With ten orders a day, issuing invoices by hand is manageable. At a hundred orders a day the same task consumes a full working day — and manual invoicing guarantees wrong tax numbers, missing addresses and skipped orders.
This article explains how e-Fatura and e-Arşiv documents (Turkey’s electronic invoice formats) are issued automatically from Shopify, which decisions shape the flow, and which mistakes become expensive later.
Important: Shopify does not submit documents to Turkey’s e-invoice system directly. The document is issued by a licensed provider or an accounting system, and an integration sits between Shopify and that system.
Three decisions that shape the flow
1. Which system issues the document?
- Through the accounting system: the order is pushed into accounting first and the document is sent from there. The most common route, because accounting and invoicing stay in one place.
- Directly through a licensed provider: the order goes straight to the provider and the invoice is issued immediately. Fast for high-volume stores, but accounting still needs its own feed.
- Through your own platform: your system builds the document and submits it. The most flexible route, suited to multi-channel businesses with custom rules.
2. Where does the taxpayer check happen?
If the buyer is registered in the e-Fatura system, an e-Fatura is issued; otherwise an e-Arşiv document. That distinction is resolved by a lookup on the tax number and must happen before the document is created. Skip it and you end up in a cancel-and-reissue loop.
3. At which moment is the invoice created?
| Approach | Advantage | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| At order / payment | Simple operation, no delay | More cancellations when stock runs out |
| At dispatch | Fewer cancellations and refunds | Requires integration with the shipping process |
| End-of-day batch | Lower system load | Customer receives the invoice late |
Whichever you choose, the rule must be identical across sales channels. If web orders are invoiced at dispatch while marketplace orders are invoiced instantly, reconciliation gets fixed by hand every month.
Two Shopify-specific difficulties
There is no tax-number field
Shopify’s standard checkout does not collect a tax identification number. To invoice business buyers you must gather it with a checkout field or a post-order form — and validate it, because an incorrect number gets the document rejected.
International sales
Sales abroad fall under different document and VAT rules. The integration has to change behaviour based on the delivery country; a flow built on a single rule stops at the first international order.
Refund and cancellation scenarios
- Cancelled before invoicing: nothing to do; the flow skips the order.
- Full refund after invoicing: a refund invoice or the corresponding correction document is issued.
- Partial refund: only the refunded lines are processed, and whether shipping is refunded must be defined separately.
- Exchange: for accounting purposes this usually means two documents — a refund and a new sale.
Common build mistakes
- Letting the integration generate invoice numbers: numbering is the responsibility of the issuing system.
- Keeping no mapping table: without a record linking Shopify order numbers to invoice numbers, tracing a problem takes hours.
- Ignoring error handling: rejected documents need a queue, an owner and a retry path.
- Skipping the test environment: a wrong document issued in production cannot always be cancelled; validate the flow in test first.
When is a custom build justified?
For a single store with standard products selling domestically, off-the-shelf tools are enough. A custom build makes sense when several sales channels feed one invoicing flow, when VAT and exemption rules vary by product, when you must work with your own ERP, or when error tracking at volume matters.
For the wider picture see our Shopify integration guide, for the accounting side Shopify – Paraşüt integration, and for the build itself our e-commerce integration service.
Summary
An automated e-invoice flow rests on three decisions: which system issues the document, where the taxpayer check happens, and at which moment the invoice is created. Once those are settled, the rest is a standard integration job. Read our e-invoice transition guide or talk to us.