planning view never sees wholesale POs or retail EDI commitments. That is how you get confident forecasts that are wrong in the same direction every time.
13. Can I see committed, reserved, and available separately per location? Shopify models incoming, on hand, available, committed, reserved, damaged, safety stock, and quality control. A tool that flattens those into one number is hiding the number you need.

4. Fulfillment and labels

Mostly questions for your 3PL, not your EDI vendor.

14. Who generates GS1-128 carton labels? Shopify’s own barcode app produces Code-128, so the answer is your warehouse, your EDI provider, or a third-party app. Somebody has to own it.
15. Who owns the serialized container code sequence? Two systems assigning codes independently creates duplicates, and duplicates fail at the receiving dock.
16. Who transmits the 856, under whose vendor ID, and within how many hours of shipment confirmation? Put the hours in the contract.
17. What granularity is the shipment feed from my 3PL? Carton-level with contents and codes, or order-level totals. Order-level totals cannot produce a compliant ASN.
18. Who pays a chargeback caused by warehouse error? Most 3PL contracts are silent on this, which means you pay. The full version of this question is in who sends the ASN when your 3PL ships it.

5. Finance and invoicing

19. Is the 810 generated from the PO prices and the ASN quantities? That pairing is the reliable pattern. Anything hand-keyed invents discrepancies.
20. How do invoiced amounts reach my financial system? Invoicing the retailer and booking the receivable are separate jobs, and they should come from one set of numbers. See Shopify to QuickBooks and NetSuite patterns.
21. How are deductions and expense offsets recorded against the original order? A chargeback you cannot attribute to a cause is a chargeback you will get again.

6. Compliance and risk

22. How are routing guide requirements tracked per partner, and what happens when a retailer updates theirs? Retailers update guides without much notice, and the update is your problem.
23. What is monitored, and who gets told? Late ASN, rejected document, missing 997, approaching ship window. Name the alerting, then name the human.
24. What is my realistic chargeback exposure in year one, and which categories drive it? A vendor who cannot answer this has not run a program like yours. Ours is set out in the EDI chargeback nightmare and avoiding retailer chargebacks.

How to score the answers

Three patterns tell you most of what you need:

• Per-partner cost and timeline are vague. Pricing will grow with your program count in ways the proposal does not show.
• Inventory questions get feature answers. If question 9 or 11 produces a sync instead of a commitment model, you are buying a second system of record and the reconciliation is yours.
• Nobody will name hours or owners. Compliance is measured in windows. A vendor unwilling to commit to a transmission window is telling you who absorbs the chargeback.

Where Endless lands on these

EndlessEDI is native across all tiers, no add-on, which changes the answers to the third group specifically: a retail PO commits stock against the same inventory record DTC and wholesale read, retail demand appears in the same forecast, and ASNs generate from the confirmed shipment rather than being transcribed from a warehouse email. Routing guides, chargeback attribution, and compliance tracking come with it, and published pricing means the per-partner arithmetic is not a discovery call.

If a retailer has already said yes, your first retail PO on Shopify walks the document sequence in order. If you are still working out whether you need EDI at all, Shopify B2B vs retail EDI draws the line, and talk to an expert if you would rather work through the packet with someone who has read a few hundred of them.

Sources

Shopify capability references — inventory states, draft order reservation with expiry, B2B catalogs and payment terms, and the Code-128 limitation of the Retail Barcode Labels app — come from Shopify’s own documentation and developer resources. Transaction set names follow the ANSI ASC X12 standard, and GS1-128 application identifiers and serialized shipping container codes follow GS1’s general specifications.

Retailer requirements vary and change. Your trading partner packet is the specification, and where it disagrees with this checklist, it wins.