"Pending Fulfillment" for orders with Fulfillment Services

[Team_Boltics]

Recently, we've been getting a lot of complaints from users telling us their orders are not being fulfilled. Upon closer inspection, our app creates fulfillments with status set to "pending" for orders with fullfilment services. 

The orders appears with a "Pending Fulfillment" fulfillment status in their dashboard. When did this change happen? I am wondering if it's always been like this, but something else caused people to start complaining. 

The users all think our app isn't working. It's very frustrating for us to answer, and for them to read our answer.

I'm guessing the general idea of how things should work is as follows :

Fulfillment app fulfills orders. If the items have a fulfillment service, set the status to "pending". 
Fulfillment services get's a notification that there are pending fulfillments, and starts processing them.
Fulfillment services finish processing orders and close the fulfillment on Shopify. The new status is "fulfilled".

What I am seeing is nobody is completing the fulfillments, and the orders are stuck in limbo. Has anyone asked the fulfillment services to actually fulfill orders on Shopify?

We are considering systematically completing any pending fulfillment, because users are confused, and I don't really expect any changes from the other parties. In the future, we can whitelist fulfillment services that are actually completing fulfillments. I don't think this is what Shopify would like us to do, so i'm asking for advice about this.

[Josh]

Hey there, 

This is normal behaviour for orders that have fulfillment services, and has been this way for quite some time. It is up to the fulfillment service to mark these as completed once they have fulfilled the order, and is touched on in our FulfillmentService and Fulfillment API documentation. 

If the service isn't doing this on their own, it could be a matter of there just being a delay on their end in shipping the product, or it's entirely possible it could be a broken integration as well. 

I'm not sure that systematically completing any pending fulfillments you find is going to improve the situation at all though, in fact I feel like it might just cause even more headaches for you. If the fulfillment has been left pending on purpose because of a delay in shipping for example, and then you were to mark the fulfillment as completed anyway, that's not going to bring you many happy merchants either. 

I think your best course of action in this case would be to inform merchants that the responsibility of completing these fulfillments lies with their fulfillment service. But I would also be quite curious to see if anyone else out there can chime in with a different way that they have been handling these.

[ChristianaW]

I recently received an order where it has been stuck on “pending fulfillment” for 5 days now, even though according to Printful it is currently in the process of being packaged and sent out. Typically, orders are updated with other words, like “picking” later in the fulfillment process on the Shopify app. This is not happening with this order. It has only been stuck on “pending fulfillment” and contains no updates beyond me requesting fulfillment when I open the order. So it appears on Shopify that the order hasn’t even been started yet. This is the only time this has happened with a Printful order and I don’t know how to fix it. I’ve tried refreshing my app. I’ve tried trying to figure out how to reconnect/sync my Printful orders with my Shopify orders. I’ve tried reaching out to the staff by writing a message in the Shopify order and they never wrote me back about anything that was going on. I have no idea what’s wrong and I’m worried that the customer will not be updated once the order ships and will also not be able to track it.

[allymenan]

Hi @Josh ,

What is the workflow for a Fulfillment Service to mark the item as fulfilled rather then pending? When creating a fulfilment with item ids and status as fulfilled, the fulfillment obj is still created with status pending?

Thanks

[Soultorch]

Hi ChristianaW ,

were you able to resolve the issue? I just started and I encountered the same issue. Got an order with 2 items but printful just started to process 1 item and nothing that I do changes the fact. If I go to the printful website it seems like the order wasn't synched correctly...