Infor A+ to Shopify Integration

It is not impossible. It is specific, and almost nobody writes about it.

We searched for A+ content and the result is close to empty. Google does not even parse the query well, because a plus sign is not a search term, so the results are generic Infor brand pages. Not one page addresses A+ and ecommerce.

That means two things. If you have been researching this yourself and found nothing useful, it is not you. And whatever your partner tells you about A+ integration, you have almost no way to sanity-check it against published material. So here is what Infor actually documents.

This surprised us, and it is the most useful finding on this page.

Infor's A+ documentation library, current at version 10.03.00, includes a Storefront Integration Layer Implementation Guide for Infor Distribution, covering Storefront 2.0.502 with A+ 10.03.00. It also includes a Commerce Gateway User Guide, along with EDI and electronic payments guides and web and mobile documentation.

Infor wrote a named ecommerce integration layer for A+ and published an implementation guide for it. That is a considerably better starting position than several of the newer products on this site, and it is not mentioned anywhere on the open web outside Infor's own documentation.

What Infor does not publish for A+ is a modern REST API or a developer SDK. So the integration is built against documented integration layers, EDI and the established data paths on the platform, rather than by calling REST endpoints. That is a different shape of project, not a worse one, and it is why the discovery step is where the risk sits.

The platform is the thing everyone gets wrong about A+, in both directions. It is neither an insurmountable obstacle nor a detail you can ignore.

Practically, it means the integration component lives where it can reach the system, and that connectivity, authentication and data access all follow the platform's conventions rather than a cloud ERP's. It means data access patterns are more deliberate, because you are working with a system designed around structured, high-volume transaction processing rather than around chatty API calls.

It also means something reassuring that nobody says out loud: IBM i systems are typically extremely reliable, and the ERP that has been running your distribution business for twenty years is not the fragile part of this project. The storefront is newer than the ERP by a long way.

What it does require is a partner who treats the platform as a real engineering context rather than a legacy inconvenience. If the first conversation is about how old your system is, that is a signal.

A+ is on a maintenance and migration track. Infor is not selling it to new customers and the published path forward is CloudSuite Distribution. That is a real program with its own business case and its own multi-year timeline.

Meanwhile your customers want to order online, and your competitors' customers already can.

The design that serves both is the one we would recommend regardless: keep the ERP-specific work thin and isolated. Your storefront, catalog, customer accounts and buying experience sit above a connector layer that knows about A+. When you eventually move to CloudSuite Distribution, you replace the connector. The channel keeps running and the migration is marginally easier because one more system is already decoupled.

Building the storefront now does not compete with the migration. Done this way it de-risks it.

A+ customers become Shopify companies, with ship-to hierarchies and buyer logins, so each buyer signs into their own pricing and their own history.

Items become products with units of measure and pack sizes as you actually sell them, and with catalog content that needs to come from somewhere other than the item master, because an item record built for order entry will not sell anything.

Contract and matrix pricing with quantity breaks resolves for the logged-in account rather than being exported into a storefront price file.

Availability distinguishes what is on hand from what can be promised, across warehouses.

Credit holds are respected, so an account your finance team has stopped cannot quietly place an order.

An order placed in Shopify reaches A+ with the account, ship-to, reference and terms attached, and its status, shipment and invoice come back to the buyer.

Uncap Connect keeps pricing, inventory, customer data and orders current in both directions, built for B2B so customer-specific pricing, credit terms and tax behave the way they do in your business.

Orders queue rather than disappear, which matters more here than on a cloud ERP because the integration depends on a connection into your own environment with its own maintenance windows.

Transient failures retry on a backoff. Permanent failures, such as an invalid item or an account on credit hold, stop and hold with the payload and the exact A+ message preserved, somewhere your team already looks, and replay without asking the customer to reorder. Replay is idempotent so a retry cannot create a second order.

The buyer's Shopify order stays visible to them throughout.

A discovery pass against your A+ environment establishing the integration mechanism, including whether the documented Storefront integration layer or Commerce Gateway path suits your version and setup.

Company accounts, ship-to hierarchies and buyer logins from your customer master.

Contract and matrix pricing with quantity breaks, resolved per account.

Availability distinguishing on hand from promisable, across warehouses, with credit holds respected.

Order capture into A+ with status, shipment and invoice returning to the buyer, plus a held-order queue with idempotent replay.

A thin, isolated ERP layer so a future CloudSuite Distribution move replaces the connector rather than the channel.

Industrial Supply and MRO, where catalogs run past a hundred thousand items and procurement buys through its own systems.

Electrical Distribution, where matrix pricing and special price agreements are the commercial structure of the business.

A+ is one of several Infor products we connect to Shopify. The Infor integration overview covers SX.e, M3, SyteLine and the rest, and Infor FACTS sits in a similar position on a different platform.

Bring your A+ version, your IBM i environment details, your CloudSuite Distribution timeline if there is one, and one account's contract pricing. Ask whether we have worked on IBM i before and what that actually involved.

Book a strategy session, or start with a Blueprint, the paid discovery engagement that establishes the integration mechanism, the pricing model and the phased plan before development begins.