Retrieving Shipping Costs via API

Retired Boards Appdev Fulfillment Api

Topic summary

Merchants need programmatic access to shipping label costs purchased through Shopify’s fulfillment system for accurate reporting and financial reconciliation. Currently, this data is not exposed through the standard Orders API.

Current Workaround:

  • Use the Events API to retrieve shipping_label_created_success events (and related verbs like external_shipping_label_created_success, cancelled events)
  • Parse the event message string (e.g., “You purchased a shipping label for $9.50 USD”) to extract costs
  • Multiple participants confirm this text-parsing approach works but is fragile and breaks if message format changes
  • Return label costs cannot be retrieved using this method

Key Issues:

  • The shipping_lines array in Orders API remains null even after fulfillment
  • No structured data format (like an arguments property) exists for shipping costs
  • The workaround requires parsing unstructured text, creating maintenance risks
  • Official Node.js library doesn’t support the order events endpoint natively

Status:

  • Thread spans 2019-2024 with ongoing requests
  • Shopify mentioned a limited beta in 2022 for label purchasing via API
  • No formal API endpoint has been released as of 2024
  • Community expresses frustration over the multi-year delay for this “basic” functionality needed for cost accounting, staff commissions, and freight reporting
Summarized with AI on November 8. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
23

Is there any other api which can provide us the shipping cost in any specific node?. Currently we need to parse this from events.

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