This happens for our client's Magnolia instance but also for a clean Magnolia Enterprise 4.5.18 with the Shop Module 1.1.4 with samples installed.

For our client it happens on their production environment whenever they need to change their shop configuration. This results in an incomplete shop configuration on their website and thus in a non-functional web shop which we need to fix by hand very rapidly when this happens. Not nice.

Use case with Magnolia Shop sample data:

1. Log in to the adminCentral on Magnolia author
2. Go to Shops Management - sampleShop
3. Double click on the sampleShop node and change any configuration data
4. On the sampleShop node select 'Activate incl sub pages'
5. This seems to go well however now go to the adminCentral on the public instance
6. Here you will see that the sampleShop node itself has been activated just fine. However all subfolders (taxCategories, currencies, priceCategories) are empty (which they should not be).
7. If you now attempt to activate for example a tax category or currency node you get the error 'can't version: /sampleShop/currencies/USD: mandatory child node {}MetaData does not exist'

So you end up with a shop on the public instance without any tax categories, currencies, etc.

As a workaround we then very quickly export all of these configurations by hand (XML Export) and import them again on the public instance.

I had a quick look but cannot figure out what the issue is. The shop node data types are all registered correctly as far as I can see. It must have something to do with the Magnolia data module workflow in relation to the shop module.

I have not tested it but I suspect the issue also occurs on Magnolia 5.