Just noticed new tools to arrange orders in batches in my admin ui.
Curious about the planned roadmap for this concept. Will order batches be a new object? reachable by API eventually?
Hey @Daniel_G , There isn’t a public Admin API surface for order batches today, so apps can’t currently query or mutate batches as their own object.
That said, this is an active area for the fulfillment workflow work in Admin. I can’t commit to roadmap timing or the exact API shape from here, but the concept is more closely tied to batching fulfillment work than just grouping Order records directly.
If you’re open to sharing the workflow you’d want to build around this, that would be really useful context. For example: reading batch membership, creating batches from orders, moving items between batch steps, reporting on batch status, or syncing batches into a WMS/3PL. I can get in touch with some folks internally and see if there’s anything more I can share.
Sounds good.
Our wholesale customers send us multiple purchase orders going to the same warehouses. We enter them separately in admin because each needs separate billing, but often we put together several orders into the same shipment. Particularly when shipping palletized.
So it occurred to me that a batch of orders would be the logical structure for a group of separate orders shipping together to the same location. All docs need to be generated from the aggregated data, not individually per order. (Bill of Lading, commercial invoice, packing list, case labels, etc)
We do have a workflow that suits our needs currently, but if order batches get their api we could take advantage of them and improve our handling of consolidated shipments.
Hey @Daniel_G - thanks, that’s really helpful context.
I’'ll pass this along internally as a concrete batching API use case:.
I can’t commit to API timing or the exact shape from here, but this is useful feedback for the team working on batching workflows for sure. For now there still isn’t a public Admin API surface for creating/querying order batches directly, so your current workaround would remain the path.
One useful detail if you’re open to sharing it: would you expect Shopify to generate those consolidated documents, or would your app/WMS generate them once it can read the batch and underlying order/fulfillment data?
I’ll keep an eye out and loop back if there’s something public I can share.
Phase one would be to merge orders in admin into a batch, and generate docs externally for that batch.
Phase two would be to try to port some of those docs into shopify.
Would be nice if the Order Printer app could take an order batch as argument.
Thanks
D
Thanks @Daniel_G - I’l pass this on! Let me know if I can help with anything else in the meantime.