Delivery Method for unfulfilled fulfillments

Technical Q&A
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Topic summary

A developer is seeking a way to retrieve the Delivery Method (e.g., “Shipping”, “Pick Up”) for unfulfilled fulfillments via Shopify’s GraphQL or Admin API. While this information appears in the Shopify UI, they haven’t found a direct API endpoint to access it.

Key Question:

  • How to programmatically retrieve delivery methods for unfulfilled orders, especially when different fulfillments may have different delivery methods?

Solution Provided:
Another user encountered the same issue where fulfillmentOrders returned empty arrays for unfulfilled orders. The problem was resolved by:

  • Checking and updating API key permissions related to fulfillments
  • After permission adjustments, they successfully queried fulfillmentOrders attributes including deliveryMethod.methodType and assignedLocation details

The response includes a code snippet showing the structure of the returned data with delivery method and location information.

Summarized with AI on October 29. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I’m reaching out to see if there is any solution for retrieving the Delivery Method for unfulfilled fulfillments using Shopify’s GraphQL API or the Admin API. The delivery method (e.g., “Shipping”) is visible in the Shopify UI for unfulfilled orders, but we have been unable to locate a direct way to access this information through the available APIs.

Additionally, if there are scenarios where each unfulfilled fulfillment has a different Delivery Method, what would be the best approach to handle and retrieve this data programmatically?

If you have any insights, suggestions, or alternative approaches to retrieve this data, I would appreciate your input.

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2

We spent a while figuring this out as well. When orders are unfulfilled, the fulfillmentOrders kept returning an empty array in Shopify GraphQL Admin API.

Turns out it was a permission issue with the API key itself. We checked all permissions related to fulfillments and now we can query properly the fulfillmentOrders attributes even for unfulfilled orders.

fulfillmentOrders: [
  {
    deliveryMethod: { methodType: "PICK_UP" },
    assignedLocation: { location: { id: "gid://shopify/Location/64815530071", name: "Chicoutimi" } }
  }
]