How to handle ecommerce when you migrate from Dynamics GP to Business Central

Short answer. Two scenarios turn the ecommerce side into configuration rather than a project: move B2C to Shopify and use Microsoft's Shopify Connector, or move B2B inside Business Central with Abakion B2B Ecommerce.

Microsoft's cloud migration tool moves your Dynamics GP financial data to Business Central, but it does not move your web shop integration. eConnect, direct SQL, Web Services for Dynamics GP and middleware maps in SmartConnect or Scribe do not work with Business Central online, so every line of integration code you own retires with Dynamics GP.

What are the three ways forward?

There are three real options for ecommerce when you migrate from Dynamics GP to Business Central, and it's worth naming all of them before we go into the two easy ones.

1. Keep your storefront and replace the connection. Sensible if your platform is current and has a supported Business Central connector, which most of the serious ones do. You still pay for a re-integration project, but you don't replatform.
2. Move B2C to Shopify and use Microsoft's Shopify Connector.
3. Move B2B into Business Central with the Abakion B2B Ecommerce app.

Option 1 is a project. Options 2 and 3 are mostly setup.

Here's what each of the two easy ones means in practice.

When does Abakion B2B Ecommerce fit?

Abakion B2B Ecommerce fits Dynamics GP companies whose ecommerce revenue is mostly B2B, where prices, agreements and assortments are maintained per customer in the ERP.

B2B is a different problem. Your customers aren't browsing. They're doing a job, on their own terms, with their own prices, and they need the number on the screen to match the number on the order confirmation.

That's exactly what breaks in the traditional model, because prices, assortments and terms have to be copied from the ERP to the shop and kept in sync. Every discount agreement is maintained twice. Every mismatch turns into a phone call to your sales office.

Abakion B2B Ecommerce is installed in Business Central, the site is hosted on Azure, and the storefront reads live data from Business Central. There's no synchronisation job, no staging database and no integration to own.

What that means coming from Dynamics GP:

Pricing. The pricing work you have to do anyway becomes the web shop. When you translate Dynamics GP price levels or Extended Pricing into Business Central price lists, you're not preparing data for an export. You're configuring what the customer sees. The question stops being how we get prices out to the shop, because there is no "out".

Customer-specific catalogues. A customer signs in and sees the items, prices, agreements and currencies that apply to them in Business Central, including blanket agreements and campaign prices. Order history and reorder come from their actual posted documents.

Availability and delivery dates. Both come from Business Central's own calculation, so the promise on the website is the promise the ERP would make. For US customers, the app supports Avalara for sales tax.

Product content. This is the one place you have to invest, and it's the same investment flagged earlier. Coming from Dynamics GP, your product texts and images are in the old storefront. They need to move into Business Central, which is what the accompanying Master Data Information app is for, along with variant matrices for size and colour ranges.

Commercial shape. It's shaped like an app rather than a project. A fixed-price initial setup, then a subscription tiered by number of active customers and items in the shop. That's a different budget conversation from a six-figure replatform, and a much shorter one.

When does the Microsoft Shopify Connector fit?

The Shopify Connector fits Dynamics GP companies whose ecommerce revenue is mostly B2C with a straightforward catalogue.

The Shopify Connector is built by Microsoft and preinstalled in new Business Central online environments. There's no middleware to licence, no server to patch and no integration partner in the middle. Synchronisation runs on the job queue inside Business Central.

It handles more than most people expect. Bidirectional item sync including variants, images, barcodes, vendor item numbers, tags and metafields. Inventory across multiple locations. Customers and companies both ways, with mapping on email, phone or tax registration number. Orders from the online store, from Shopify POS and from Shopify B2B. Shipping costs, gift cards, refunds, cancellations and payout information from Shopify Payments. Posted invoices pushed back so buyers can find them in their Shopify account.

What that means coming from Dynamics GP:

Architecture. You lose a moving part instead of gaining one. The old pattern was Dynamics GP, middleware, storefront, with someone responsible for the middle. The new pattern is Business Central and Shopify, with Microsoft responsible for the connection and both endpoints on their own release cadence.

Pricing. Shopify holds the storefront price, and Business Central exports it based on customer price groups and discounts. If you're coming from a Dynamics GP setup with a dozen price levels, this looks like a downgrade until you remember what you're selling. Consumers don't need customer-specific pricing. Most of the complexity in your Dynamics GP price setup exists for wholesale accounts, and those accounts are the subject of the next section.

Inventory. You map Business Central locations to Shopify locations and pick which ones feed the store. For most Dynamics GP companies this is the first time the web shop reads a live availability number rather than a nightly file.

Orders. Order to cash stays in Business Central. Orders arrive as sales documents, fulfilment goes back to Shopify, and your finance team works in one place. For US sales tax, Shopify calculates at checkout and you keep an engine such as Avalara behind Business Central for posting and filing.

Limits. Be clear-eyed about them. Microsoft deliberately keeps the extension points few so the connector can follow Shopify's release pace without breaking. It's one shop per configuration, so multi-channel selling into Amazon or Walmart needs something else. Shopify's B2B features have improved, with catalogues through Markets and volume pricing added in the 2026 release wave 1, but complex contract pricing still strains the model. And you have to stay current on Business Central versions, because the connector follows the platform.

For a straightforward B2C catalogue, the Shopify Connector is the cheapest credible path off Dynamics GP that exists.

Why Dynamics GP companies keep postponing the migration

Most Dynamics GP companies have already made the decision in principle. Microsoft ends Dynamics GP support for product enhancements, regulatory tax updates and technical support on 31 December 2029, and security updates stop on 30 April 2031. New subscription licences stopped being sold on 1 April 2026. The direction is settled. The only real question is when.

And for a lot of companies, the thing that keeps pushing "when" into next year is not the general ledger. It's the web shop.

Your online store has been wired into Dynamics GP for years, often by a developer who has since left, and nobody is quite sure what happens if you pull the ERP out from underneath it. The suspicion is that migrating the ERP quietly triggers a second project, a web project, and that the web project will cost more than the ERP one.

That suspicion is usually correct, but it isn't the whole picture. There are two scenarios where the ecommerce side turns into configuration rather than a project. This article covers both.

What does the cloud migration tool actually move?

Microsoft's cloud migration tool is better than its reputation. It moves company setup, the chart of accounts, customers, vendors, items, open receivables and payables, open purchase orders and inventory quantities from Dynamics GP into Business Central online. Your finance team will recognise their data on the other side.

The cloud migration tool does not move your ecommerce integration. It has no opinion about your web shop, and that is the gap. Your general ledger migrates. Your integration doesn't. For most Dynamics GP companies, the integration is where a decade of work is buried.

Does eConnect work with Business Central?

No. eConnect, direct SQL against the Dynamics GP company database, Web Services for Dynamics GP, and middleware maps in SmartConnect or Scribe all stop working when you move to Business Central online. Many Dynamics GP companies run several of them at once, added in layers over the years.

Business Central online exposes no SQL Server endpoint, no eConnect assemblies to reference, and no Windows service you can install next to the database. All integration runs through published APIs and AL extensions.

Every line of Dynamics GP integration code you own therefore has the same end-of-life date as Dynamics GP itself. Nobody ever wrote that on a slide, but it is true, and it is the single biggest number in your ecommerce budget.

What happens to item numbers longer than 20 characters?

They are truncated, so shorten them in Dynamics GP before you migrate rather than after. Dynamics GP allows item numbers of 30 characters. Business Central allows 20. Microsoft's preparation guidance for Dynamics GP cloud migration is to clean up master data in Dynamics GP first, and item numbers are the clearest case for doing so.

The reason this matters more for ecommerce than for finance is that the two systems use the item number for different things. In Dynamics GP an item number is an internal key. On your web shop the same item number is a public URL, a canonical product ID, a line in your Google Shopping feed, an entry in a customer's saved reorder list, and the join key for every product review you have collected. Changing item numbers is a five-minute conversation in the ERP project and a three-week conversation on the web side.

Count your items over 20 characters before anything else.

How does Dynamics GP pricing map to Business Central pricing?

It doesn't map one to one, and Dynamics GP Extended Pricing has no import path at all.

Standard Dynamics GP pricing gives you price levels per customer, plus price methods that calculate from list price or from current cost. If Extended Pricing is switched on, standard pricing is switched off entirely and you are in a separate model built on price sheets and price books. Plenty of companies also run Omni Price or something similar on top.

Business Central uses sales price lists, customer price groups and line discounts. Dynamics GP price levels can be remodelled into that. Extended Pricing has to be rebuilt from scratch by someone who understands what the old setup was trying to achieve.

There is a second problem underneath. Many Dynamics GP web shops don't ask Dynamics GP for a price at all. They hold their own copy of the price rules, because calling eConnect for every price on every page view was too slow. If that is your setup, you don't have one pricing engine. You have two, and they disagree at the worst possible moments. When you rebuild pricing in Business Central, you get to decide whether you keep paying for the second one.

Why does inventory availability behave differently in Business Central?

Dynamics GP sites become locations in Business Central, which is the easy part. The harder part is what a quantity means.

Dynamics GP stores quantity on hand, allocated and available as values a query can read directly. Business Central calculates availability from the item ledger plus reservations, sales order quantities and inbound receipts. If your storefront reads a Dynamics GP quantity field, that field does not exist in Business Central, and there is no single equivalent field to point the old query at.

Decide what "in stock" means to a customer before you decide how to display it.

Where does your product content live today?

In your web shop, or in a spreadsheet somebody maintains. The Dynamics GP item master is thin: a description, a short description, a class, some unit of measure setup. No marketing copy, no images, no attributes, no translations, no tabbed technical specifications.

That has been fine for years, because Dynamics GP was never asked to sell anything. In Dynamics GP the item master describes what you sell. On the web it has to sell it.

This matters when you choose your new model, because both of the low-effort options below expect product content to live in Business Central. That is not a hidden cost. It is a decision, and you should make it consciously rather than discover it in week six.

What happens to order history and customer logins?

"My orders" on your website is being served from Dynamics GP sales history tables. The cloud migration tool brings over open orders and open receivables. It does not, by default, hand you five years of order lines in a form your storefront can query.

You have three options for Dynamics GP order history, and all three are acceptable:

• Migrate the history into Business Central.
• Keep an archive with read access for support staff.
• Or set a cut-off date and tell customers that older orders live in the old portal until it is retired.

Customer logins are a separate question. Logins live in the web platform, not in Dynamics GP, so they survive a change of ERP connection. They do not survive a change of web platform, which means password resets for your entire customer base on go-live day.

What about the storefront platform itself?

A lot of Dynamics GP connected stores are running Magento 1, an old nopCommerce build, a k-eCommerce or Sana version several major releases behind, or something custom in .NET. The ERP migration didn't create that debt, but it makes it very visible.

In what order should you sequence the two projects?

Move the ERP first, then move the storefront once, onto the new model.

The mistake we see most often is companies spending real money on the Dynamics GP ecommerce integration in the year before they migrate. If Business Central is on your roadmap at all, treat every hour spent on eConnect as an hour you'll write off. Design any change to the current setup as disposable, and keep it thin.

If you have to run Dynamics GP and Business Central side by side during the transition, freeze the Dynamics GP connection rather than extending it.

Two web projects in two years is the outcome nobody plans for and plenty of companies get.

Where to start

Five questions will tell you which path you're on:

1. How many of your items have numbers longer than 20 characters?
2. Does your web shop ask Dynamics GP for prices, or does it calculate its own?
3. Are you running standard Dynamics GP pricing, Extended Pricing, or a third-party pricing add-on?
4. Is your ecommerce revenue mostly B2C, mostly B2B, or genuinely both?
5. Where does your product content live today, and who maintains it?

The answers usually point clearly at Shopify or at Abakion B2B Ecommerce.

Frequently asked questions

Both apps are on Microsoft Marketplace

• Shopify Connector, published by Microsoft
• Abakion B2B Ecommerce

Sources

• Dynamics GP lifecycle and end of support dates, Microsoft Learn
• Dynamics GP data migrated to Business Central online, Microsoft Learn
• Prepare and plan for cloud migration from Dynamics GP, Microsoft Learn
• Shopify Connector overview, Microsoft Learn
• Shopify Connector FAQ, Microsoft Learn