How your iPaaS partner should be managing third-party system updates and changes. Seamlessly.

When your integration is working well, it's invisible.

You're not thinking about it. You're not looking at it. You're getting on with running your business, and that's exactly how it should be.

The problem with invisibility is that it's easy to forget every integration in your stack is reliant on third-party systems continuing to work the way they always have. Shopify, NetSuite, your WMS, your returns platform, your payment provider. Every one of them is a moving target. APIs get versioned. Platforms get migrated. Features get rolled out. Fields get deprecated.

When any link in that chain changes, a lot of that change lands with your iPaaS partner.

So the question isn't whether third parties will change. They will. The question is whether your iPaaS partner is staying ahead of those changes, or finding out about them at the same time you do, when something breaks.

This is a guide to what good looks like.

Most of our partnerships begin through word of mouth. Someone in our network meets a company they think is doing something interesting. That might happen at an event, through a shared customer, or just because someone's heard good things and reaches out.

From there it's pretty casual. We'll have a conversation, get a sense of what they do and how they work, and see if there's a natural fit. There's no criteria checklist. It's more a case of: do we rate your product? Do we get on well with your team? Is there a genuine overlap in the brands we work with or the problems we solve?

If there's something there, we'll set up a session between our tech teams to understand how everything works, and then we keep the conversation going. If we don't love the product or the offering isn't right, we’ll always be honest. Some partnerships make more sense later down the line, so we like to keep the doors open.

Third-party system changes come in a few different shapes: API versioning, platform migrations, new feature rollouts, and the occasional outright breaking change. Some are predictable. Shopify runs four major releases a year with a 12-month support cycle, so you always know what's coming. Others are far less foreseeable.

The honest answer on frequency: this isn't a weekly problem. For most of the systems we work with regularly, true root-cause integration issues from third-party changes aren't that common, partly because we stay close to product update notifications. It comes in waves from some systems, and on a more quarterly cadence from others.

Where the bigger risk actually sits is the missed opportunities: changes that could simplify your integration or eliminate a manual workaround, that nobody acted on.

The most visible symptom is an unexpected breakage out of nowhere, followed by a scramble to fix it. Errors start appearing that weren't there before. Failed sync notifications creep in. Data goes missing. Things feel unstable without a clear cause, and then they get resolved with no real explanation.

A GraphQL schema change is a good illustration of how bad this can get. If a third party removes a field from their API and nobody's noticed, every request that tries to pull that field fails. In an order integration context, that can mean orders simply stop syncing, entirely. It's an extreme example, but it's well within the realm of what can happen when nobody's watching.

The other version is slower, and arguably worse. A reporting field shifts. Everything keeps working operationally. Nobody notices until month end, when the numbers don't reconcile. Or imagery slowly falls out of sync because a status value changed on the source system. These subtle changes can snowball, and they're harder to spot because nothing has obviously broken.

The other tell is who finds out first. For something that's clearly broken, your iPaaS partner should be the one telling you. If you're consistently the one flagging issues to your integration partner rather than the other way round, something's off.

The gold standard is an iPaaS partner that's closely aligned not just with you as a brand, but with the technical teams at the third parties in your stack. Real relationships there. Not just reading the changelog, but actually knowing what's coming.

In practice, that means a few things:

They subscribe to every available update channel for every system you rely on. RSS feeds, dev logs, email lists, partner channels, whatever each third party offers. We pipe ours into dedicated Slack channels so the team is routinely checking what's changing and assessing the impact. No single channel covers everything, so you have to cover them all.

They work well ahead of deprecation windows. If a system has a 12-month support cycle, you shouldn't be scrambling in month 11. That gets challenging when you're supporting a lot of systems, but it's the standard to hold yourself to.

They tell you about new features, not just breaking changes. This is where most integration partners fall short. Flagging a deprecation is the bare minimum. The better version is a partner who knows your stack well enough to come to you and say: there's a new feature here that could save your team time, or simplify this part of your setup. Shopify is a good example. Things like inventory transfers have evolved a lot, and your integration partner should be the one prompting that conversation, not waiting for you to discover it yourselves.

They handle scheduled and unscheduled changes differently. For scheduled changes: plan in advance, agree timing, run it at a safe moment with the right eyes on it. For unexpected breakages: priority shifts to getting things back up and running first, then optimising. That might mean temporarily reduced functionality for a matter of days while the full fix is worked through. That scenario should be genuinely rare.

If you want to evaluate how well your current iPaaS partner is handling this, or you're sizing up a new one, here are the questions worth asking.

What API version are you currently running for the systems in my stack? A lot of platforms use date-based versioning (2026-01, 2026-04, and so on), so it's pretty easy to see how current things are. If a system has gone through a major re-platform recently, ask how they handled that transition. The answer tells you a lot.

What's your process for managing third-party updates? A good integration partner will have a clear answer to this. Updates can't always be handled as a single blanket change. They need to be managed and verified case-by-case. You want to hear them talk about that nuance.

Do you have access to sandbox environments for the third parties in my stack? They should be testing against release versions of third-party systems before touching production. If they're working straight against live, that's a red flag.

How robust is your UAT process? Is it a dedicated part of how they work, or an afterthought?

A few red flags worth watching for: things keep breaking and they're fixing them after the fact rather than ahead of it; their own platform is running on legacy software (if they're not investing in their own stack, they're unlikely to be keeping pace with yours); they can't tell you what's changing in your third-party systems over the next six months.

Zero disruption from third-party changes isn't a fully realistic expectation. From anything.

But it's also worth saying this isn't just on your iPaaS partner. The third parties you've picked matter too. If you've selected systems that work in a vacuum and push changes without telling anyone, you're going to have disruption no matter how good your iPaaS partner is. Pick well on both sides (integration partner and third parties) and zero disruption starts to become a realistic target.

There are also genuinely unforeseeable changes. Your iPaaS partner can't fully control how your third parties behave. What they can control is how fast they respond. If they're suggesting weeks to resolve something unexpected, that's a real red flag. The right response is to treat it as high priority, and to know your integrations well enough that they can move quickly. Days, not weeks.

The thing most brands don't realise about their integration setup is how dependent it is on third parties continuing to behave the way they always have. That dependency is just as critical to how an integration holds up as the integration partner themselves.

When a third-party system pushes an update, the difference between a good integration partner and a bad one is the process they have in place to deal with it. A good one already knows how your setup works, knows the update is coming, and has access to your sandbox so they can get straight to work. A bad one is slow. Lots of questions, lots of back and forth, a painful process that takes far longer than it should.

If your integration partner is telling you about a breaking change after it's already broken, you're leaving yourself exposed.

What brands should really be asking their integration partner is: what's your change management process, and how closely do you work with the third-party systems you integrate with?

If they can't answer those clearly, that tells you what you need to know.

Want to discuss how we manage this for the brands we work with? Get in touch.