How can I export comments from the order timeline?

[Brandon719]

Is there a way to export the comments my employees have made in the Timeline of Orders and in the Customer Info?  The standard export does not seem to do it.

[Greta]

Hello, @Brandon719!

I'm happy to provide you some information on this.

Currently, there isn't a way to export only the comments on an order's timeline. However, if you print the order page, it will contain the timeline, including the comments. Any customer comments will be included on this page as well. If you want to do this, you'll open up the order and click More actions > Print order page.

And you'll get a document with all the orders information, including timeline and customer comments:

I hope this workaround works for your purposes. However, I will also submit a future feature request to our development team for there to be a way to export only the comments, without needing to print the entire order page. If this feature is added in the future, it will be included in the Shopify Changelog!

I hope this helps, and please let me know if I can clarify anything else. 

[Brandon719]

Greta,

Thank you for the information.  I am migrating to a new backend accounting system and would actually like all data from the order page.  Customer, Item, Date, Address, Comments, etc.  Is there a way to do this?  I have seen how to export the majority of the data, the problem is that I can't figure out how to get the comments too.

I have over 30,000 orders I need to export, so the print option is just not viable.

[Greta]

Hey, @Brandon719!

Thank you for getting back to me. I definitely see how in your situation, printing each order individually wouldn't be doable. I exported the orders on my test store and I do see that with whichever configuration, the timeline comments are not included in the CSV file. I know this doesn't resolve the issue now, but I have sent another request to our developers (for timeline comments to be added to the export orders file) and included your comments. I do hope that the change is implemented as I know it would make your workflow a lot smoother. For the time being, there isn't a direct way to export the comments along with the rest of the order information like the customer names and products purchased. 

Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback with me! 

[Derek_P]

Hi Greta,

I second Brandon719's frustration. We've just recently migrated from Squarespace to Shopify and are happy with the move, for the most part. The part we're not happy about is the inability to export comments into CSV files. It's close to a deal-breaker for us. Having those comments (notes) in a spreadsheet, while processing orders for shipping, is very important to us. We took that feature for granted in Squarespace, and now we miss it. I hope your team will make that option available soon.

[Jonathan-HA]

+1 for this

On the developer side, it would be great if there's a separate REST API endpoint to pull the timeline data by order ID.

[Greta]

Hi, @Jonathan-HA and @Derek_P!

Thank you both for sharing your thoughts. I have added your feedback to the feature request, and our developers will review it. If it is implemented in the future, it will be included in our Changelog. 

Thanks again! 

[bara2ak]

"I have sent another request to our developers (for timeline comments to be added to the export orders file) and included your comments. I do hope that the change is implemented as I know it would make your workflow a lot smoother."

It's been a year since this comment and until now they didn't do it....

Shopify is going bad.