Is there a way to create a flow base in Custom item?

Shopify Plus

Topic summary

A user seeks to create automated notifications when employees create custom items in Shopify POS, primarily to track and reduce inventory accordingly.

Detection Method:

  • Custom items can be detected through Flow’s “order created” trigger
  • They appear as lineItems with customAttributes where value == "custom_sale"
  • Custom items don’t create actual products/variants, just one-off order entries

Key Limitations:

  • Custom items cannot be edited via API (only deleted and recreated)
  • No vendor field available for custom items through API
  • POS custom sale button only allows setting Title and Price fields
  • Product title, vendor, and type default to “None”

Alternative Solutions:

  • One user employs Report Pundit extension for weekly reports on custom items, then manually adjusts inventory
  • Another user attempted to parse vendor codes from titles (e.g., “ABC - Vintage Chair” → vendor “ABC”) but this isn’t supported

Status: The discussion remains open with no complete automation solution for inventory reduction based on custom items.

Summarized with AI on October 28. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hello!!

Is there a way I can create a notification based on custom item? I mean, if some employee create a custom item in POS i can get a notification? This is not a trust issue, what I want to do is reduced the inventory based on custom items.

Thank you :smiley:

1 Like
2

You can detect if someone bought a custom item. It doesn’t add a new product or variant, but ordering it will trigger “order created”.

There, it will show up a lineItem with data that looks similar to this:

"order": {
      "app": {
        "name": "Point of Sale"
      },
      "lineItems": {
        "nodes": [
          {
            "title": "Test custom sale item",
            "customAttributes": [
              {
                "key": "_shopify_item_type",
                "value": "custom_sale"
              }
            ],
            "product": null,
            "variant": null
          }
        ]
      },

So probably the best way to check it to look for is at least one order / customAttributes / value == “custom_sale”

1 Like
3

Where do I place this code?

4

This is the data that was returned by a query in my own shop. You don’t use it directly… it just shows the type of data you have access to. The part at the end shows you what to put in a condition step.

1 Like
5

I am working with Report Pundit (a great little extension) to create a report that delivers to me weekly and shows any custom items created. For my purposes, weekly is often enough to give me a chance to manually adjust inventory.

6

Is it possible to use flow to change the vendor of the custom sale item?

7

Not sure what “custom sale item” is, but you can update the vendor of a product using https://shopify.dev/docs/api/admin-graphql/latest/mutations/productUpdate. You can call productUpdate via the action “Send Admin API request”

8

The Custom Sale button in Shopify POS seems to create a one-off product with Product title, Product vendor, and Product type values set to None. See here: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/sell-in-person/shopify-pos/inventory-management/products/quick-sales. The only fields that can be set via the UI are Title and Price. What I am hoping to do is strip a three letter code from the Title and write it to the Vendor field. E.g. If the title is “ABC - Vintage Chair” then the Vendor would be set to “ABC”. Obviously the better way to do this would be to have a Vendor field on the Custom Sale button, but it seems like that is impossible.

9

Ah, I see. Custom items aren’t true products that I can tell. They are just one-off things added to an order. There isn’t a way to edit them via API. You would have to delete and recreate. But even then, there is no “Vendor” field available. https://shopify.dev/docs/api/admin-graphql/latest/mutations/ordereditaddcustomitem