Filtering by fulfillment_status in the Shopify REST Orders API (versions 2020-07 and 2020-10) is returning incorrect results and experiencing delays. Requests with fulfillment_status=unshipped sometimes include fulfilled or even closed orders, especially when combined with status=open.
Latency appears tied to fulfillment_status-specific filters: delays of 10–30+ seconds were reproduced, and one merchant saw a 7-minute delay; another reported orders arriving days later. Sample requests and X-Request-ID headers were provided, and Shopify previously indicated a shift to Elasticsearch for this filtering.
Shopify staff reported a fix was pushed on Friday to address long delays, stating most cases after Nov 20 are resolved. They requested X-Request-ID values for any post-fix calls that still miss expected orders to investigate remaining isolated reports.
Additional reports note fulfillment status flipping between fulfilled and unfulfilled and inconsistent timing, despite no relevant fulfillment apps being used.
Action items: affected developers should open support tickets, supply X-Request-ID from problematic responses, and may reference ticket ID 20753466. Status: partially mitigated; investigation ongoing with unresolved edge cases.
Summarized with AI on February 12.
AI used: gpt-5.
I just received new reports from 2 more customers today. It seems the update with the filter bug is getting rolled out to more stores.
I did more testing with different filter combinations and here’s another weird thing I found:
If status=open and fulfillment_status=unshipped is set, some “closed” orders are getting included (but not all closed orders). If I remove the fulfillment_status filter and only have status=open, the filter works fine and doesn’t include closed orders. So it does seem like something weird is going on with that fulfillment_status filter.
I hope someone from Shopify can take a look soon as this could potentially affect a lot of merchants as this update gets rolled out.
We just found another issue where there’s quite a big delay with orders getting included in the API response only if the fulfillment_status filter is set to a specific status, so it seems related to this as well.
We learned from Shopify last month that there was a change that was made recently to use elastic search for fulfillment_status filtering, so that could be related.
So far, we’ve had 4 customers this week report an issue with a few orders getting missed because of this.
I was able to re-create the issue on our test store and seeing delays from 10-15 seconds to over 30 seconds. One customer reported an order that was missed which was created 7 minutes before the API request was sent, which is areally big delay.
Here’s the output of my tests:
The fulfillment_status filter is set to ‘unshipped’, delay of 30+ seconds:
we are facing recently same issue, some orders are not received via API (version 2020-10). after afew days of requesting regularly, Shopify give the orders!!!. we are using paging structure.
we call /admin/api/2020-10/orders.json?limit=100&fulfillment_status=unshipped
@soheylnazifi Yup, we also had one merchant report orders not showing up until days later…
I’m currently debugging with Shopify, you can reference my ticket ID 20753466 if you decide to open an ticket with them as there’s already a long conversation with very detailed debug info on this ticket which might help.
In order to investigate further, kindly provide the X-Request-ID value from the response headers of a call that didn’t return the expected orders.
For anyone else reading along, we pushed a fix on Friday for an issue that caused long delays in orders showing up in the API response. We’re still investigating a few isolated reports, but most cases of long delays appear to be resolved. If you’ve made a request after Nov 20th where the response didn’t include the expected set of orders, please provide the X-Request-ID here and we’ll investigate.
We are also experiencing something strange going on with our API fulfillment status. When we manually fulfill orders, sometimes they go through at the right time, sometimes they are delayed by hours, and sometimes they flip back and forth from fulfilled to unfulfilled again, etc. This is all happening in the API, not in our store or on the customer side. Shopify support told us to inquire with some of the apps we are using to see if they are unintentionally causing this, but we don’t use any fulfillment apps or apps related to updating orders after they’ve been placed.
