Why is there a delay in updating variant.next_incoming_date on my product page?

Topic summary

Liquid properties for restock messaging (variant.incoming and variant.next_incoming_date) stopped updating reliably after Shopify’s Transfers UI update; the properties are not deprecated per dev docs.

Key symptoms reported:

  • next_incoming_date returns null on new transfers or shows a stale/“ghost” date.
  • Edits or deletions to transfers don’t update the date; variant.incoming can stay true after receiving or deleting a transfer.
  • Transfers can’t be marked “completed,” and expected dates linger in admin lists.
  • Items added to edited transfers don’t show dates; timezone offsets display the prior day (e.g., GMT+8).

Workarounds used:

  • Duplicate a pending transfer, keep it pending, then delete the duplicate to make next_incoming_date reappear (sometimes with a 1‑day offset).
  • Use manual “Incoming”/month tags.
  • Create a brand‑new transfer per affected item to clear ghost dates.

Shopify support acknowledged a known issue; partial fixes restored dates for some but not edits/deletions. Later updates indicate improvements, and some stores report full resolution after recreating transfers, though edge cases persist.

Status: improving but not universally resolved; monitor and consider the above workarounds.

Summarized with AI on January 10. AI used: gpt-5.

I’m curious what your tagging method is to display back-in-stock dates on products pages, could you describe how you did that?