Exact Online Shopify integration cost: what actually drives the price

The honest answer to "how much does an Exact Online Shopify integration cost?" is "it depends what you are syncing" — which helps nobody. This piece unpacks that dependency: which items push the price up, and why two projects that look alike are not worth the same money. We are not going to print euro figures here, because the real variable is effort, not money: whoever builds it, the same scope takes roughly the same number of weeks.

Six factors that drive Exact Online Shopify integration cost

• Number of SKUs: the gap between 500 products and 45,000 is not a code gap, it is a data and testing gap. Large catalogues add bulk operations, queue management and an API rate-limit strategy.
• How clean the item data is: if item codes, units and VAT fields in Exact are consistent, mapping takes under a week. With duplicates and gaps, the same job runs to three weeks.
• Single or multi-warehouse: publishing one dedicated e-commerce warehouse is the simplest case. Mapping Shopify locations one-to-one onto Exact warehouses is the most flexible and the most expensive.
• B2B pricing rules: a store where everyone sees the same price and a dealer portal with customer-specific price lists, quantity breaks and credit-limit checks are two different projects.
• Multi-currency and tax: one country, one currency, one VAT regime is the cheapest. Intra-EU selling, several VAT rates and currency conversion raise both build and test effort.
• Whether invoicing is in scope: writing a sales order is one thing; generating the invoice in Exact and returning its number to Shopify is measurably more work.

Realistic effort ranges

Here are the numbers we see in practice. A clean 500-SKU, single-warehouse sync with one-way stock and an order flow is typically 3-4 weeks. Add customer-specific B2B pricing and it goes past 6, because price-list mapping and credit-limit checking are each a separate flow. Combine multi-warehouse, multi-currency and invoice generation in Exact in one project and 8-10 weeks is normal. Above roughly 20,000 SKUs the development time does not change much, but data preparation and validation become a phase of their own.

What sets the price of an integration is not how hard the API is, but how closely the data in the two systems already resembles each other.

One-off migration versus ongoing sync

These two get conflated constantly, and it is where budgets go wrong most often. A one-off migration moves product and customer data from Exact into Shopify once: you write a script, run it, and you are done. That is a few days of work and needs no maintenance. An ongoing sync, by contrast, is a living system. Stock movements, price changes, new products, orders, returns and credit notes flow continuously in both directions. Failure handling, retry logic, queueing and monitoring are therefore half the scope. If a proposal just says "data migration", ask which of the two it means.

Licence and API considerations on the Exact side

Access to the Exact Online REST API depends on which modules you have. Trade and inventory functions are not available on a subscription that only covers bookkeeping, so part of scoping an integration is checking what your current Exact subscription actually includes. Get that confirmed in writing, and create a dedicated API user for the integration rather than using a personal account.

The second issue is call limits. Exact enforces daily and per-minute limits, and a naive design burns through them fast on a large catalogue. Building event-driven triggers costs a little more up front but removes the limit problem permanently. Decide up front who monitors those limits after go-live, and put the use of a test environment in the contract.

Maintenance cost, and why it is not optional

An integration does not finish on the day it goes live. Exact revises its API versions, the Shopify Admin API moves forward several times a year and older versions eventually close. On top of that come your own changes: a new product type, a new warehouse, a new country, a new payment method. Integrations without a maintenance budget tend to end the same way: six months of clean running, then an API version closes, the sync stops quietly and nobody notices. Stock drifts, orders stop reaching Exact, and finance discovers it at month-end close. The emergency repair at that point costs several times what regular maintenance would have.

The costs that don't appear in the quote

• Data cleanup: duplicate debtor accounts and inconsistent item codes. This work usually stays with your team and is on nobody's schedule.
• Testing time: genuinely validating an integration means running end-to-end scenarios with your own orders. That is your operations team's time.
• Training: warehouse and finance staff have to learn the new flow. If nobody teaches the rule "we no longer edit that field in Shopify", the data degrades.
• Exception handling: no integration automates one hundred percent of cases. If you don't plan who resolves the remaining two percent by hand, it lands on somebody's desk by default.

When an integration is not worth it

It is against our interest to say this, but it is true: below roughly 30-40 orders a month with a limited catalogue, an integration is probably the wrong investment. Keying a handful of daily orders into Exact by hand takes ten minutes; it does not justify 3-4 weeks of development plus ongoing maintenance.

Likewise, if your catalogue changes once a year and stock is not critical — you make to order rather than hold inventory — a one-off migration plus a simple order hand-off may be enough. The right question is not "can this be integrated", it is "does the manual work exceed what this automation costs". We don't publish fixed package prices either, because a price given without knowing the six factors above misleads one of us: we scope first, then give a fixed-price quote. The analysis call is free, and if the conclusion of that call is that an integration isn't worth it for you, we say so.