One of the more confusing parts of the Fulfillment API changes is the status of fulfillment_service. While the changes make sense when your stores integrate with physical fulfillment providers and systems that have multiple warehouses (which I assume is what triggered all these changes) it makes less or no sense if your fulfillment systems provide digital goods.
Let’s say I have X amount of products on my stores and they use one of three fulfillment services:
- “Digital service A”
- “Digital service B”
- “Physical Service C”
“Physical Service C” only has one warehouse so there is little benefit for my stores to be able to handle multiple locations per service, but I do understand it’s purpose. Maybe one day we’ll have two warehouses.
The digital ones make less sense. The documentation here adds to the confusion and I get the sense that Shopify is somewhat aware about the limits of this situation:
If you need to determine whether a product is a gift card, then you should continue to use this field until an alternative is available.
This focuses on gift cards but really this is a digital goods issue.
… As a result, we recommend that you use the InventoryLevel resource if you need to determine where a product variant is stocked.> > If you previously set this field, then we recommend that you instead connect an inventory item to a location. Each Location is associated with a single FulfillmentService. The value of this field after setting it will be as described above…
Adding Inventory Levels to digital goods isn’t the end of the world. It’s also a little silly. And so my question is: do we need to? Will we be able to keep updating the product variant resource to set fulfillment_service past 2022-10 ?
It looks like it’s still available in 2023-04 will it be in 2023-07?
?