Connecting your shop to bexio:connector or your own automation?

What the connection actually has to do

An order in the shop and an entry in bexio are not the same thing. Decisions sit between them: is the customer created as a contact or found? Does an invoice appear, or a document with immediate payment? Which VAT rate applies to shipping? What happens with a return, a partial delivery or a foreign currency?

These questions decide whether a ready-made connector is enough. The bexio API itself covers everything needed: contacts, items, quotes, orders, delivery notes, invoices, payments, entries, files and projects.^[5] The difference between the two routes is not the technology, it is who sets the rules.

What a ready-made connector can do

For Shopify the most common app is staged by order volume: around USD 13 per month up to ten orders, around USD 23 up to 50, around USD 28 up to 100 and around USD 64 up to 500 orders, each with a trial period.^[1] It transfers orders as invoices, records payments, syncs items and stock and handles VAT.^{[1, 2]}

For WooCommerce a common Swiss solution costs CHF 19 per month in the standard plan and CHF 39 per month in the premium plan, billed annually, with a 90 day trial per domain. Premium adds, among other things, extended stock synchronisation, PDF attachments by email and item import.^{[3, 4]}

Where connectors reach their limits in practice

The limits rarely show on day one, they show after a few months. Typical points:

• Several payment providers: a payout from Stripe or PayPal contains revenue, fees and refunds in one amount. Booking that cleanly needs one combined entry, not one payment per invoice.
• Partial deliveries and back orders: when part of the order ships later, delivery note and invoice no longer match the order one to one.
• Payment by invoice: whether a customer may buy on invoice depends on their open items in bexio. That is decided in the shop, not in accounting.
• Your own account logic: revenue accounts split by range, country or channel, with separate rules for shipping and packaging.
• A second source: a marketplace, a point of sale system or a warehouse system that also produces documents.
• Address fields: shops keep street and house number in one field. For payments, the details have to be separate from November 2026.^{[9, 11, 12]}

What your own automation does differently

Your own automation runs on an automation platform with ready-made bexio building blocks, among them contacts, items, quotes, invoices, payments, projects, time entries and files, connected through OAuth 2.0.^[7] Little of that is coding, a lot of it is deciding: which rule applies, what happens on an exception and what gets logged.

The flow usually looks like this: the shop reports the new order by webhook.^[9] The automation checks the customer, creates or finds the contact, produces the document, matches the payment and attaches the receipt. Anything ambiguous lands on an exception list instead of in a quiet mis-posting.

The comparison in one table

Status of the provider pages: 18.09.2026. Prices in USD for the Shopify provider, in CHF for the WooCommerce provider.

What matters when switching over

Whichever route you take, preparation decides how calm the first weeks are. Four points are worth settling before the first live document:

• Contacts first: decide how an existing customer is recognised, by email address or by customer number. Without that rule you get duplicates, which later distort every report by customer.
• Pick a start date: begin on the first day of a month or quarter. Then old and new documents do not run side by side in the same period.
• Fix numbers and accounts: settle in advance which document numbers the connection assigns and which revenue accounts shipping, packaging and discounts go to.
• Check addresses: the connection writes addresses into bexio. If the shop delivers street and house number together, the split has to happen before writing, otherwise the gap simply moves along.^{[11, 14]}

Also plan a test phase with real orders in which every document is checked once by hand. Two weeks are usually enough to find the exceptions nobody thought of beforehand.

How to decide in ten minutes

1. Count payment methods: one payment method speaks for the connector, three with fee deductions rather for your own solution.
2. Estimate document volume: below 50 orders a month the monthly price weighs little, above 300 it weighs more.
3. Note the special cases: partial deliveries, subscriptions, payment by invoice, foreign currency, a second sales channel.
4. Look at the chart of accounts: the finer the revenue accounts, the sooner you need rules of your own.
5. Run a test: start with the connector and check after two months how many documents were reworked by hand.
6. Decide: if the rework stays below an hour a week, the connector is right. Above that, your own solution usually pays for itself in the first year.

Frequently asked questions