Every question, answered plainly

It connects Sage 100 to a Shopify storefront so your catalog, prices, customers, invoices, and orders flow both ways automatically, and it runs in your own AWS account as something you own rather than rent.

Distributors and manufacturers running Sage 100 Premium who want a real B2B web presence: customer accounts with live AR, Net-30 at checkout, accurate stock, and orders that book themselves into Sage without anyone retyping.

No. It is a delivered system: a private Shopify app for your store, a small application server in your AWS account, and one connector service on your Sage server, installed and verified as an engagement. That is why it can do things marketplace apps cannot.

Mostly no. Staff work inside the Shopify admin they already know; the ForgeSync dashboard lives inside it. Sage users keep using Sage. The system does the carrying between the two.

Yes, on purpose. Sage remains the boss of items, prices, customers, and money. The storefront presents what Sage knows and feeds orders back into it. Nothing asks your accounting team to trust a second source of truth.

The connector layer: retired tools like eBusiness Manager, legacy middleware tied to platforms you want to leave, and the manual retyping that fills the gap when no connector exists.

Since May 2023 eBusiness Manager cannot be purchased, so a store built on it is running on borrowed time with no path forward. ForgeSync Enterprise is a replacement for that whole layer: modern storefront, modern connector, no dependency on anything Sage has retired.

Yes. Your product data lives in Sage, and Sage is where we sync from, so the catalog does not need to be rebuilt by hand. If you already have a populated store, products are matched to Sage items one by one with a review list for anything ambiguous, never a guess.

Because the move is calm now and an emergency later. A planned cutover runs the new system in parallel, proves it with a test order and a read-back, and flips with a rollback path. Waiting for the old connector to fail means doing all of that during an outage.

No. It is delivered: the system runs in your AWS account under a license to your company, and it keeps running whether or not you buy anything else from us. The optional monthly care plan is for keeping it current and watched, not for permission to use it.

The AWS account and everything in it, your database, your data, your store, and a license to the software. Offboarding is a written runbook that includes a full export of your web-side data. Leaving is a checklist, not a negotiation.

No. Shopify charges its normal plan and payment fees, and AWS bills your account directly for hosting (a small instance). ForgeSync itself takes nothing per order.

Real numbers are published on the pricing page: a fixed-fee audit credited against any build, an owned integration build priced from a stated floor, and an optional monthly retainer. Marketplace channels like eBay and Amazon are add-on modules. Your exact quote follows a short technical qualification, but you will never have to book a call just to learn the ballpark.

Compatibility maintenance (Shopify moves its platform quarterly; release trains keep you current), managed monitoring with escalation to us, and priority support. Security advisories go to every customer regardless of plan; plan customers get patches installed for them.

The system keeps running. You lose the update train and the managed watching, not the product. Care plans are month to month with a documented wind-down.

You are holding everything: your AWS account, your data, the runbooks in your documentation library, and software that does not phone home for permission. It keeps working. We designed for this question on purpose because every buyer should ask it.

Sage 100 Premium (the SQL edition), because the fast reads come from its SQL layer. Version 2022 is certified today and additional versions are certified against real installations as they arrive. If you run Standard or Advanced, tell us anyway; that helps us plan certification, but we will not pretend it works today.

Basic and up. Catalog, accounts, AR, Net-30, and order flow work on every plan, and checkout enforcement (credit-hold blocking, quantity rules, shipping gates) is verified working on a live Basic-plan store.

Correct. The only thing that genuinely requires Plus is cosmetic checkout customization (custom fields and messages inside the checkout itself). That is a Shopify platform line, not a ForgeSync one, and we will tell you plainly if something you want sits behind it.

The storefront features are built as embeds that fit into your theme through settings rather than surgery, and we run a theme preflight before contract that tells you exactly how your theme will behave. You get that verdict in writing before you sign, not after.

The connector reads all your warehouses today, so availability can reflect what you actually have. Mapping separate warehouses to separate Shopify locations is committed roadmap, stated plainly, and worth a conversation about your exact setup.

Multiple web logins linked to one Sage customer account with a designated primary is committed roadmap with the data model already designed. Today one login maps to one account. If this is your blocker, say so; it moves the priority.

No. Single currency and United States tax, stated honestly. The tax model is built around US nexus and Sage tax schedules.

Every few minutes the system asks Sage what changed and writes only the changes to Shopify: items, prices, and stock. Nobody exports spreadsheets, and nobody retypes.

No. Existing products are matched to Sage items exactly, then by careful normalization, and anything that cannot be matched confidently goes on a review list instead of being guessed. Fresh stores get a full push. Both paths are rehearsed.

The sync runs on a delta cycle measured in minutes, not nightly batches. A price change in Sage this morning is on the site before your customer calls about it.

It joins one export queue, gets written into Sage through Sage’s own business object layer with your terms, tax handling, freight, and deposit, and is stamped with the web order number. Then the system reads the order back from Sage to confirm the stamp echoed. That read-back is the step that makes duplicates impossible.

The stamp and the read-back. Before any retry, the system checks whether Sage already has an order carrying that web order number. If a network hiccup interrupted the first attempt, the retry finds the stamp and stands down instead of booking again.

It waits in the queue with a plain-language reason: customer on credit hold, card expired, product not in Sage yet. Your team fixes the cause and presses Retry. Nothing is lost, nothing books wrong, and nobody retypes an order.

A dashboard inside your Shopify admin: the export queue across every channel, customer accounts and AR, pricing controls, bulk product actions, and a sync log recording what every job did and when. When something needs a human, it says so in words, not codes.

Yes. Fulfillment and tracking numbers write back to Shopify orders, with customer notification behavior under your control.

Yes. Accounts that carry terms in Sage see Net-30 at checkout; accounts that do not, do not. The storefront reflects what your AR policy already says instead of inventing a second policy.

Their real story from Sage: invoice history, order history, open balance, ship-to addresses, and tax exemptions. The account page answers the questions that otherwise become phone calls to your AR desk.

A held account is recognized at the storefront: enforcement at checkout plus visibility for your staff. And if an order slips through in a race, the export queue still catches it before Sage books it. Two fences, not one.

Exemptions recorded in Sage flow to the storefront so exempt customers check out correctly. New certificates go to your accounting team and into Sage, and the web follows Sage, in that order, because the audit trail has to live in the ERP.

List pricing from Sage price codes flows automatically. Deeper customer-specific pricing models vary widely between Sage shops, so that layer is scoped per engagement: shown to logged-in accounts, kept offline, or somewhere between. We help you pick a strategy on purpose.

Supported, and resolved properly: guest orders are matched to the right Sage customer instead of piling up junk accounts in your ERP.

Yes, as add-on modules. Marketplace orders land in the same queue, book into Sage through the same pipeline, and appear on the same dashboard as your store orders. eBay runs in production today, including automated freight reconciliation; Amazon is offered as the same class of module, scoped to your channel setup.

Exactly like web orders: same duplicate protection, same held-order handling, same read-back. One pipeline for every channel is the point; your ERP should not care where the order came from.

Handled deliberately. The eBay module includes automated freight reconciliation so what the buyer paid, what the marketplace charged, and what Sage books all agree, with discrepancies surfaced instead of buried.

One self-contained Windows service and one configuration file. No IIS, no runtimes to manage, no third-party software. Your IT registers it in a single elevated session, and the installer verifies its own package hash before touching anything.

A dedicated Sage user with one concurrent license seat, and a SQL login that can only read. Never domain admin, never a sysadmin SQL account, never standing remote access for us.

None inbound, by default. The Sage server dials out through a restricted tunnel to your application server, and the account it lands on can forward exactly one port and nothing else, no shell. If your policy prefers an inbound rule instead, a pinned TLS listener restricted to one source address is the documented fallback.

Two things: sales orders and customer records, through Sage’s own business object layer, each write verified by read-back. Everything else is read-only, and the SQL login physically cannot write.

Encrypted at rest on both sides: machine-scoped encryption on the Sage server (no plaintext secret lands on disk) and application-key encryption on the server side. Secrets never travel by email; they are generated in place or handed over live.

Nobody. Single tenant by architecture: your installation shares no database, no server, and no runtime with any other customer. Your data lives in your AWS account under your name.

No. Shopify keeps taking orders, the queue holds them, and everything books when service resumes, protected by the same duplicate safety. Meanwhile our monitoring notices the silence from outside and pages us, not you.

Each sync job against its own expected cadence, the scheduler itself, queue depth, and certificate expiry starting 90 days out. Alerts arrive in your Slack in three tiers (noise to logs, actionable to one channel, critical with a mention) or by email, in plain words with the fix named where known.

Nightly off-site database backups plus AWS snapshots, and the restore is a rehearsed drill with a measured recovery time, not an assumption. After any recovery, an order replay tool re-fetches recent orders idempotently, so a restore never loses or doubles an order.

The hands-on work is short; the calendar is mostly your own lead times: IT change control for a handful of standard tickets, and provider approvals that start the day you sign. Typically a couple of weeks elapsed, driven by your side’s turnaround, and we will give you the honest critical path at qualification rather than a fantasy date.

Five standard IT items, each with paste-ready ticket text we provide: a dedicated Sage user, a read-only SQL login, one elevated session on the Sage server, one outbound network permission, and a five-minute Custom Office field. Plus a worksheet of business values like your default warehouse and tax setup.

Your IT runs the tickets and drives the one session on the Sage server while we talk them through it. We do everything application-side in your AWS account. Your team never hands us secrets; access is granted, keys are generated in place.

A gated sequence: configuration validation that refuses to run half-set-up, bulk imports that stop on implausible results, a real test order through checkout that books into Sage and is read back, and a final verification battery that must come up green. Then, and only then, go-live.

No. The cutover runbook arms the new path, proves it with a live event, then back-fills the gap window idempotently: an order Sage already has is recognized, not re-booked. The re-run that finds zero new orders is the written proof of no duplicates.

A green verification board, acceptance baselines cut from your own data (used to gate every future upgrade), access to the customer documentation library with the runbooks, and a close-out record of what was installed and verified.

Deliberately: the pipeline pauses, a snapshot is taken, the update applies, the system verifies itself, and then order flow resumes. Rolling back is one command. Orders queue safely during the window; nothing drains into a half-updated system.

We do, on a quarterly rhythm matched to Shopify’s own release calendar. Care-plan customers ride release trains that keep them on supported versions without thinking about it.

Usually we know first: the monitoring pages us on silence and on failures. Alerts name their cause and, where known, the fix; your CS team has a runbook in plain language for the everyday cases; and security issues carry a stated response commitment.

The honest envelope today is one production Sage company and one store per installation, sized for mid-market distributors. If you have a second company or a second storefront on the horizon, raise it at qualification so the design accounts for it.

Yes: in production since July 2026 for a US industrial distributor with a five-digit SKU catalog, live AR for thousands of accounts, and an eBay channel, with the legacy connector fully retired in place. A named reference and figures are available on request.

A short technical qualification call: ten minutes of questions with your IT contact tells us both whether this fits (Sage edition, license seat, SQL login, change-control turnaround). If it fits, you get a scoped quote and a theme preflight verdict in writing. If it does not, we will say so plainly.