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

Technical Q&A

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.
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The equivalent response I had received to my open case on this was

“As per Investigating this with our Dev the development team is aware of this issue thank you for reporting this, and the cause is due to be addressed by upcoming updates while I cannot provide an exact timeline of when a complete fix will be implemented, have peace of mind that this issue is being investigated and a resolution is being worked on.”

This feels more optimistic than your reply but hard to nail down. Both could be saying the same thing.