How long do customers have to edit or cancel their orders after order creation?

Shopify Discussion
1

At present we’ve created a lightweight API integration to pull orders into another system by querying the fulfillmentOrders API endpoint.

I understand there’s a full workflow that should be ideally used with Shopify around order fulfillment, but due to budget constraints an initial lightweight solution has been implemented that simply polls the fulfillmentOrders endpoint every so often.

As we’ve not followed the full workflow suggested using webhooks that Shopify can call, we are experiencing issues where orders have been changed or cancelled after we’ve pulled them across to the other system and so result in incorrect fulfillments.

It there a specific time window customers have once an order has been placed during which they can modify or cancel their order? If so, we can introduce a delay to pulling in fulfillment orders to circumnavigate this issue for now until the full solution has been developed.

2

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. As mentioned, we’ll be integrating with the webhooks later when budget allows. For now we’re trying to find a quick solution to allow the low-budget solution to work as a stop-gap.

From what you mention I wonder if there’s alternatives open to us:

  1. Are we able to set some status on the imported fulfillment orders to indicate that they are being fulfilled and can no longer be modified or cancelled by the customer?

  2. Where can we find the store policies that define the rules around modifying and cancelling orders?

Thank you for your assistance, it’s much appreciated.

3

Thanks for the additional info, much appreciated. I’m a little confused by the suggestions though…

The custom field option doesn’t sound suitable as it’s unclear how Shopify would use this to prevent the customer from changing or cancelling the order on Shopify’s side. I would have assumed that there would be something built-in to the API I haven’t found yet? I assumed that if a webhook request is used to notify the fulfillment service of a cancelled order, and there’s the option of rejecting the cancellation (via an appropriate response to the webhook call), Shopify must record this as a status somewhere to prevent further cancellation attempts.

I haven’t used the webhooks in anger yet, so this is all assumptions on my part from what I’ve read in the docs so far.

Regarding “Store policies regarding order modifications and cancellations can typically be found in the store’s terms of service or return policy, which are usually available on the store’s website.” - so this sounds like a text only thing? The store owner can’t enforce change / cancellation windows on the orders placed which Shopify will check before allowing a modification or cancellation to take place? If you’ve defined a policy to say “no cancellations” in text and the customer is allowed to cancel an order through Shopify, I’m not sure what use it serves. I’d imagine there must be some way to define some rules for Shopify to follow around these scenarios? Which I assumed you were originally hinting about in your original reply.

4

Any update on this query? We are trying to do the same.

5

Hi there!

I can’t access original replay by @Niyeepo . Maybe you can post solution/answer here one more time? I am trying to understand what is time window when customer can make changes to original order and is there any? Or is it possible to update/cancel as long as order in in unfulfilled status?