Developer changelog

As of API version 2021-07, you can use the GraphQL Admin API and Google Cloud Pub/Sub to subscribe to, update, and delete webhook subscriptions.

You can learn more about managing webhooks with Google Cloud Pub/Sub at Shopify.dev.

As of July 2021, you can use the BulkOperationRunMutation endpoint, a resilient and performant solution, to move data in bulk into a store in a bulk asynchronously.

Instead of running a GraphQL mutation multiple times, you can run a bulk mutation operation. This is a simple way for you to import all of their data, without being slowed down by throttles.

We currently provide support for the following mutations: * productCreate * collectionCreate * productUpdate * productUpdateMedia * productPageUpdate * productVariantUpdate * metafieldUpsert * priceListFixedPricesAdd * priceListFixedPricesDelete

Learn more about how to get started with Bulk Mutations.

As of version 2021-04 of the REST Admin API, the Checkout resource returns the application_type property for discounts that are added to a checkout. The field shows how the discount was applied. Valid values are automatic, discount_code, manual, and script.

To learn more, refer to the Checkout reference.

Metafields are currently available to Products and Product Variants in the unstable API version. When the stable API version 2021-07 is released, the Metafields will also be available to Shop Collections, Customers, Blogs, Articles and Pages.

When merchants sell on multiple sales channels, it can be difficult to determine whether the merchant or the sales channel is responsilbe for remitting sales taxes. For example, most marketplaces are the liable party for sales tax, and should be excluded from merchant sales tax filings.

As of the 2021-07 version of the REST and GraphQL orders APIs, a new field is now present on the TaxLine object: channel_liable. This field indicates whether the sales channel that submitted the order is liable for remittance for each tax line. It can contain the following values: - true indicates that the channel is responsible for remittance of the tax line. - false indicates that the channel is not responsible for remittance of the tax line. - null indicates that it is unknown who has the responsibility, and that the merchant should check with a local tax authority to determine their tax obligations.

The channel_liable field lets developers inform merchants that another party is responsible for sales tax remittance, which then helps merchants better understand the tax that they are responsible for.

As of API version 2021-07, the GraphQL Admin API returns XXX in response to an unrecognized currency code. XXX is the ISO code used to denote transactions that involve no currency.

In mutations, a CurrencyCode input value of XXX is invalid. XXX can only be returned as a result and not as an input value.

This change prevents order pages from breaking if payments include a currency code that's not in the list of [supported values for the CurrencyCode object](api/admin/reference/common-objects/currencycode).

The new Liquid input setting allows merchants to add custom Liquid code directly from the editor. The Liquid setting is similar to the HTML setting type, except it allows access to Liquid variables. This means merchants will be able to access global and template-specific Liquid objects without editing their theme code.

Learn more about this update in our developer documentation.

Refer to Dawn’s custom-liquid section for an example of how the Liquid setting can be implemented.

As of API version 2021-07, you can use the File API to create, update, and delete generic files and images. This functionality allows merchants to reuse files for different apps. These files are added to the Files page in Shopify admin.

Learn more about the File API on Shopify.dev.

With the Shopify GitHub integration, you can connect your GitHub user account or organization to your Shopify admin, and connect Git branches to themes in your store. Native support for version control allows you to make and track and manage changes to theme code, as well as collaborate with other developers and share progress in real time.

Learn more about the Shopify GitHub integration.

You can now access our post-purchase checkout extension beta. This allows you to start building high-converting experiences like upsell offers, survey, donation requests, and more.

For more information on getting started, requirements, limitations, and more, refer to our detailed developer documentation.

Theme developers can now use Shopify CLI to build themes.

You can now do the following:

• Develop, preview, and test changes using development themes
• Hot-reload CSS and Liquid section changes as you’re developing
• Initialize a new theme project using our reference theme, Dawn, as a starting point
• Push and publish themes from the command line
• Lint your theme’s code using Theme Check
• Populate test data for your theme, including products, customers, and draft orders

Learn more about developing themes using Shopify CLI.

Theme Check scans themes for errors and highlights Shopify theme and Liquid best practices. You can run these checks as a part of the Shopify Liquid Visual Studio Code extension. Theme Check identifies several types of issues within your theme code, including:

• Liquid syntax errors
• Missing templates
• Unused variables and snippets
• Unknown and deprecated tags
• Excessive snippet nesting
• Performance issues

Learn more about Theme Check.

Development themes are temporary, hidden themes that are connected to the Shopify store you’re using for development. When you run shopify theme serve, Shopify CLI automatically creates a development theme inside the store you’re working on, and will reuse that theme each time shopify theme serve is subsequently run during the same session. You don’t need to worry about others viewing or making edits to it because development themes are not visible on the Online store > Themes page.

Learn more about Development Themes.

We've released a new commerce-oriented type system for metafields. Metafields created with these new types from our APIs will be more interoperable across our system.

The type system is exposed through a new type field. The type field replaces the valueType field, which is now deprecated, and will be removed in our 2021-10 release.

Most new types map to the old MetafieldValueType enum, except for json_string and json. json replaces json_string, but json_string will continue to exist because it behaves differently than the new json type when referenced in Liquid.

Note: json_string will not automatically migrate to the json type.

Learn more about the type system and how to migrate to it in the Metafields documentation.

To learn more about these API changes, refer to our API reference documentation:

• Admin REST reference
• Admin GraphQL reference
• Storefront API reference

Dawn is Shopify’s first open source reference theme–built with performance and flexibility in mind, and using Online Store 2.0 features, including JSON templates, which support app blocks and sections on all pages.

Dawn uses a HTML-first, Javascript-only-as-needed approach to theme development, and can be used as a model for building new themes on Shopify. Using Shopify CLI, theme developers can clone Dawn as a starting point for building new themes.

View the Dawn repository on GitHub.

We've released a new commerce-oriented type system for metafields. Metafields created with these new types from our APIs will now be more interoperable across our system.

The type system is exposed through a new type field that replaces the existing valueType field which is now deprecated. To make the migration easier, this is a non-breaking change. Both fields being supported until 2021-10 when valueType will be removed.

To learn more about the API changes, refer to the API specific reference documentation:

• Admin REST reference
• Admin GraphQL reference
• Storefront API reference

Theme developers can now use dynamic sources to insert standard metafields and known resource properties as setting defaults.

Learn more about the type system and how to migrate to it in the Metafields documentation.

The Shopify Subscription APIs now support Authorize.net!

We have updated our CustomerPaymentMethod API on the September 2021 release to allow Shopify to store credit cards from Authorize.net and be used by the SubscriptionContract API.

Learn more about Shopify Subscription APIs.

Accurate and reliable sales data is critical to our merchants' businesses. It surfaces the insights they need to report on sales, reconcile their accounts, and measure and improve the performance of their business.

Shopify is releasing a new set of APIs that provide app developers the ability to query a list of all sales related changes on any Shopify order. You can now have a single consistent way to ensure your app is retrieving the most up to date and precise sales data as opposed to stitching order and sales data together through multiple resources. The APIs offer a variety of helpful metrics regarding each sale including detailed information about discounts, taxes, and the additional ability to reference information about the line item associated with the sale. You can think of it as a queryable audit trail to track all order changes from new sales, order edits, returns, and more.

To learn more about the new APIs, visit our getting started guide in the Shopify Developer Docs.

The Storefront API, which was previously limited to only private apps and public sales channel apps, can now also be used by custom apps to create custom buying experiences.

Learn more about the Storefront API here.

With the Developer Console, you no longer need to build your app extension in an isolated environment, you can now test your app extension with real store data in a local store environment. Any changes made to your local environment will render immediately, meaning you no longer need to publish your app to view your modifications.

You can also render both desktop and mobile testing environments.

Learn more about product subscription app extensions and the developer console.

App developers and their teams can independently investigate billing questions from merchants and issue app refunds directly from the Charge Overview page. Developers no longer need to contact Shopify Support to issue app refunds. By responding to merchant billing support inquiries directly, app developers can increase merchant satisfaction.

Staff acounts can use the new Manage refunds permission to issue app refunds so that app developers can decide which team members perform refunds. Developers can issue refunds for app charges up to $1,000.00 USD and app charges that were created less than a year ago.

To learn more about partner app refunds, refer to: Issuing app refunds page

The new Theme Kit Access app makes it easier for merchants to grant access to their theme. Instead of relying on a private app API password to authenticate, merchants can now leverage the Theme Kit Access app to create, share, and manage Theme Kit access with their partners.

To start leveraging the Theme Kit Access app, click here.

To reduce the complexity of searching for apps, we’ve reduced the number of app categories and subcategories in the Shopify App Store, and renamed some of our categories to better fit the merchant's vocabulary and search intent.

This change means that most developers will find their apps listed in different or renamed categories and subcategories, and therefore some might also have a different page rank.

To learn more about app store categorization, please visit the shopify.dev

You can now iterate through the global Liquid Pages object, instead of only being able to directly reference known pages through their handle. This allows you to access a paginated pages listing of up to 50 items at a time and produce HTML that is conditional to the page data that is available.

You can return properties for a specific page using {{ pages.pagename.propertyname }}:

<h1>{{ pages.about.title }}</h1>
<p>{{ pages.about.author }} says...</p>
<div>{{ pages.about.content }}</div>

You can also interate through up to 50 pages at a time with pagination:

<ul>
{%- paginate pages by 50 \-%}
    {%- for p in pages -%}
        <li>{{p.title}}</li>
    {%- endfor -%}
    {{ paginate | default\_pagination: next: 'Older', previous: 'Newer' }} 
{%- endpaginate \-%}
</ul>

We have added a new payment method type, CustomerPaypalBillingAgreement, to the 2021-07 release candidate that allows the ability to store Paypal Billing Agreements in Shopify to be used by SubscriptionContracts.

This change also introduces two new mutations. One to create a PayPal billing agreement for a customer, and one to update existing agreements. For more information on the new mutations, visit our documentation on customerPaymentMethodPaypalBillingAgreementCreate and customerPaymentMethodPaypalBillingAgreementUpdate

We've released the localization form, which lets you build country selectors into themes. Merchants can now offer different prices for different countries that share the same currency with international pricing.

The currency form remains backwards compatible for new and existing themes, however using the localization form is highly recommended.

Learn more about the localization form.

You can now iterate through the global Liquid Pages object, instead of only being able to directly reference known pages through their handle. This allows you to access a paginated pages listing of up to 50 items at a time and produce HTML that is conditional to the page data that is available.

{% comment %} 
    Before: Create a list of known pages in a store.  
{% endcomment %}

<ul>
    <li>{{pages.about.title}}</li>
    <li>{{pages.contact.title}}</li>
</ul>

{% comment %} 
    Now: Create a paginated list of pages that are present in a store. 
{% endcomment %}

<ul>
{%- paginate pages by 50 \-%}
    {%- for currentPage in pages -%}
        <li>{{currentPage.title}}</li>
    {%- endfor -%}
    {{ paginate | default\_pagination: next: 'Older', previous: 'Newer' }} 
{%- endpaginate \-%}
</ul>

As of May 2021, Shopify will automatically minify theme CSS when it is requested by the storefront. Minified CSS files are cached until the next time the underlying CSS file is updated.

Minification improves storefront performance, leading to a better buying experience for customers.

Learn more about performance and its benefits in the Shopify Help Center.

Apps can now query SellingPlanGroups that were created by another app using the new Shopify API Search query term app_id.

The app_id can be one of the following terms:

1. CURRENT (sellingPlanGroups(query:"app_id:CURRENT")) - The default behavior, where it returns all SellingPlanGroups created by the requesting app.
2. ALL (sellingPlanGroups(query:"app_id:ALL")) - Returns all SellingPlanGroups from all apps.
3. An app id number (sellingPlanGroups(query:"app_id:2525000000")) - Returns all SellingPlanGroups for the specified app id.

Learn more about the SellingPlanGroups query in the query root documentation.

The discount code creation job has been updated to enhance its performance, including an update to our request throttling. For best results, enqueue a discount code creation job, and then enqueue another job when the job completes.

For more information about discount code creation job, visit our developer documentation.

Zone information for United Kingdom will now return the following possible constituent countries for the UK:

• Name: England, Code: ENG
• Name: Northern Ireland, Code: NIR
• Name: Scotland, Code: SCT
• Name: Wales, Code: WLS
• Name: British Forces, Code: BFP

Merchants use provinces in their shipping zones settings to specify the rates for a country or province.

All existing shops that have United Kingdom in a zone will automatically include all UK constituent countries.

This data can be queried from the GraphQL admin api or REST admin api

Shipping/billing addresses in the UK are not supposed to contain these consitituent countries. To ensure that the shipping/billing address is displayed correctly, ensure you are using the format_address liquid filter to format correctly based on the address locale.

We've added an activity log for app store ads to help advertisers keep track of who completed which actions, and at what time, within their ads account.

To access the activity log, go to your Ads page and then click Activity log.

The following actions are tracked as of April 14. Some events may appear as early as March 31.

• Ad creation
• Ad status changes (active / paused / archived)
• Ad budget changes
• Keyword creation (inclusive of negative keywords)
• Keyword status changes (active / paused / removed)
• Keyword bid changes.

Learn more about advertising in the Shopify App Store on Shopify.dev.

We've introduced a host query parameter as part of the URI that Shopify redirects to after the OAuth grant flow. This parameter represents the domain that hosts your embedded app and is needed to initalize App Bridge 2.0 in the Shopify admin.

For most apps, there is no action required following this change. This change might be a breaking change if your app's hmac verification step doesn't verify the hmac using all the parameters available in the redirect URI.

For steps to verify the hmac parameter, see the "Verification" step of the Authenticate with OAuth guide.

To see what other changes are needed to use App Bridge 2.0, see Migrate your app to App Bridge 2

Store access controls adds enhanced workflows that let you work more securely on development stores, managed stores, and Plus Sandbox stores with your team and contractors.

Owners and staff members with the Manage members permission can now:

• Specify a level of access, for each type of store, for a staff member. You can select between no access, access to all stores, or access to specific stores. A staff member can log in to a store only when they’ve been allowed access.
• Allow select staff members to add, archive, or transfer ownership of stores.
• Provide access to a specific store for a staff member from the Team or Stores section of the Partner Dashboard.

To get started, head over to the Team section of the Partner Dashboard, and open up any team member’s profile. Learn more about the features in our Help documentation.

To help maintain app quality and marketplace trust on the Shopify App Store, we’re increasing app quality checks to ensure that published apps:

• Meet the most up-to-date version of requirements for public apps
• Meet our new app performance requirement to ensure apps don’t negatively impact store speeds
• Have clear and trustworthy app listings, that are without incentivized reviews.

If something is found during the quality check of your listed app that does not meet our criteria, then the app store team will email you with the required changes and next steps.

This is a possibly breaking call, where there's no way for Shopify to know if your app is using the 'one' value. As a result, we will not delist any app that continues to get this warning.

As of API version 2020-07, we're updating the allocation method for discounts that have set the target_selection as explicit. Currently, Shopify applies these discounts to a single line item, which corresponds to an allocation method of one. With this change, the allocation methods will instead include "each" and "across".

We're making this change to add "each" functionality, and simplify the discount syntax, as "one" and "across" functionally both discount the final price by a set amount.

This change also affects discount_applications on the following webhook payloads :

• orders/cancelled
• orders/create
• orders/fulfilled
• orders/paid
• orders/partially_fulfilled
• orders/updated

For more information, please visit the community forum post.

We’ve just released a change to predictive search that fixes the issue where predictive search API returns results in multiple languages. This helps customers searching for products on translated storefronts.

Recent changes requiring two-factor authentication on payments in Europe have required 3D Secure 2.0 (3DS) coverage for subscriptions particularly in a recurring billing scenario.

This update includes the full buyer end-to-end experience for a 3DS challenge when attempting recurring billing.

If a European buyer’s bank requires authentication, then Shopify notifies the buyer in an email of the 3DS challenge requirement. If the buyer authentication fails, then it's the partner’s responsibility to retry the payment.

For information on 3DS support for subscriptions and more detail on Shopify and partner responsibilities in this process, click here.

Introducing price lists, a new API resource that allows you to configure international pricing.

Price lists can be used to create percentage price adjustments and fixed variant prices that are applied in the online store and checkout.

Learn more about the price list API in Shopify Developers.

We’ve introduced a new app charge overview page in the Partner Dashboard, so app developers can view all one-time charges, app subscriptions, and usage charges made to merchants. This helps developers access key details to investigate app charges for answering merchants’ billing inquiries and better understand payouts.

Learn more about the app charge overview page on Shopify.dev

As of API version 2021-04, GiftCard GraphQL APIs are available for custom and private apps installed on Shopify Plus stores. App developers can now use the APIs to query all gift cards within a shop, as well as create, update, and disable gift cards. To get started, check out our tutorial on managing gift cards using the GraphQL Admin API.

GiftCard REST API availability has also been extended to custom apps installed on Shopify Plus stores. Partners developing custom apps can now use Gift Card functionality when creating custom apps for Plus merchants. Learn more about the GiftCard REST resource in our developer documentation.

As of GraphQL API version 2019-04, the list of valid country codes will retroactively include TA (Tristan da Cunha) and AC (Ascension Island). These British Overseas Territories were formerly included under the GB country code, but they are now distinct in order to comply with post-Brexit mailing address formats. Our APIs already support other British Territories, including AI, BM, FK, GG, GI, GS, IM, IO, JE, MS, PN, SH, TC, and VG. This change affects the shipping locations for all merchants who ship to the “rest of world” shipping zone.

The impacted enums are CountryCode in the GraphQL Storefront API and CountryCode in the GraphQL Admin API.

This change will go live on March 22, 2021.

Over the next week, we’ll be rolling-out new metrics in the ads reporting dashboard for Shopify App Store ads. The new metrics will help developers to measure their return on ad spend, the number of customers gained through ads, and customer acquisition costs.

New metrics include: * Customers * Revenue * Customer Acquisition Cost * Return on Ad Spend * Conversion Rate

The new metrics will be available on impressions served on or after May 5, 2020.

These additional metrics and soon-to-be added personalized keyword optimization suggestions will help make sure that your advertising efforts trend towards a positive return on investment.

You can learn more about these new metrics on Shopify.dev and in frequently asked questions.

As of 2021-04, you can use the SUBSCRIPTION_POLICY value in the existing ShopPolicyType enum. This lets you retrieve and modify a shop's subscription policy.

Lean more about the ShopPolicy object and the shopPolicyUpdate mutation.

As of API version 2021-04, a new field called delivery_method is present on the FulfillmentOrder object in the REST Admin. This field can contain an id and a method_type. The method_type can be one of the following values: local, none, pick_up, retail, or shipping.

delivery_method represents the type of method that is used to transfer a product or service to a customer. The field was previously released in GraphQL API 2020-10 version.

For more information about FulfillmentOrder, visit our developer documentation.

Products that require a subscription for purchase, but have no selling plans associated with the product variants, are no longer available for purchase in the Online Store sales channel. Previously, a product would become available as a one-time purchase if no selling plans were attached.

The Liquid property requires_selling_plan on Product and ProductVariants has been updated to reflect this change. The Liquid property still states whether a selling plan is required to purchase the product variant. Previously, the property would return false if the product was set as subscription-only in the admin, but had no selling plans associated with the product variants.

Learn more about setting products as subscription only.

With the launch of automatic international tax-inclusive pricing, whether or not prices have taxes included can vary based on the customer's country.

This change introduces a new liquid method on the cart drop, cart.taxes_included.

Learn more about automatic international tax-inclusive pricing in the Shopify Developer Docs.

Shopify now supports adding embedded Vimeo videos to products, leveraging the ExternalVideo object.

Many ExternalVideo API implementations assume that all external video objects represent YouTube videos. To help determine where the video is hosted, we're introducing the new field host to ExternalVideo that will return a MediaHost enum value (currently VIMEO or YOUTUBE).

Additionally, we're introducing two new MediaErrorvalues EXTERNAL_VIDEO_EMBED_NOT_FOUND_OR_TRANSCODING and EXTERNAL_VIDEO_EMBED_DISABLED for Vimeo error handling.

If a merchant has used price adjustments by region, or set specific pricing by region, then those prices are now reflected in the presentment_prices property of Shopify's Product API. Prices for the Eurozone are still reflected as one price across all countries or regions that use the Euro.

Learn more about international pricing in the Shopify Help Centre.

Kit, a Shopify app that automates some marketing tasks, and the Kit Skills API will be deprecated on April 1, 2021. The API will be removed on August 31, 2021, and won't work after that date.

To Kit Skills developers, we are grateful for your partnership and the amazing things that you do for Shopify merchants.

For more information, refer to the frequently asked questions in the Shopify developer documentation for Kit.

We’ve released a new Shopify Admin API library for Node. This library makes interacting with the Admin API easier, to help accelerate app development for developers who use Node frameworks.

The following resources have been updated to use this new library:

• The koa-shopify-auth package
• Our Node + React app tutorial
• The Shopify App CLI

For more information on how to use this new library, refer to our Getting started guide. You can also submit issues and feature requests to the shopify-node-api repo.

The DiscountCode lookup API now includes requested the API version in the location URL that it returns, instead of falling back to the earliest supported version.

Example: /admin/api/<API_VERSION>/price_rules/<PRICE_RULE_ID>/discount_codes/<DISCOUNT_ID>.json

Learn more about the DiscountCode lookup API on Shopify.dev.

Shopify now supports adding embedded Vimeo videos to products, leveraging the external_video object.

Many ExternalVideo API implementations assume that all external video objects represent YouTube videos. To avoid any complications arising from this change, version 2021-01 and earlier of our APIs don't return ExternalVideo objects that represent Vimeo videos.

You can access Vimeo videos using the unstable version of our APIs. We will also be introducing the ability to detect the video host in 2021-04.

Learn more about Liquid media filters and the external_video object on Shopify.dev.

The Shopify Subscription APIs now support Shopify Scripts.

For information on how to use Shopify Scripts with subscriptions, refer to Scripts for subscriptions in the Shopify Help Center.

For more information on the Subscription APIs and upcoming roadmap, including the timeline for upcoming features, visit the Subscriptions FAQ on Shopify.dev.

Over the next few weeks, we're rolling out a new webhook metrics report in the Partner Dashboard. This report lets you track failed webhook deliveries, monitor response times, and find removed webhook subscriptions for your public and custom apps in real time.

You can access the report from the Apps page of your Partner Dashboard. Click on the percentage in the Webhook deliveries column to view the webhook metrics report for your app.

You can search your detailed delivery logs by subscription ID, webhook ID, or shop ID to troubleshoot any failures, and keep your app reliably consuming webhooks and providing merchants with a great app experience.

Learn more about using the webhook metrics report on Shopify.dev.

You can now detect the theme editor programmatically using Liquid and JavaScript. In Liquid, you can use request.design_mode. In JavaScript, you can use Shopify.designMode.

Workaround methods, such as content_for_header contains in Liquid, or searching the page URL in JavaScript, aren't supported and won't continue to work in the new theme editor. To make your app or theme compatible with the new theme editor, you need to update your code to use a supported method.

Learn more about detecting the theme editor on Shopify.dev.

In our 2020-04 API version, we added validation requiring the compare_at_price field to always be greater than the price field on variants.

After further review of use cases around the current use of the compare_at_price field, we're reverting the addition of validation between the price and compare_at_price fields on variants, and notifications about this change as we will be removed from all versions.

If you're currently seeing notifications about this change in your API Health dashboard, you can safely ignore them. If you've already updated your app to handle this breaking change, there's no need for action. Your app will continue to function throughout the revert.

Shops with checkout.liquid enabled can now upgrade to a new version of Shopify Checkout, unlocking powerful new checkout features—like subscription apps and local pickup—while keeping checkout.liquid customizations in-tact.

All checkout upgrades need to be completed by February 26, 2021. Shops that don’t complete the upgrade within the checkout upgrade window (January 25, 2021 to February 26, 2021) will be upgraded automatically, which may cause some checkout.liquid customizations to break.

Find instructions for the checkout upgrade process in the Shopify help center.

Note: Only shops with checkout.liquid enabled need to perform the upgrade.

If a merchant uninstalls a subscriptions app, then 48 hours later selling plans and associated records (selling plan groups, policies, and their associations to products and variants) are deleted. Subscription contracts and the product and variant records themselves won't be affected.

Learn more about selling plans in the Shopify Help Center.

Two new staff permissions have been added to the Partner Dashboard, giving you more granular control over what your organization’s staff members can access.

• View referrals grants access to the Referrals page.
• Manage affiliate campaigns grants access to the Affiliate tools page, and affiliate tools on the Referrals page. Staff members with this permission can also manage affiliate campaigns. This permission is available only to organizations that are part of the Shopify Affiliate Program.

Access to these features was previously controlled by the Manage shops permission. Staff members in your organization who have the Manage shops permission are granted View referrals as part of this update. If you are part of the Shopify Affiliate Program, then staff members who have the Manage shops permission are also granted the Manage affiliate campaigns permission as part of this update.

To learn more about staff permissions, visit the Shopify Help Center.

All developers can now request access to the Subscription APIs and Product Subscription App Extension. Using these tools, developers can build flexible apps that support new selling methods for merchants, and are compatible with all of Shopify’s platform features (including discounts, shipping, reporting, and payments).

To learn more about building with the new Subscription APIs and tooling, refer to our developer documentation.

The Checkout API no longer returns the amount of inventory remaining when a checkout is created or updated and there are not enough products in stock. This change was made to protect the privacy of our merchants.

To support older themes, the option remaining: 1 is returned from the API. However, this number doesn't change, or represent the actual amount of inventory remaining. This option will be removed in a future version of the API.

Learn more about the updated error response by reading our Checkout API documentation on Shopify.dev.

API access to App event, Earning, and Experts Marketplace Job data is now available to all Shopify Partners through the new Partner GraphQL API. This API allows programmatic access to data that was previously available only on the Partner Dashboard.

To get started with this API, visit Shopify.dev.

On the Shopify Plus plan, brands get exclusive access to the checkout.liquid file, enabling them to make flexible customizations to Shopify Checkout. However, they need to upgrade Shopify Checkout periodically in order to unlock new checkout features while ensuring any checkout.liquid customizations remain in-tact.

The next checkout upgrade will take place between January 25, 2021 to February 26, 2021. Only shops with checkout.liquid enabled need to perform the upgrade.

Learn more about the checkout upgrade process and view a full list of the new Shopify Checkout features in the Shopify Help Center.

As of the 2021-01 API version, product media information in the GraphQL Storefront API is returned in order of its position.

As of the 2021-01 API version, a new field translated_name will be available in DeliveryCountry and DeliveryProvince types. The translated name of the country or province is based on the user locale.

When billing for your app, your charges and subscriptions will transition between a few different states.

One of these transitions is the accepted to active state.

When a merchant accepts a new one-time charge or subscription, the charge transitions from pending to accepted. However, the merchant is not charged until you manually activate that charge, transitioning the status from accepted to active.

To simplify the billing flow for apps and make it easier to use, we're removing the need for that request.

Starting in the 2021-01 release: when a charge is approved by a merchant, the charge will immediately transition from pending to active. Check out our updated REST Admin API billing guide for more information.

As of Storefront API version 2021-01, you can obtain the SEO details for Product, Blog, and Page nodes. This new field returns translated content if any is available.

We've made some updates to our API License and Terms of Use and our Partner Program Agreement to protect the integrity of our platform and clarify how apps should be built and distributed on the Shopify platform.

These changes come into effect as of today, January 1, 2021.

We encourage all developers on our platform to review and be familiar with the API License and Terms and the Partner Program Agreement, so that you understand how to build, run, and grow your app and development business on our platform.

For more information and frequently asked questions, please visit the Shopify Help Center.

In April 2020, we released a breaking change that added additional validation requiring the compare_at_price to be strictly greater than the price on variants, in order to provide a more consistent experience for apps consuming these values.

Due to an internal oversight, apps affected by this breaking change were not notified of that fact until very recently. In order to provide apps with enough time to do this migration, we are extending the migration window for this change by 1 full versioning cycle. Effectively, this change will move from 2020-04 to 2020-07.

We encourage you to stay on top of changes by regularly viewing your API Health report, checking for the presence of a deprecation header, and by reading through our quarterly release notes.

Learn more about this breaking change in the 2020-07 release notes.

Earlier this year, Localization Extensions were launched to allow additional information to be collected upon checkout. This feature can be used to collect information for stores to meet various countries' regulatory requirements (e.g. Brazillian CPF numbers).

Version 2021-01 of the GraphQL Admin API adds functionality to update those values using an order mutation.

For more information, refer to the GraphQL Admin API reference docs for the OrderInput object and the DraftOrderInput object.

As of the 2021-01 version, we've made it easier to determine the original width and height of storefront images before attempting to download and render it. This will help with optimizing performance of client-side rendering logic, such as preventing content reflow from lazy-loaded images.

Learn more about the image width and height properties in the Shopify Storefront API documentation.

As of the 2021-01 API version, you can now proxy script tags added to Storefront's via the ScriptTags API through Shopify infrastructure, allowing Shopify's globally distributed CDN to cache and serve your script tags.

Learn more about the new cache property in the ScriptTags API documentation.

The following Subscription API resources received updates:

• Descriptions updated for SellingPlanAnchor.day.
• Added the pricingPolicy field to SubscriptionLine and SubscriptionLineInput.
• Added createdAt and completedAt DateTime fields to SubscriptionBillingAttempt.
• Added nextBillingDate to SubscriptionDraftInput allowing the nextBillingDate to be batched with other changes.
• Added the expiresSoon field to CustomerCreditCard.
• Removed DELIVERY from SellingPlanRecurringDeliveryPolicyIntent.
• The subscriptionDraftLineUpdate mutation now accepts partial input. Unspecified fields retain their previous value.
• Added the customer_payment_methods/revoke webhook.
• Added the admin_graphql_api_id attribute to customer_payment_methods/*. Manually building the resource ID is no longer required.

Private apps can now check their deprecated calls through the Deprecated endpoint using the REST API.

Details can be found in the REST API reference doc

As of 2021-01, you can query transaction fees on the OrderTransaction resource. The TransactionFee provides you with a breakdown of the fees associated with an order transaction, such as processing fees or foreign exchange fees.

Learn more by visiting the OrderTransaction and TransactionFee reference docs.

Update March 11 2021: The version was delayed to 2021-04 from the originally posted 2021-01.

Duties are now available on the 2021-04 version of the Storefront API. You can query duties on the Checkout and Order resources.

Learn more by visiting the Checkout and Order resource reference docs.

Details of resources affected:

API Version 2021-04 or later (includes duties)

Checkout

lineItemsSubtotalPrice: The sum of all the prices of all the items in the checkout. Duties, taxes, shipping and discounts excluded.

paymentDueV2: The amount left to be paid. This is equal to the cost of the line items, duties, taxes and shipping minus discounts and gift cards.

subtotalPriceV2: Price of the checkout before duties, shipping and taxes.

totalPriceV2: The sum of all the prices of all the items in the checkout, duties, taxes and discounts included.

Order

currentSubtotalPrice: The subtotal of line items and their discounts, excluding line items that have been removed. Does not contain order-level discounts, duties, shipping costs, or shipping discounts. Taxes are not included unless the order is a taxes-included order.

currentTotalPrice: The total amount of the order, including duties, taxes and discounts, minus amounts for line items that have been removed.

subtotalPriceV2: Price of the order before duties, shipping and taxes.

totalPriceV2: The sum of all the prices of all the items in the order, duties, taxes and discounts included (must be positive).

API Version 2020-10 or earlier (does not include duties)

Checkout

lineItemsSubtotalPrice: The sum of all the prices of all the items in the checkout. Taxes, shipping and discounts excluded.

paymentDueV2: The amount left to be paid. This is equal to the cost of the line items, taxes and shipping minus discounts and gift cards.

subtotalPriceV2: Price of the checkout before shipping and taxes.

totalPriceV2: The sum of all the prices of all the items in the checkout, taxes and discounts included.

Order

currentSubtotalPrice: The subtotal of line items and their discounts, excluding line items that have been removed. Does not contain order-level discounts, shipping costs, or shipping discounts. Taxes are not included unless the order is a taxes-included order.

currentTotalPrice: The total amount of the order, including taxes and discounts, minus amounts for line items that have been removed.

subtotalPriceV2: Price of the order before shipping and taxes.

totalPriceV2: The sum of all the prices of all the items in the order, taxes and discounts included (must be positive).

TL;DR - In high-volume situations, the timeout for responding to rate requests from Shopify will be dynamically adjusted based on the number of requests per minute.

The timeout for CarrierService API rate requests will be changed to a dynamic value depending on how many requests per minute (RPM) are being made by the client. This change is to optimize the performance of checkout, while still giving apps the appropriate amount of time to calculate shipping rates. These limits are applied to each app-shop pair. The new timeout values are as follows:

• RPM under 1500: read timeout will be 10 seconds
• RPM between 1500 and 3000: read timeout will be 5 seconds
• RPM over 3000: read timeout will be 3 seconds

These values are upper limits and should not be interpreted as a goal to develop towards. The requests are also treated as tiers, so only those requests above a given threshold will be given a lower timeout.

Shopify is constantly evaluating the performance of the platform and working towards improving resilience as well as app capabilities. As such, these numbers may be adjusted outside of our normal versioning timelines. The data and statistics have shown the impact to our partner community with these thresholds are minimal.

For more information on the CarrierService API, read our documentation here: https://shopify.dev/docs/admin-api/rest/reference/shipping-and-fulfillment/carrierservice

As of 2021-01, apps can access Shopify Payments extended authorization fields by querying the GraphQL Admin or REST Admin APIs.

On November 2nd, we will be introducing a new collection of apps for both subscriptions and post-purchase upsells in the Shopify App Store. These are the first apps built directly within Shopify Checkout using the new Subscriptions APIs and post purchase app extensions, creating a more smooth and integrated experience.

With this release, the previous subscription apps and post-purchase upsell apps that bypass the Shopify Checkout will no longer be available for download. Merchants currently using these apps will continue being able to use them, but any new clients will need to select from one of the publicly available options that are properly integrated into the Shopify Checkout. All the most popular apps in these categories have replatformed their apps to leverage these new APIs and extensions and can be found in our new collection.

View the new collection of apps on the Shopify App Store, and learn more about the Subscriptions APIs in our Shopify developer documentation.

We've released a new version of Debut that contains the new pickup availability feature. This feature lets merchants show customers whether a product in the online store is available for local pickup. On each product page, the pickup availability section shows whether the product is available, and the estimated time frame for pickup.

Learn more about how merchants can show pickup availability from the Shopify Help Center.

Want to implement this feature in your own themes? Checkout the Add pickup availability to product pages tutorial.

To maintain a safe and secure working relationship between merchants and partners, we've added an additional layer of security when requesting access to a store through a collaborator account. Merchants can choose to set a 4-digit collaborator request code to only receive collaborator requests from those who have the exact code. If this feature is enabled, then you'll need to get the code from merchants to request access to their store.

For more information on the collaborator request code and where to enter the code in your partner dashboard, visit our documentation.

We've released a new reporting column for App store ads - relevance. The relevance column provides advertisers with a more explicit signal for how relevant their app is for any given search term or keyword.

To learn more about creating ads in the Shopify App Store, refer to our documentation.

On October 14th, we’re introducing a new ‘Charge_ID’ field in the Partner Payout CSV, so app developers can link app charges with a particular payout item. This new field will help app developers reconcile app charges with their payouts.

Note that the new Charge_ID field is only available for data generated in new Partner Payouts CSV file downloads.

For more information on the Partner Payout CSV, visit the Shopify Help Center.

We’re excited to introduce APIs and tooling that will enable you to build support for subscriptions into the cart and product pages on the storefront.

You can use the Subscription APIs and Product Subscription Extension to develop flexible apps that support new selling methods for merchants, and are compatible with all of Shopify’s platform features (including discounts, shipping, reporting, and payments).

Start developing new subscription apps today! Request access to the new APIs using our early access sign up form.

To learn more about building with the new Subscription APIs and tooling, refer to our developer documentation.

To learn how we’re making Shopify checkout more extensible for you, check out our Web Design and Development blog.

As of 2020-10, legal settings can now be modified using the new Legal Policies API. Legal policy apps will be able to update the text content of policies by specified policy type (e.g. refund policy or privacy policy).

Learn more about the all new Legal Policy API in our developer docs.

In the 2020-10 version release, the status field was added to the product resource in both the REST Admin API and GraphQL Admin API. Merchants can use the field to identify, filter, and manage products based on their current status: draft, active, or archived.

Merchants can save new products as a draft and work on them iteratively until they’re complete and ready to be made available to selected sales channels with an active status. Merchants can also archive products they’re no longer selling to keep their product list organized, free of clutter, while retaining all product information.

To learn more about product status changes, refer to our product status API guide and 2020-10 release notes.

The following fields were previously deprecated, and have now been fully removed as of 2020-10.

• Refund.restocked
• RefundLineItem.refundType

These fields were deprecated by RefundLineItem.restockType.

For more information, see the RefundLineItem object in our documentation.

As of the 2020-10 API version, you can query a shop's shipping policy using the shippingPolicy field on the Shop object.

To learn more about the shippingPolicy field, refer to our developer reference documentation.

We've updated bid suggestions to give advertisers a more accurate view into what bid is required for their app to be competitive for any given keyword. Bid suggestions take into account your current relevance score when surfacing a suggested bid range.

• For exact match keywords, the likelihood that your ad will show up on the first page of search results increases.
• For broad match keywords, the competitiveness against other advertisers who bid on that keyword is measured.

To learn more about creating ads in the Shopify App Store, refer to our documentation.

Due to low usage, as of September 30th we no longer support AdRoll on Shopify App Store listings. For remarketing, we offer alternatives such as Google and Facebook Pixel support.

Learn more about setting up app listing tracking and retargeting from the Shopify Developer documentation.

The customer privacy API is a browser-based, Javascript API that enables developers to read and write cookies related to a buyer's privacy preferences. As of 2020-10, the API is available to all Shopify online stores as a property on the global window.Shopify object.

For more information on the new Customer Privacy API, visit our developer documentation.

We've made improvements to the rich text editor for Blogs posts, Pages, Products and Collections. You can now manually add RGB/HEX codes into the rich text editor with the new color picker, making it easier to precisely match text and background color to your brand and style.

Learn more about using the rich text editor from the Shopify Help Center.

As of 2020-10, apps can now add manual or percentage-based discounts to any item that is added while editing an order with the GraphQL Admin API.

For more information about using discounts with order edits, including the specific mutations to add discounts, visit the tutorial on editing an existing order with the Admin API.

The theme editor has been rebuilt in React and includes an updated mobile theme editing experience and many UI enhancements. The rebuild also decreases load times for large themes, making it easier and faster for merchants to set up and customize their online store, while also laying a new foundation for future improvements to the theme editing experience.

Update 9/25/2020: If you provide an app that detects usage in the Theme Editor, then please ensure that you’re using the official JavaScript API, Shopify.designMode, to detect the Theme Editor. Other implementations involving detection of the URL could cause broken experiences for merchants. For more information please review the community forum or the partner discussion area.

To learn more about the new theme editor, please visit the Shopify Help Center.

As of the 2020-10 API version, apps can add an array of media objects to product variants. Currently the array is limited to only one media object of type image.

For more information on how to work with product variants and media using the GraphQL API, refer to our variant media tutorial.

Additionally, we've added a new mime type field to the MediaImage object in the GraphQL API.

As of the 2020-10 REST API, checksums will be provided on assets that were recently updated.

If you use a client that supports checksums (ie Theme Kit 1.1 or newer), then the time it will take to sync your local files and the bandwidth used will be drastically reduced.

For more information, please see the checksum field in the REST API.

Please also see the blog post: How We Improved Theme Development Tooling Using Checksums

Beginning today, partners who want to test orders in development stores can only process payments using the following methods: * Shopify's test payment provider (Bogus Gateway). * A payment provider set to test mode.

If you want to test your development store using real transactions, then you can select and purchase a Shopify plan in the account settings of your development store.

This change was applied to all newly created development stores on March 30, 2020, as mentioned in our changelog update here. Beginning September 14, 2020, this change will be applicable across all development stores.

Learn more about test orders in the Shopify Help Center.

You can now subscribe to Shopify Payments dispute events with webhooks. The disputes/create and disputes/update topics are now available in all supported API versions.

For more information, visit the webhooks topic documentation.

Version 2020-10 of the GraphQL API will now allow you to directly query an order that is associated with a given refund.

For more information about the Refund object, visit our developer documentation

Earlier in the year we released the ability to refund duties using the GraphQL API. Now, as of version 2020-10, we are releasing the same functionality on the REST API.

For more information, please see the refund_duties property in the REST API.

Apps can now get additional context about batch discount code creation errors by looking into the new logs field. This field will return any error the system reported when trying to create the discount codes based on the price rule definition.

To learn more about this new field, visit the reference documentation.

Apps can now create BXGY discounts with a minimum purchase amount prerequisite via the REST Admin API.

A new prerequisite_to_entitlement_purchase field was added that defines the minimum purchase amount required to qualify for the discount.

For more information, visit the Price Rules API reference.

You can now access the online store speed report data from the Stores page in the partner dashboard, so you can quickly identify which clients might need your help making their online store faster. You can view store performance data for all of your managed stores and sort stores by speed score.

Learn more about the online store speed report in the Shopify Help Center.

Available today through the Partner Dashboard, the POS product recommendations app extension allows app developers who build product recommendations, and cross-sell and up-sell apps, to extend their app functionality to Shopify POS.

Product recommendations are a valuable feature for merchants with both online and physical store locations, who are looking to surface just-in-time product recommendations that are consistent across all storefronts, and make it easier for store staff to make more data-driven and informed purchase recommendations to buyers. This app extension allows app developers to provide this surface, while in turn making their app available to a whole new customer base.

To learn more about the POS product recommendations app extension, please visit the Shopify Help Centre.

As of API version 2020-10, we are removing the ability to change any tax field data using the Country and Province resources.

Please see the 2020-10 release notes for more information.

You can now subscribe to events related to delivery profiles with webhooks.

In the past, changes to a shop’s shipping zones triggered the shop/update webhook, but didn’t include any information about the new zone configuration. To stay current, apps would then have to send a follow up request to the shipping_zones endpoint and compare the results with their local copies of the data.

With the release of delivery profiles, we wanted to provide a proper webhook topic for apps that would allow them to avoid these frequent callbacks. As of today, you can now subscribe to the profile_create, profile_update, and profile_delete webhooks.

For more information, see the webhooks topic documentation, our updated delivery profiles guide, and the 2020-10 release notes.

As of the 2020-10 version, we have added information to fulfillment orders that allow API clients to understand the delivery method of any fulfillment order.

A fulfillment order delivery method can help you figure out how the line items represented by the fulfillment order should be delivered, or if they need to be picked up in-store.

Learn more about Fulfillment Orders and their associated delivery methods in our documentation.

Starting in the next few weeks, private app permissions will be set to Off by default in all non-Plus stores. This ensures that merchants opt in to all private apps and understand the permissions they’re giving to developers. All current private apps will continue to function, but cannot be modified until merchants re-enable private apps in the Shopify admin.

If you are looking for an alternative to private apps when building bespoke apps for merchants, consider using custom apps.

To learn more about private app permissions, please visit the Shopify Help Center.

Previously apps could only edit orders created through a Shopify channel (for example, POS, online store, or draft orders). Going forward, apps can now edit orders they created. To determine if your app can edit an order on Shopify, you can query the merchantEditable field on the Order object. If the return value of this field is true, your app can edit the order.

A new feature has been added to make it easier to manage and optimize your ads on the Shopify App Store - Recommended Keywords.

Recommended keywords - Keyword recommendations are now provided when partners add keywords. These recommendations are generated based on organic search performance, app category and other factors.

Learn more about Shopify App Store Ads in the Help Centre

On August 4, 2020, we resumed the activity requirement to continue receiving recurring commission payments for referrals and Plus upgrades. If you are a Partner that receives recurring commission payments for referrals or Plus upgrades, please check the Referrals page in your Partner Dashboard to understand how much time you have until you need to complete another activity. The activity requirement does not apply to ongoing earnings from app sales, theme sales, or any Partner activity other than referrals and Plus upgrades.

Shopify will now limit the amount of checkouts that can be created on the Storefront per minute. If an API client exceeds this throttle, then a 200 Throttled error response is returned.

For more information, see API rate limits.

Our new App Bridge authentication beta introduces session tokens to empower developers to create faster apps that are compatible with all modern browsers. Session token-based authentication does not depend on cookies, but instead relies on a Shopify-generated token that your app needs to send with every request.

To learn how you can participate in the beta and get started with App Bridge authentication and session tokens, refer to our developer documentation.

We've added a new report to the Shopify admin that will help merchants and Partners gauge and measure online store speed.

The new Online store speed report runs speed tests for merchants' home page and highest-traffic collection and product pages, and then combines each page’s Google Lighthouse speed score into an overall score. It also provides a comparison of how a merchants store’s speed compares to similar online stores.

The Online store speed report will roll out to all merchants over the coming weeks. You can learn about how the speed score and ranking are calculated and how you can help merchants improve their speed in the Shopify Help Center.