Order API - submitting line item without product or variant, receiving inventory error

Retired Boards Appdev Customers Discounts And Orders
1

Hi everyone. I was speaking with ShopifySupport over on Twitter. They’re unable to help me regarding Admin API issues and suggested I post my question here.

I run a platform that utilizes the Shopify Admin API to submit orders on behalf of my customer’s stores. We’re seeing a brand new issue as of today with at least one store, but potentially more.

The order being submitted has 1 line item, a price of $35.00 and a title. There is no product or variant associated with it.

Shopify is now returning this error message, and I cannot figure out why, seeing as there is no product or inventory associated with the order:

Unable to reserve inventory

Orders for this store have been working for nearly a year without a hiccup. It’s also noteworthy to mention that other orders for this store that do include a product id and variant id are not returning with this error.

Any guidance is appreciated. Thank you so much.

2

Hi Sean,

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, when you POST /admin/orders.json

{
  "order": {
    "line_items": [
      {
        "title": "Coffee",
        "price": 35.00
      }
		]
	}
}

You are getting the “Unable to reserve inventory” response?

Testing with above request, all works fine. Since I cannot reproduce this error, I suggest you look at one of those responses headers and post the X-Request-Id here so someone from [email removed] Shopify can take a look at what exactly is going on.

Best wishes!

3

Karl,

Appreciate the response. Unsure what was happening, but I assume that they were having a minor hiccup with the API at some point. It ended up resolving itself yesterday afternoon with no changes on our part. Our platform attempted to resubmit the orders after a specified amount of time, at which point Shopify finally accepted them. Go figure.

I’ve never seen the ‘Unable to reserve inventory’ error for any of our customer’s stores, so it was new to me. At first I thought it was the typical ‘Unable to claim inventory’, then realized it was something entirely different and unassociated.

Thanks again for your help! Have a great day.

Sean

1 Like
4

Hey Sean,

This actually had to do with a recent change in determining oversell quantities on variants that allow overselling.

The source of the error has since been adjusted and you shouldn’t be running into it anymore.

I recommend retrying any orders that previously failed, they should now succeed.

5

Hi,

I am working on Order API and I am get this response “Unable to reserve inventory”.
As per the above discussions this should not be coming.

Can anyone suggest me that what is causing this issue.

Thanks in advance