Unresolved - Must allow merchants to request fulfillment

Shopify Apps

Topic summary

A Shopify app developer is struggling to comply with a requirement that apps interacting with order management must allow merchants to request fulfillment. Their proposed solution involves:

  • Customers explicitly approving automatic fulfillment via checkbox
  • Third-party suppliers confirming orders by updating status from “not shipped” to “in progress” or “shipped”
  • Sending tracking updates back to Shopify at the order level

Core Technical Challenge:
The developer currently uses direct API connections with suppliers for real-time inventory updates (push method). However, Shopify’s new fulfillment service requirement would:

  • Force hourly polling instead of real-time updates
  • Take control of inventory management away from manual/API updates
  • Create problems when managing hundreds of webshops connected to multiple suppliers with rapidly changing stock levels

Unresolved Question:
How to bypass or ignore inventory management within the fulfillment service setup while continuing to update stock levels via API in real-time. The developer needs guidance on maintaining their current push-based inventory system while meeting the fulfillment request requirement.

The App Review Team redirected technical API questions to the developer community forum.

Summarized with AI on October 29. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Any app that interacts with order management must provide a way for merchants to manage fulfillment requests directly. This ensures that merchants have control over their order processes and can respond to customer needs effectively. As for how to implement this on your existing workflow, the App Review Team cannot adequately support you on this type of API-related question. We recommend posting in our .dev community for assistance as they are more knowledgeable in this regard.

We want to build this solution:

Each customer will be required to give explicit approval by ticking a checkbox, confirming that orders may be fulfilled automatically.
Next, we ensure that each supplier (i.e., the 3rd party supplier handling the shipments) must also approve the order.
We do this by requiring a status update from the 3rd party supplier — changing the order status from “not shipped” to either “in progress” or “shipped.”
After that, we send the status update and tracking information back to Shopify at the order level.

There is an important note. Currently, we have linked the vendors with direct api connection which provides accelerated tracking updates. So the suppliers we are working with are the 3rd party. It could be that at the beginning of the day 100 items are in stock and at the end of the day 0. If, according to your new API Endpoint, we start pilling the stock once an hour, this will cause a lot of problems. After all, it is not 1 webshop that is linked to 1 supplier, this could be 100s.
Can we keep the push setup for stock updates active or do you have another advise?

2

Hello winneramii,

Thank you for your reply! I already have feedback about the order flow, this is what we need to do:

It’s possible to fulfill orders automatically, so in case you fulfill your orders using 3-th party fulfillment services, fulfillment requests will be created. Keep in mind that this will affect all of your orders.
This can be configured under Settings → Checkout and accounts > Order Processing > Automatically fulfill the order’s line items.

This is the outstanding question, could you help with this:

Currently, we have linked the vendors with direct api connection which provides accelerated tracking updates. So the suppliers we are working with are the 3rd party. It could be that at the beginning of the day 100 items are in stock and at the end of the day 0. If, according to your new API Endpoint, we start pilling the stock once an hour, this will cause a lot of problems. After all, it is not 1 webshop that is linked to 1 supplier, this could be 100s.
Can we keep the push setup for stock updates active or do you have another advise?

3

In order to even create a fulfillment request, we first need to set up a fulfillment service. This service will then be responsible for both the fulfillment and the inventory levels of the products — which means we will no longer be able to adjust the inventory manually in the Shopify back office (as is currently possible). Nor will it be possible to update inventory via the API as we do now, since Shopify will start retrieving this information from us through a different method, once per hour.

How can we ensure that the inventory level in this request is ignored, so that we can continue to update it via the API?