Shopify Glossary Terms

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is the structured exchange of business documents between trading partners in a machine-readable format. EDI predates the modern internet and remains foundational to B2B commerce, particularly in retail, wholesale, and supply chain operations.

Common EDI document types include:

• 850 - Purchase Order (buyer to supplier)
• 855 - Purchase Order Acknowledgement
• 856 - Advance Shipping Notice (supplier to buyer)
• 810 - Invoice
• 846 - Inventory Inquiry/Advice
• 997 - Functional Acknowledgement

Shopify Plus does not ingest EDI natively. Brands that need EDI typically run it through middleware (SPS Commerce, TrueCommerce, B2B Gateway, Cleo) which translates EDI documents into API calls against the Shopify Admin GraphQL API, or routes them via an ERP that already handles EDI translation.

For B2B brands evaluating a move to Shopify Plus with EDI workflows in scope, the architecture decision is which layer owns EDI: the ERP (most common), middleware (next most common), or a custom integration sitting between EDI VAN and Shopify (least common). For more, see B2B Migration: Moving Wholesale to Shopify Plus Without Breaking Pricing.