Chapter Twelve · Historical Sync

Bring in your back catalogue.

After you've connected your store, the extension starts watching for new activity. To also bring in the customers, orders, and products that were already in Shopify before that, run a Historical Sync.

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v1.0·4 min read

When you'd use it

Pretty much every merchant who installs the extension already has some Shopify history they'd like to see in CRM — previous orders, existing customers, the current product catalogue. Historical Sync is the one-time job that brings that data over.

It uses the same rules as your live sync — same field matching, same matching key, same Account creation for B2B. Every record arrives in CRM the way it would have if you'd installed the extension earlier.

When to run it (and when to wait)

Wait until you've watched one or two live customers and orders flow through and you've confirmed your field matching looks right. Historical Sync respects whatever rules you have right now — if you change a rule later, the historical records won't automatically be updated to match. Get the live sync looking good first, then backfill the history.

Step-by-step

Open the Historical Sync tab

It's in the left menu of the extension Settings. The top of the page is the import form; below it sits a list of any past jobs you've run.

Pick the store and what to import

Two dropdowns:

Store — if you have more than one, pick which one to import from.
What to import — Customers, Orders, or Products.

Optional — pick a date range

If you only want a specific window — for example, just orders from the last year, or just last month's customers — use the date filters. Leave them blank and everything in your store is included.

Click Start Import

A new entry appears in the list below, marked Processing. The import runs on our side, not in your browser — you can safely close the tab and come back later. Nothing's lost.

Check the result

When the job finishes, you'll see one of three statuses:

Success — every record imported.
Partial — most went through, but some had issues. Click the job to see the per-record list.
Failed — the whole job stopped. Usually a connection or permission issue — reconnect the store and try again.

Every record handled also shows up in your Shopify Logs module, the same way live syncs do.

What each import brings in

If you pick this	You'll get this in your CRM
Customers	Every customer in your Shopify store becomes a Zoho Contact — with their B2B Account if applicable.
Orders	Every order becomes a Zoho Deal — with line items, totals, and payment status filled in.
Products	Every product becomes a Zoho Product — with price, image, and variants.

It's safe to run more than once

Running an import twice won't create duplicates. The extension finds existing records by your match field (Email for Contacts, Order Number for Deals, etc.) and updates them rather than creating new ones. That makes it safe to:

Tweak your field matching and run the import again to update everything.
Retry after a Failed run once you've fixed whatever caused it.
Run a regular catch-up import as an extra backup against missed sync events.

It might take a while

Shopify limits how fast we can pull data — this is normal and protects your store. Large catalogues can take many minutes (occasionally hours for tens of thousands of records). You don't need to watch — come back later or check the job list any time.