AskMe developed a custom business automation system for Print Market to solve a practical e-commerce problem: how to work with a large supplier catalog without manually copying products, prices, stock levels, images and printing options into Shopify.
The project was built as an independent ANDA Shopify Sync service. It connects personalized ANDA Present supplier feeds with the Print Market Shopify store and gives the team a controlled way to import, review, select and publish supplier products.
The system imports several XML feeds: products, prices, inventory, categories, labeling data, unique-product printing prices and technology printing prices. Instead of loading everything into Shopify blindly, the data is first processed and stored in a local SQLite database with WAL mode. This gives the business a stable working layer between the supplier API and the online store.
Inside the private admin panel, the Print Market team can search products, filter by categories, select individual items or whole pages, review import jobs and manage synchronization settings. The admin also includes password rotation, Basic Auth protection, job history and safeguards that prevent several import or sync jobs from running at the same time.
For Shopify integration, the system uses the Shopify Admin API and productSet logic. Selected products can be created in Shopify with variants, images, calculated prices, inventory quantities, product options and technical metafields. Products are prepared safely: new products can be created as drafts first, and only products with enough orderable stock are activated and published to the online store.
A separate pricing layer was created for the project. It calculates selling prices from supplier purchase prices, markup rules, product weight, inbound shipping rules, shipping markups and quantity ranges. This is especially important for promotional products because the final customer price depends not only on the blank product, but also on quantity, setup costs, printing method and delivery logic.
The Shopify product pages also received a dedicated ANDA product template and custom pricing script. The storefront can show unit price, VAT-inclusive quantity total, minimum order quantity and localized price captions. The pricing data is stored in Shopify metafields so the storefront and cart logic can use the same structured information.
Automatic translation was added through Microsoft Azure Translator. Product titles, descriptions and other product content can be translated from English into additional storefront languages. The system uses a translation cache, so repeated translations are not paid for again and the same text can be reused consistently. Translation runs after the product is accepted by Shopify, so a temporary translator error does not force the whole product synchronization to repeat.
The project also includes image handling. Product images are taken from supplier URLs, the primary image can be normalized into a clean 800 by 600 white canvas for Shopify ingestion, and temporary transfer files are removed from the server after Shopify finishes processing them. This keeps the server cleaner and avoids unnecessary storage growth.
In addition to catalog synchronization, we added a Shopify app-proxy flow for customer service-request file uploads. It supports staged upload targets, file validation, signed upload proof, Shopify Files registration and deletion from the admin. This gives Print Market a safer way to accept customer print files without exposing the internal admin system.
Technically, the project uses TypeScript, Fastify, SQLite, Zod validation, streaming XML parsing with saxes, Sharp for image processing, Microsoft Azure Translator, Shopify Admin GraphQL API, Shopify metafields, Shopify theme customization, a Shopify Function extension for bundle-style pricing logic, Docker Compose and Nginx deployment.
The result is not just an integration, but a business automation layer. Print Market can expand the product catalog much faster, reduce manual work, avoid repeated copy-paste operations, keep supplier stock and pricing data under control, prepare multilingual product content and publish products into Shopify through a structured approval process.