Connecting your store

Connecting a store is what gives Evident a catalogue and an order stream. Until one is connected, or you are pushing data yourself, nothing else in the product does anything.

BigCommerce

There are two ways to connect, and they are not equivalent.

The app (recommended)

Install Evident from your BigCommerce control panel. The app requests its scopes once, at install, and BigCommerce keeps them in step with the app itself. You can then work with Evident inside the control panel — the dashboard runs embedded, signed in with a session BigCommerce hands us on every load.

If your browser refuses the partitioned cookie that embedded session needs, Evident falls back to opening the dashboard in its own tab. Nothing is lost; it just stops being embedded.

A manual API account

You can also create a store-level API account in BigCommerce and paste the credentials into Evident.

Scopes on a BigCommerce API account are immutable. You cannot widen them later. If you discover you need another scope, you must create a new API account — and running Connect again with new credentials creates a duplicate store in Evident rather than upgrading the existing one. Grant everything below the first time.

Evident asks for:

Scope	Why
store_v2_products	Catalogue sync, product images, star badges
store_v2_orders	Order ingest — review request triggers, verified purchase, loyalty accrual
store_v2_customers	Matching reviewers and loyalty accounts to real customers
store_v2_categories	Category-scoped FAQs and galleries
store_v2_content	Page- and blog-scoped FAQs
store_v2_information	Store name, currency, timezone
store_v2_marketing	Issuing loyalty redemption coupons. Without it, redemption falls over at the last step.

What syncs, and when

Connecting runs an initial product and category sync, backfills recent order history, and registers webhooks so later changes arrive without polling. Settings → Integrations shows counts and the last sync time, and offers a manual re-sync — worth running after a bulk catalogue import.

Shopify

Install the Evident app for your Shopify store and approve the scopes. As with BigCommerce, the dashboard then runs embedded inside the Shopify admin.

Shopify’s admin does not allow the app to use cookies, so the embedded session works differently under the hood: Shopify’s session token is exchanged once at entry for an Evident token that is carried on every request. This is invisible unless you are debugging it — but it does mean an embedded session lives in the page, so a hard refresh re-establishes it rather than resuming it.

Evident asks for read_products, read_orders, read_all_orders, read_customers, read_content, write_script_tags, and — for loyalty redemption — write_discounts and write_store_credit_account_transactions.

Loyalty on Shopify has a real limitation today. Shopify’s order status is a payment state, not a fulfilment state, so the status change Evident awards points on does not occur the way it does on BigCommerce. Shopify stores do not currently accrue loyalty points from orders. Reviews, FAQs, galleries and redemption all work normally. If loyalty is why you are here, talk to us before you build on it.

Adding a scope later

Both platforms treat scopes as fixed at authorisation time. Adding one means re-authorising:

• BigCommerce app — reinstall or accept the updated permission prompt. Reinstalling does not duplicate your store; Evident reconciles to the existing one.
• BigCommerce manual API account — see the warning above. New account, and expect a duplicate store row to clean up.
• Shopify — Shopify prompts for the new scopes on next load.

This is the most common reason a feature “does not work” on an otherwise healthy connection. Loyalty coupons are the usual casualty.

Custom and headless storefronts

If you are not on either platform, you push data instead of granting scopes. There is no OAuth step and no webhook registration — you call PUT /products and PUT /orders yourself. See Headless storefronts.

Disconnecting

Removing a connection stops sync and webhooks. Your reviews, loyalty balances, FAQs and galleries stay — they belong to the store environment, not to the platform connection. Reconnecting the same store resumes against the same data.