The record cannot be synced because it does not exist in the external system
I’ve had this issue for exactly a month now. Items randomly fall into this error status of “The record cannot be synced because it does not exist in the external system”. All of these also have the characteristic of being a Status = Deleted. The item itself isn’t deleted but the Sync History record is. See this video which shows that when I try to update the status and sync the item, it automatically falls back into the status of Deleted:
We’ve been manually updating our inventory in Shopify, among other manual updates due to bugs. It’s very labor intensive and we’re going into our busy season. We migrated to Acumatica due to the integration with Shopify, but it’s not working out so great. Please help!
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Hi there! We have had the same issue. How I have resolved it in the past was to edit the product and deleted the external ID out of Acumatica.
To the best of my understanding, if you delete an item out of shopify after it’s been synced, and try to recreate it, acumatica is trying to hit an endpoint that doesn’t exist so it won’t work. Unfortunately the delete button does not actually delete the link to the old page.
It’s not great, but you have to select an item one at a time, click the three dots, and then select edit. Then it will pull up this screen:
Delete out the external ID and leave the need to sync box checked. It should work after that.
If someone has a way to do it in bulk that would be nice to know, but we have fixed these one at a time in the past.
Secondary thought - I’m not sure, but I would guess that fixing only the stock items should cascade to fix the product availability without having to do both. Let me know if you end up testing that out!
Hi @lawsont, this behavior might happen depending on some scenarios. If we have “Deleted” status with “Local Delete” as Last Operation then it might indicate that there are ids mismatch. This could happen due to some reasons, such as customizations or entity mapping, which would require further investigation. Most probably once you fix the issue with Stock Item, then Product Availability should sync as well.
Could you please check the status of the column “Last Operation” in Sync History (BC301000)?
What version are you using?
Could you please provide what is the product availability mode?
To the best of my understanding, if you delete an item out of shopify after it’s been synced, and try to recreate it, acumatica is trying to hit an endpoint that doesn’t exist so it won’t work.
@jfarrell, it should still adjust its external value to the new created product even if you sync an item, delete in Shopify, and try to sync again. This happens because when we try to get external item with old deleted ID then Shopify returns null. The ERP behavior should be the same as if you edit the sync status and delete the externID.
Unfortunately the delete button does not actually delete the link to the old page.
@jfarrell, could you please provide some more information regarding this? technically once we delete the sync status and save in Sync History (BC301000), then the processing should work as a new sync. It will not save old ID. For example, there are new sync IDs used.
hey @gabrielpaz86! that’s been my experience with the acumatica delete button on the commerce sync page. it doesn’t remove the link to the old item and we get the same error from the original post on this thread. the only way i got it to work was going into the items as I described. I’m not really sure how to explain that differently - can you be specific about what you want more information on?
@jfarrell, sure. Could you please provide the steps to reproduce such scenario (if it is an issue)? I couldn’t reproduce from my side.
@jfarrell The edit function is definitely enlightening, thanks! Although, we may have slightly different issues. In our case, the External ID that’s referenced is the correct one and to my knowledge they’ve never been deleted. I’m not sure what event forced it into this status, but in all of these cases, I simply want it to update the shopify product that lives at this External ID, but it refuses to do so. The fact that it thinks it “does not exist” yet shows evidence that it exists with a direct link to the page is what I don’t understand.
@gabrielpaz86 Thanks, here’s the answers to your questions:
It’s a combination of:
Deleted Externally: This field is helpful, because I can identify that these are truly deleted externally. It’s the minority of them, but at least I can filter this out when trying to solve for the records
Deleted in ERP: See example video. It definitely exists in the ERP with a quantity available and everything. This might be our primary issue. Luckily it’s only 204 records. I’m going to go through it more thoroughly now.
Modified in ERP: There are many records that show this status AND the “does not exist in external” error, but none of those have a Status = Deleted interestingly. Not sure what to make of it, but figured I’d note it.
Currently 23R1. We’re migrating to 23R2 as we speak, but finding additional issues with it, so we can’t launch that yet. Maybe some of these issues are solved in R2?
Product Availability Mode = Available
Thanks
@lawsont,
If these Items has Availability Mode as “Set as Available (Don’t Track Qty)” and in ERP you are having “Deleted” status with “Deleted in ERP” as in the video, then we are actually updating the external store. In this case you may consider them as “Processed”, we have an internal ticket for that. And depending on your prepare mode (which usually is “Incremental”) then these entities will keep being repreapred, and as consequence they will keep updated, so you don’t need to manually set them as “prepared”.
How to test that:
Go to the product that has “Set as Available (Don’t Track Qty)” in Shopify. The “Track quantity” should be disabled. Please enable and save.
Prepare and process the product availability for the item.
This value will be updated and disabled.
@gabrielpaz86 If I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying the issue is because we have these items set as “Set as Available (Don’t Track Qty)”? I don’t think that’s my issue because I did a Count on that field and none of them have that setting.
Almost all of them have the “Store Default” which is “Set as Available (Track Qty)”
Also, at this point, we’ve been manually looking at each one of these and the inventory is tracked in Shopify for all of them and the inventory is incorrect. There have been a couple cases where the inventory happens to be correct, but we’ve now processed over 1,000 in the past month in which the inventory is incorrect. It’s very painful to have to do this and our busy season has just started. It’s causing issues with our customers and our hands are about to fall off trying to keep up with the manual updating!
@lawsont, thank you for your answer. We will investigate your case internally.
@gabrielpaz86 Thanks, SWK has a case open with Acumatica as of a few weeks ago if that helps.
@lawsont , I have two thoughts:
Template items are not synced for product availability - only the individual stock items. So instead of syncing the availability for the template item, you should be doing it for the stock item (variant).
Often times, it’s not a bad idea to re-sync Template Items and Stock Items if you encountered serious issues with product availability.
Finally, product availability sync had (has?) an issue when you have it on a Real Time Sync. Try to stop RTS for product availability and instead utilize a schedule - this worked for us more than once (both for Shopify and BigCommerce).
Let us all know if anything helped.
@Yuri Karpenko Sorry for the delay here. We have a case open with Acumatica so have been conversing on there and I forgot to circle back to this thread. Here are my responses in order:
Most of the records with this error don’t have Template Items. In the cases where they are Template Items, I do wish I could search for Inventory ID (ERP ID) in order to find it, but when I search that field, it crashes the screen 100% of the time, presumably because we have too many products for it to handle.
I’ve done full resyncs around 10 times now and it hasn’t worked so far. I’ve tried it on individual items countless times. No luck.
I’m intrigued by this one. We are using RTS now. I’m a little nervous to turn it off, but I’m inquiring to the case # that SWK is also on and maybe we can try it out together.
I’ll try anything at this point. We’re pretty desperate and my staff is losing faith in the system. Thanks for the help. I’ll let you know if #3 works!
@Yuri Karpenko We were able to fix it with an elaborate set of steps, but I do think the key was turning off the RTS, so thank you for that tip! That said, can you point me to an article/resource on some best practices around doing an automation schedule for Product Availability? How have you gone about it. I’m new at those. And, are there any performance considerations for having a large item list (90k+)? Thank you!
@lawsont , I’m glad it’s working now. Unfortunately, I haven’t written an article (and haven’t seen one yet) that would explain the best approaches to the inventory sync. I don’t think that the number of items matter all that much though. Acumatica will only prepare and process data for those inventory items, for which inventory quantities have changed. So even if you have 90k SKUs, but only 10 changed their availability numbers since last sync, only 10 will be in the pool for changes, which is pretty sweet. If, however, your inventory is extremely volatile, you would probably need to sync about a custom solution (customization). That said, what I would do if I were in your shoes - since you already have a schedule in place (assuming, it’s on 5-15 minutes cadence, and not more frequent than that), I would review the number of updates Acumatica does every occurrence. Most importantly, on the Sync History screen, look at the TIMES (in addition to dates) when an update happens - you want to see that Acumatica completes the update before the next occurrence. I’ve seen situations, where the cadence is 5 minutes, and the volatility of inventory numbers is very high, and Acumatica constantly running an update for inventory quantities - it’s choking, pretty much. In those cases, I would recommend extending the cadence (to 15 minutes, for example), and if it’s still chocking - then a detailed investigation is required. I hope you don’t get to that point, and that your schedule will work just fine.
LMK if you need any further help on this. Best!
@Yuri Karpenko Thanks! That’s super helpful. I’ll give that a shot!