Infor VISUAL to Shopify Integration

Uncap connects VISUAL to Shopify so account pricing, real availability and order status reach your customers without anyone retyping a sales order. We have shipped this integration in production, which is worth saying plainly, because most of what you will read about connecting Infor to Shopify is about a different Infor product.

Ask around about putting VISUAL behind an online storefront and you get a warning: nobody has a connector for it, so this is custom work, and custom work on an ERP is where projects go wrong.

Half of that is true and worth taking seriously. There is no off-the-shelf VISUAL connector. Infor's own commerce material covers CloudSuite Distribution and M3, and the one Infor connector on the Shopify App Store is built for M3 CE. When an integration vendor tells you they connect Infor to Shopify, the honest follow-up question is which Infor. We ran the search a lot while building this page. Almost everything that ranks for VISUAL is actually written about SyteLine or M3 with the word VISUAL dropped into the title.

The other half is wrong, and the reason is boring rather than clever. VISUAL has a documented, supported integration surface that Infor has maintained for years. It is not a REST API, so the work looks different from a cloud-to-cloud project, but "different" and "risky" are not the same word. What makes a VISUAL project go wrong is a partner who quotes it as though it were a cloud ERP, discovers in week six that it is not, and starts writing directly to the database to catch up.

Infor documents two integration surfaces for VISUAL and neither one is a web service you can call from somewhere else.

The first is the VISUAL API Toolkit, a set of .NET class libraries built as 32 bit assemblies and supported for Visual Basic and C# only. It exposes business objects covering customer orders, customers, shipping, parts, inventory adjustments, transfers, work orders, payables and receivables. This is the supported way to write into VISUAL, because the business objects run the same validation and status logic the application runs.

The second is Business Object Documents exchanged through Infor ION, which move through in-box and out-box tables inside the VISUAL database itself. The BOD path has limits that shape a design, so they are worth knowing before you commit to one. Document generation is filterable only by ID range or date range, with no per-record or event-level selector. The set of documents the generation service produces is fixed: sales order, inventory count, production order, receivable invoice, labor ticket and calendar. Each document type carries a system of record flag that decides whether VISUAL may publish it at all. Infor's own administration guide notes that generating certain documents is resource intensive enough to slow the Manufacturing Window, which is the screen your planners live in all day.

Two consequences follow. Something has to run where it can reach VISUAL, usually on your network, so connectivity and the gateway are part of the build rather than an afterthought. And the sync cadence is a design decision with a cost attached, not a slider you set to "real time" and forget.

None of this means VISUAL is old. Release 11.1.0 is current and its administrator documentation was published in January 2026. VISUAL is a current product whose integration model predates REST. That is a different statement, and the accurate one.

There is a third thing you may hear about, which is a REST framework arriving in VISUAL 11. We have seen this described in third party write-ups and we could not confirm it against Infor's own 11.x documentation, so we are not going to build you a plan around it. If your instance has it, we will use it. If someone has quoted you a project that depends on it, ask them for the Infor page.

Every VISUAL integration eventually reaches the moment where writing straight to the SQL tables looks faster than going through the business objects. It is faster, for about two months.

A customer order in VISUAL is not one row. Creating one through the application sets derived fields, applies status transitions, writes the audit records, and triggers the logic that downstream planning depends on. An insert that skips all of that produces an order that looks right in the table and behaves wrong in the Manufacturing Window. The failures show up late, usually as orders that will not close or quantities that do not reconcile, and by then nobody remembers which integration wrote them.

We read the database directly for things that are genuinely read-only, and we write through the API Toolkit. That is the whole position, and it is the main reason a VISUAL build survives its first upgrade.

Most ERP integration pages assume you sell from stock. Under that assumption the integration is a quantity sync: read on hand, push to the storefront, decrement on order.

That model does not describe a make-to-order manufacturer. A good part of what you sell does not exist yet. What the buyer needs to know is not how many are on the shelf but when they can have it, which comes from lead time, from what is already committed, and from what the shop floor can actually take on. The equivalent for engineered products is whether it can be quoted at all.

So the number a VISUAL storefront shows is a promise date more often than a quantity, and the work is deciding how that promise is calculated and how conservative it should be. Where you do hold finished goods or service parts, those behave conventionally and sync as quantities. Both models usually run on the same store, and separating them correctly is one of the first decisions in the project rather than one of the last.

VISUAL customer records become Shopify company accounts, with ship-to addresses, contacts and terms attached, so a buyer signs into their own account instead of a generic storefront.

Contract and customer-specific pricing stays in VISUAL, where it is negotiated and maintained, and resolves at checkout for the account that is logged in. Exporting a price file into Shopify is what creates the gap between the price a buyer is quoted and the price they are invoiced, and that gap is what sends them back to calling your inside sales team.

Parts map to products with their VISUAL part attributes intact, which matters more than it sounds for machinery and vehicle parts, because attributes are what fitment and search are built on.

A Shopify order becomes a VISUAL customer order through the API Toolkit, with line detail, addresses and terms mapped, so nothing is retyped and nothing waits for a batch window. Shipment and invoice events come back out to the buyer's account, which removes most of the calls a parts desk fields in a week.

Uncap Connect is the Shopify side of that. On the VISUAL side, the component that reaches the database and the Toolkit is built and operated as part of the engagement, because the documentation leaves no other option.

This is the part nobody publishes, and it is the part that decides whether you trust the integration at 4pm on a Friday.

Orders fail for ordinary reasons. A part number was changed in VISUAL this morning. An account went over its credit limit between browsing and checkout. The Toolkit call times out because document generation is running. What matters is what the system does next.

A transient failure gets retried on a backoff, because a timeout is not a data problem. A permanent failure gets held rather than retried forever, with the payload kept intact and the reason attached, so a person can read what went wrong without opening a log file. Held orders surface somewhere your team already looks, and they can be corrected and replayed without asking the customer to place the order again. The Shopify order stays visible to the buyer throughout, because from their side the order exists and silence is worse than an exception.

Ask anyone quoting you a VISUAL project what their held-order queue looks like. The answer tells you whether they have run one in production.

Uncap built Kooks Headers and Exhaust, a performance automotive manufacturer of more than 60 years, onto a single Shopify B2B and D2C store. The build integrates Infor VISUAL and a PDM Automotive PIM for real-time inventory, adds ACES year, make, model and engine fitment search, and gives wholesale buyers secure portals with custom pricing.

The published results are 22% higher conversion and 38% lower total cost of ownership from consolidating the stack.

Georgia Kryssing, Sales and Marketing Director at Kooks, on the starting point: "Before switching to Shopify, our old website held us back. We lacked analytics, marketing tools, and B2B capabilities, had no live inventory or search, and were stuck on a platform that was restrictive and hard to scale."

A VISUAL-side component sized for your deployment, which is the piece that makes everything else possible and the piece most quotes leave out.

Availability logic that reflects how you actually manufacture, whether that means a promise date, a quantity, or both on the same catalog.

Pricing resolution from VISUAL for the logged-in account, including contract pricing, so the number on the site is the number on the invoice.

Company accounts, ship-to locations and buyer logins mapped from VISUAL customer records.

Order creation through the API Toolkit, with a held-order queue and replay rather than silent failures.

Fitment and attribute-driven search where the catalog calls for it, which for machinery and vehicle parts is usually the difference between a storefront and a catalog.

One Shopify store carrying B2B and DTC, one catalog, one availability position.

Machinery and Equipment, where the parts business behind the machine is the recurring revenue and buyers arrive with a machine rather than a part number.

Auto Parts and Aftermarket, where ACES and PIES fitment decides whether the right part reaches the right vehicle. This is the pairing Kooks runs in production.

VISUAL is one of several Infor products we connect to Shopify. The Infor integration overview covers the others.

Bring your VISUAL version, how you are deployed, and one account's contract pricing. If you make to order, bring the way you currently quote a lead time, because that conversation is the project.

Book a strategy session, or start with a Blueprint, the paid discovery engagement that maps the integration surface, the availability model and the phased plan before development begins.