Five stores, one source of truth
2XU sells through regional Shopify storefronts and runs the business on Apparel21. In 2020 the two were not connected. Products, prices and stock levels had to reach each store from the ERP, and every online order had to get back to the system that fulfils it, with pricing and shipping that differ by region.
Without a connector, the storefront and the ERP are two places to maintain the same information, and the gap between them is where customers see the wrong stock and staff spend their day correcting it. The brief was one integration that could serve every region without forcing every region to behave the same way.
What flows where
Product data, inventory and fulfilment updates travel from Apparel21 into Shopify, so each store presents the range the business is selling at the prices and stock levels it holds, and customers learn when their order has been fulfilled. Online orders travel from Shopify into Apparel21, where the operation picks them up, with returns carried between the systems as well.
The connector refreshed products daily, stock every 15 minutes, and orders, fulfilments and returns every two hours, so the storefront and the ERP were never far apart.
One connector, five configurations
The connector was built once and configured five times: 2XU Australia, 2XU Teams Australia, 2XU New Zealand, 2XU United States and 2XU Canada. The core product and order flows are shared, while each store keeps its own regional pricing and shipping configuration. That gave 2XU one integration to maintain rather than five.
Support that kept up with the business
The project was signed in November 2020 and the connector was operating by early 2021. We supported it in production until 29 and 30 August 2023, when the original services were handed over to Apparel21 Connect, the vendor's own integration service. Platforms updated, ranges changed and regions gained new requirements over that period, and the connector kept doing its job through all of it.
The results
The connector carried 2XU's product, stock, order, fulfilment and return traffic between five storefronts and Apparel21 for about two years and nine months of production use. What it removed was the second entry: nobody carried products, stock or orders between the two systems by hand.
The stores it was built for have kept growing. In the 30 days to 14 September 2026 those five storefronts took 16,470 Shopify orders, about 200,000 a year at that rate, and each main regional store now holds roughly 3,300 to 3,700 products and 19,600 to 21,500 variants. Those are current Shopify figures for the storefronts rather than a measurement of the original connector's throughput, and because the same catalogue repeats across regions they are not added together.
Where it stands now
2XU's Apparel21 integration is now run by the vendor's own service, and we remain involved in 2XU's Apparel21 rollout and migration work in 2026, nearly six years on from the first project.
For a brand weighing up an ERP connection, the lesson is the shape of the thing: two directions with clear purposes, one shared core, a configuration per region, and support from the people who built it.