Updated Deadline: Aug 1st -- [Deprecation] Important changes to ProductVariant, Refund and Fulfillment APIs

[Ryan]

UPDATE JAN 2: 

https://ecommerce.shopify.com/c/api-announcements/t/deadline-reminder-important-changes-to-productva...

UPDATE SEP 14 

Hey Devs!

We've recently shipped a new change to help with identifying calls that we consider deprecated.  We've added a new header to return on these calls:

X-Shopify-API-Deprecated-Reason

If you receive one of these headers in your response, this means Shopify considers that a deprecated call.  This is an effort to allow these calls to be machine readable, and loggable, in order to assist developers in identifying the areas that need to be updated.

Examples of calls that will return this header:

• Creating a fulfillment without a location
• Creating a product with variants that have "inventory_quantity"
• Creating a new variant on a product that has "inventory_quantity"
• Updating a variant with "inventory_quantity_adjustment"
• Updating a variant with "inventory_quantity"

Happy Coding!

UPDATE JUNE 28: 

Hey Devs,

Just want to let you know that we are extending the deprecation deadline from July 1st to August 1st.  There will be a new post tomorrow with more details, but we just wanted to get it out there to maybe relieve some of the stress you are feeling headed into the weekend.

Most, if not all of your questions will be answered in the post tomorrow so try to save any queries for that!

Cheers All!

Ryan

Hey Devs,

Shopify is preparing to release multi-location inventory features to all merchants this summer. All apps that create fulfillments or manage inventory will need to be updated by July 1st, 2018, to remain functional on shops that track inventory across multiple locations.

Key dates

July 1st, 2018

• Apps will no longer be able to create fulfillments without specifying a location
• Apps will no longer be able to set inventory on the Product/Variant APIs

Migrating to support multi-location fulfillments

Shopify fulfillments are currently “location unaware”, meaning that when an app creates a fulfillment and fulfills an order, Shopify decrements the inventory with no concept of which location that inventory should be decremented from. In order to support merchants with inventory allocated across multiple locations, apps will need to include a location_id when creating fulfillments.

For details on how to migrate your apps to support multi-location, see our Multi-Location Fulfillment Migration Guide.

Migrating to support multi-location inventory

Currently inventory is set and adjusted on the product variant and is not tracked by any particular location. In anticipation of multi-location inventory, Shopify has released a new Inventory API, which includes two new endpoints: Inventory Item and Inventory Level. The Inventory API will allows apps to effectively manage inventory quantities across multiple locations.

For details on how to migrate your apps to support multi-location inventory, see our Multi-Location Inventory Migration Guide.

We’ll keep you up to date as we continue to make improvements to our platform’s multi-location fulfillment and inventory management capabilities, so you can continue to build the best apps to help extend these new features.

If you have any questions about this change, please read our detailed FAQ or contact deprecations@shopify.com.

Thanks,

Shopify Apps Team

[tomn68]

Is this a revised schedule? I thought the last email from February where it stated May 7 as option to enabled multi-location inventory and then Jan 1 2019 where it goes read only.

Just so I'm clear, if we use the product variant to track inventory levels but do not use them to track muli-location inventory levels, does this new July 1st date effect us in this use case?

Tom

[Tahar_from_Stoc]

Hi Ryan,

It would be a lot better if you guys could allow us to enable multi location on our development stores before releasing this nice addition to the grand public. 

We are authoring an inventory management platform with a nice integration with Shopify. This is a very important change we need to get right from the start and we don't have much time left. 

Another question which came up from our engineering team is: how are existing merchands who don't have multi-location enabled going to be affected? Will the deprecated inventory APIs be disabled for this merchands cohort as well? 

Thanks in advance.

Tahar from Stock&Buy

[Ryan]

Hi Tahar, 

Stay tuned for details on enabling multi-location features on development shops.  I don't have any public details to share except that it will be available to all partner developers before it launches to merchants.

For all,

If you have specific implementation questions for the migration please contact deprecations@shopify.com.

[Tahar_from_Stoc]

Thanks Ryan. Appreciate the super fast response. 

By the way, we did send an email to deprecations@shopify.com but received no response 🙂

[Ralph-HA]

Hi Ryan,

   Thanks for all the awesome detail. 

    I have a quick question about the affect of inventory on the orders api.  There is a flag on the create order api call called inventory_behavior.  Do the changes made that will affect the inventory levels on the Product API have an affect on this?  I know they are totally different API endpoints but I wasn't sure if the underlying behavior would cause any changes on Order api as well.

Thanks!

[MeltinBit]

Hello, after reading the post i realized that for the FulfillmentApi the only change that's need is to provide a location_id.

The question is: where do i find the location_id? I mean no location has been specified right now for products and variants, so how can they be associated to a Location? Is this something that happens by default for all the inventory?

Thanks!

[Ryan]

Hi Ralph,

There is no change to the orders API.  If you specified inventory_behavior = decrement_obeying_policy Shopify will handle all of the inventory decrementing using the new APIs.

Hi Fabio,

You can get the location_id from https://help.shopify.com/api/reference/location#index to see them all or from https://help.shopify.com/api/reference/inventorylevel to see locations for a specific item.

Ryan

[Paul_McWhinnie]

Hello Ryan O,

Two issues with this:

1. This change violates the golden API rule.. once publised, behaviour should not change or break. Why not allow us to continue setting variant -> inventory_quantity and under the hood just update the appropriate inventory item/level for the default Location?

2. This change will incur extra API calls.

Upon further review...

(a) https://help.shopify.com/api/tutorials/inventory-migration-guide#affected-apis
Affected API | Changing behaviour 

Setting inventory_quantity will adjust a product variant's inventory at its location that has the lowest ID. The inventory at that location will be adjusted so that the sum of inventory across all locations matches the value set by inventory_quantity. Use the Inventory Level endpoint instead.

(b) https://help.shopify.com/api/tutorials/inventory-migration-guide#deprecation-schedule
Deprecation Schedule

July 1, 2018
Apps will no longer be able to set inventory_quantity or inventory_quantity_adjustment on the product variant.

(a) and (b) seem to contradict each other or does "Setting inventory_quantity.." refer to current behaviour?

Thanks,
Paul

[Poul_Poulsen]

So with a new shop where you have to add lets say 100 product calls to the api, you now have to add that x times for each variant due to the inventory level getting its own endpoint ? Isn't it possible to just send the inventory items with the variants within the same call for when you add a new product with variants ?

[Hari2]

Hi,

I use a private app (not Third party apps) to make API calls to my store endpoint to update inventory quantity and fulfillment details for the order. fulfillment_service is set to "manual" for all the products/variants. I fulfill the products manually and use my custom application to update Shopify with the required details.

Question:

1. Is location_id still mandatory in the fulfillment API even when private apps are making the call to create the fulfillment records ?

2. When the product is set to fulfillment_service = manual, can i update the inventory levels using Inventory API without specifying the location_id.

[bardia]

Hi Ryan,

Could you please update the post's links to the two Migration tutorials? They point to 404.

Thanks,

Bardia

[Robert_Tolton1]

@Hari - I too would like to know this, I have a private app performing fulfillments currently. It's slightly concerning that neither the fulfillment migration tutorial nor the API docs for locations are currently available? Is locations something you opt-in to?

[Ryan]

Hey All,

Fulfillment Migration Guide, Locations, if these don't work for you, try resetting your cache.  The  URLs were only down for about 30 minutes for the migration to the new developers site.

Question:

1. Is location_id still mandatory in the fulfillment API even when private apps are making the call to create the fulfillment records ?

2. When the product is set to fulfillment_service = manual, can i update the inventory levels using Inventory API without specifying the location_id.

You must always include a location ID, doesn't matter about private apps.

[JAS_Technology]

I noticed the same thing as Paul and mentioned it here. Important to get an answer. 

[Ryan]

Responded to your other thread as well:

You have to include a location ID even if the shop only has a single location.  The changed behaviour on Product and Product Variant went into place when that document was pubished in late 2017, and will only continue to take place in a grace period for grandfathered apps after the release of multiple locations.  This is in order to mitigate the affect on merchant's inventory if the apps do not migrate in time.  I will update the migration guide to be more clear about this.

[Tahar_from_Stoc]

Hi Ryan,

We are still unclear about how the new API will work. Here are a few issues / questions we are currently having a very hard time with:

1. Is multi location equivalent to multiple locations? What I mean is, we have a test store with three locations but the has_multilocation flag is still set to false. Is there a place in the admin area where we can turn this on? Can one define multiple POS locations with the has_multilocation flag set to false? 
2. Related to point 1 above, do you have an ETA as to when we can we set the multi location flag?   

I would be helpful if you can answer these questions in a timely manner, we have one engineer staying idle waiting for these points to be clarified 🙂

Thank you in advance.

Tahar.

[Ryan]

You can test the multi-location feature by creating a new development store from your partner account and checking the box here:

Once your store is created you can go to settings > locations and enable the features.

For 1.  Even with the flag off, you may have more than one location.  This could be from POS locations, or automatically created from a fulfillment service

[Tahar_from_Stoc]

Thanks a lot Ryan. That definitely helps. In case of a store with multiple POS locations and the has_multi_location flag set to false, how will Shopify behave? Would inventory and orders be handled same as if the multi-location flag was set?  

Again thanks for all the clarifications.

[JAS_Technology]

Hi Ryan O. Here is another question. When creating a product via the API or creating a new variant via the API do we, in essence have to create variants with zero inventory and then after the call completes we set inventory levels for the necessary location(s)? So the new flow of product creation would be:

1. Setup JSON for a full product including properties, images, variants, metafields, etc...
2. POST to /admin/products.json
3. Inspect response JSON to get inventory item ID's
4. For each variant's inventory_item_id, submit a POST to inventory_levels/set.json to set its available inventory

This right? Make sense? No way to create a product with inventory levels in one call anymore?