Acumatica template sync keeps reordering our Shopify variants

Merchants arrange Shopify variants deliberately, cheapest first or most popular colour first, because the first variant is the one the product page opens on. The Acumatica connector overwrites that arrangement. The community thread describes it precisely: "template sync will rearrange all the variants on the product in Shopify even if there were no changes, if template is pushed, or if something else changed on the template".

The trigger is worth noticing. It is not a variant change. Any template push re-sorts the variants, so an edit to a description or an attribute somewhere else on the template resets your merchandising.

Designed behaviour, not a defect, which is why waiting for a fix will not work. Acumatica employee simonliang91 answered the thread directly: "we make the sort order of variants by the following order: Option1 to Option2 to Option3". The connector regenerates variant positions from the attribute values on the Acumatica side every time it writes the product.

That means Shopify’s stored variant positions are treated as derived data rather than as something a merchant owns. There is no setting that changes it, because the sort is not configuration.

Two routes, and only one of them survives contact with a merchandiser.

The route the thread recommends is a customisation. The answer given is to "do the customization to override the method MapVariantPositions(TemplateItems local, ProductData external) in SPTemplateItemProcessor graph". That is a scoped piece of developer work with a known entry point, which is about as good as connector customisations get, but it is code you now own across every Acumatica upgrade.

The route with no code is to make Acumatica’s sort produce the order you want. If the connector sorts by Option1 then Option2 then Option3, then choosing which attribute is Option1 and controlling the sort of its values gives you a lot of the outcome for free. Renaming size values so they sort correctly is unglamorous and it costs nothing to maintain.

The thread is anchored on Acumatica 2023 R1 with the same behaviour reported on 24R1, and it was read on 20 August 2026. A customisation that overrides a connector method is exactly the kind of thing an Acumatica feature release can break, so if you take that route, put a retest of it into your upgrade checklist rather than discovering it in production.

If your variants are not merely reordered but missing, this is not your page. Missing matrix items is a separate issue with configuration causes to rule out first, including the Export to External System flag and the dependency of Product Availability on TemplateItem.