FulfillmentOrders for Order line items that do not require shipping - Do they need to be Fulfilled?

[TPDEng]

 We have an order management app that pulls in open orders, gets their associated fulfillment orders, and allows customers to fulfill these fulfillment orders.

For Shopify Stores using Route Protection add-ons, they are seeing separate fulfillment orders created. 
These FulfillmentOrders(FOs) will just have the route protection on them, and the line item on the order says "requires_shipment": false.

Do they need to fulfill these fulfillment orders for line items that have a "requires_shipment" value of false? 
What happens if these non-shippable FO's are left unfulfilled?

Is there a clean way to auto-close & exclude FOs for requires_shipment: false?
Is there a clean way to have these line items included on the main FulfillmentOrder that includes their physical

items?

Thanks for any insight from Shopify or others who have solved this.

[ShopifyDevSup]

Hi @TPDEng 👋

It's a little unclear what you're looking to do here, and I would recommend starting by reviewing this guide on fulfillments for order management apps. Generally, the `FulfillmentOrder.supported_actions` would indicate the actions available, and the order management app would determine which actions to take. 

Do they need to fulfill these fulfillment orders for line items that have a "requires_shipment" value of false? 

• There are products that do not require shipping, but still require fulfillment - e.g. digital products, gift cards, etc. 

What happens if these non-shippable FO's are left unfulfilled?

• The line items would remain unfulfilled.

Is there a clean way to auto-close & exclude FOs for requires_shipment: false?

• It would be up to you and the merchant to discuss how to handle fulfillment for these items. They may have auto-fulfillment already setup for certain items. Logic would need to be built into the app to handle different cases. Potentially the merchant may use a third-party fulfillment service app for fulfilling items that do not require shipping - e.g. a fulfillment service app that fulfills digital products

Is there a clean way to have these line items included on the main FulfillmentOrder that includes their physical items?

• If you're referring to fulfillment order routing, this is currently in early access beta and only available in developer preview. In production (live merchant stores), one workaround would be to request fulfillment for multiple fulfillment orders from the same fulfillment service app or location (dependant on the supported actions). 

Hope that helps! 

@Umiko 

[TPDEng]

@Umiko Thank you for reviewing my question. 

We see line items on orders, creating separate Fulfillment Orders that are not physical objects or digital assets but just extra charges - "Route Protection" in this case. 

The supported actions on these Fulfillment Orders for this item is [ "create_fulfillment", "hold" ]

I want to help them resolve these so my questions are about choosing the best solution:

Option 1:  Ignore any Order line items with value of "requires_shipment": false 

We could ignore these associated Fulfillment Orders & leave them "unfulfilled" ( in your reply above you mentioned looking at the possible actions: the supported actions on these are  [ "create_fulfillment", "hold" ])

Can you leave unfulfilled Fulfillment Orders of this type (not a deliverable item) on an account indefinitely? 

Option 2: Automatically Fulfill Order line items with value of "requires_shipment": false

For order items like route protection, we could automatically "fulfill" the associated Fulfillment Order. We could have our app send this via the API. The other option is if there is a setting in Shopify per product to have certain items auto-fulfill - is this possible?

Your response above says:
    |   They may have auto-fulfillment already setup for certain items.

The linked document refers to auto-fulfilling entire orders. Can specific items/products within one order be auto-fulfilled & others manually? Or is this a per order/per store setting?


Option 3: Configure a product to not need any fulfillment/ not generate a Fulfillment Order

Is this possible? 

The example of Route Protection paid on an item seems like a good candidate if possible.

Option 4: Configure these Route Protection products to not generate separate Fulfillment Orders

This option has worked because then the Shopify store pulling orders from the API sees the Route Protection line item on their Fulfillment Order AND when they fulfill this via the API all fulfillment orders are closed (since there is only one in this case)

One downside to this is that warehouses & 3PLs might try to pack this non-physical/non-digital product when they see it on the Fulfillment Order.

This is also complicated when a store is shipping physical items from multiple locations - which FO would this line item end up on? Maybe not important as we haven't seen this yet.

Thanks for reviewing!

Ideal solutions seem to be having the ability to have certain items/products not generate any FulfillmentOrder OR if certain items can be marked as fulfilled automatically in the Shopify Platform.

If we do solve this by instead having our app auto-fulfill when we see a line item that doesn't require shipping we'd need a way to distinguish between non-deliverable items like Route Protection or a digital item that a customer needs delivered but not shipped.

[ShopifyDevSup]

Would you mind reposting this to our fulfillment FAQ thread here? These are great questions and potential solutions, and it would be really valuable to surface these for others facing similar concerns.

[TPDEng]

Will do. 
We saw a similar issue this week with Gift Cards that are virtual creating separate fulfillment orders and Stores weren't sure how to "fulfill" or resolve this fulfillment order.

[TPDEng]

Posted on the  fulfillment FAQ thread here

Here is the direct link to this issue