When we started our business we had a 3rd party app syncing all of the orders to our shopify store from multiple different online shopping platforms. Since we encountered so many issues like missing orders, duplicates, and information not syncing correctly, we just started fullfilling them on their platforms instead of through Shopify. Because of this, we now have 9,999+ orders unfullfilled on our shopify store all from over 2 years ago (2018-2021). What is the best course of action to deleting these orders without affecting anything on our shopify store or on the other platforms. Would it be better to archive these orders instead? We are just trying to organize our store and not have it show all of these orders that were already fullfilled on other platforms years ago.
Topic summary
A merchant has 9,999+ unfulfilled orders from 2018-2021 that were actually fulfilled on external platforms due to syncing issues with a third-party app. They want to clean up their Shopify store without affecting existing data.
Key constraint identified:
Unfulfilled orders cannot be archived directly in Shopify—they must first be marked as fulfilled.
Recommended solution:
- Mark all orders as fulfilled
- Then archive them
Implementation approaches suggested:
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Matrixify app method: Export unfulfilled orders to spreadsheet, update columns to “Fulfilled” with “Do Not Notify Customer” enabled, reimport via Matrixify, then repeat process for archiving. This approach was successfully used by a respondent facing similar bulk-update limitations in Shopify’s native interface.
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Alternative app: Easy Order Management app offers bulk delete/cancel/archive functionality with advanced filtering options.
Both solutions address the issue that Shopify’s admin interface may error out or fail to update when processing thousands of orders simultaneously.
I don’t believe you can Archive an order that’s Unfulfilled.
So the steps are:
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Mark orders as Fulfilled
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Archive Orders
You can do this in the Shopify admin interface, but when I was in a similar situation as you describe, the page would error our or otherwise ‘not update’ all the orders. I suppose there was just too many.
I ended up using Matrixify (app):
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Exported the Unfulfilled Orders to spreadsheet
-
Updated the Columns in the spreadsheet to Fulfilled and Do Not Notify Customer (important)
-
Reimported into Shopify via Matrixify
Repeated this for Archiving the orders. Problem solved.
How-to Links:
Marking as Fulfilled: https://matrixify.app/tutorials/fulfill-existing-shopify-orders-in-bulk
Archiving: https://matrixify.app/tutorials/archive-and-unarchive-shopify-orders-in-bulk/
I made an app to bulk delete/cancel/archive orders for merchants. You can also use the app with a rich filtering