View order Edits/changes

[iAmNotARobot456]

With Shopify, is it possible to tell that an order has been changed?  Lets say an employee added an additional line item, deleted one, changed shipping costs, etc.  How can I tell that this order has been edited after the customer placed the order?  Is their an audit trail?  I see from the documentation that there are order change notifications.  Can I query those?

Most systems have have a change log or an audit trail that is visible in the UI.  Is there anything like this in the UI or API that would let me track changes?

[AllanW]

Is there an answer to this. For example we had a delivery date changed and the customer is not happy. We have no way of finding out when and who changed the delivery date. Surely this is a standard feature of any commerce system.

[iAmNotARobot456]

Hello,

A few months ago I was made aware of Events that are available in the
Shopify API. When different things happen in Shopify, they may generate an
event. For example, Orders and Products can generate events.

https://shopify.dev/api/admin-rest/2022-01/resources/event#top

Orders in particular have some really useful events such as Auth, Capture,
Fulfillment, Order, Refund, Sale, void. While these are all very nice, I
don't see one for things like "new item added", "item deleted", "item
Quantity changed", etc. In your case, you are concerned with delivery date.
Either way, I see no way of finding this out. We have a system that keeps
an ERP system in sync with Shopify. For the most part, we can easily send
data back and forth (and we know which data is different). However, for
this situation, I don't know how we could do it with out downloading ever
single non-fulfilled order, and re-comparing it with the existing orders in
the ERP system to see if anything (we care about ) has changed. That just
feels wrong to do it that way, so we never did. Let me know if you figure
something out. Maybe I missed something with the Events. I did have
another idea, but its not good. The end user could always "mark" the order
somehow by placing an "edit" tag on the order after making the changes.
That would mark the order as changed. However, once again that's a bad idea
because we have no way of forcing the user to do this. I wonder, can we
make Shopify tag an order somehow after someone edits it? That would work
for me, and probably you too. When the end user changes something we are
interested in, it would put a special tag on the order. Then our systems
would pickup on that tag and do whatever they need t odo.

[AllanW]

I was really looking for an audit trail that shopify should keep rather
than making something like tagging as edited. Otherwise it is not much
help in the troubleshooting area.

I did find one of the webhooks is orders/edited but only shows edit of
shopify core fields like line items.

As you suggested the only solution I could see was keep track of the
relevant information on every order and listen for order updates and
check if something has changed. Thus keeping and syncing separate
database to Shopify and adding lookup to very edit in shopify. Plus some
sort of logging which would be best added as a staff note I guess. This
gives the change made but still does not give us who changed it.

It seems an important part of a commerce system to keep good audit logs,
hopefully someone will see this. I am sure shopify will respond with
'there is an app for that' so the monthly subscription costs can go up
once again.