When will Shopify fix their order exports?!

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A long-time Shopify user highlights critical limitations in the platform’s order export functionality.

Main Issues:

  • Multi-item orders create separate lines per SKU, but secondary lines contain mostly empty fields
  • This structure prevents proper analysis, such as calculating SKUs purchased per country
  • Fulfillment location data is missing from exports
  • Built-in reports are buggy and often fail to account for cancellations correctly

User’s Concern:
The poster believes these export deficiencies reflect that Shopify developers don’t use their own platform daily, as a complete export should be a basic feature.

Status:
The discussion remains open, with the original poster seeking community workarounds that don’t require purchasing additional paid apps.

Summarized with AI on October 31. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hello all,

I have been a long-time Shopify user and one of the fundamental flaw is that the developers and customer representatives clearly don’t use Shopify themselves on a daily basis…

One such mind-boggling issue is the order export, which is incomplete. My biggest issue with it is that, if a customer orders more than on item, then there will be a line per item in the export (fair enough), but the secondary lines will be mostly empty. This renders the export pretty useless for analysis such as calculating the number of SKU bought per country (among many other examples). Sure, there are reports, but they are buggy too (often not taking cancellations into account properly). Plus a proper, full export should be a basic thing.

One other missing data is the fulfilment location.

Maybe someone in this community will be able to help us find a workaround for this (and hopefully not yet another paid app for something that should be handled by Shopify), thank you in advance!