Consistency delay for GraphQL orders queries

Products and Orders APIs
1

Hi,

We run daily incremental order imports using the Admin GraphQL API. We query orders using a bounded updated_at like:

query Orders($cursor: String, $queryString: String!, $pageSize: Int!) {
  orders(
    after: $cursor
    first: $pageSize
    query: $queryString
    sortKey: UPDATED_AT
  ) {
    nodes {
      id
      updatedAt
    }
    pageInfo {
      hasNextPage
    }
  }
}

After successfully importing a completed UTC day, we advance our watermark and do not normally query that day again. We’re concerned that an order updated near the end of the day might not yet be visible in Shopify’s search index when the import runs. We could potentially miss some orders because of this.

How long can it take for a created or updated order to become visible in this query? Is there a guaranteed maximum delay or consistency SLA for search-index visibility?

Thanks for the help!

2

There’s no published SLA for this, the query filter runs against a search index that’s eventually consistent rather than real time, not a hard cutoff. Safer pattern is to overlap your watermark, re-import the last few hours of the prior day on each run, instead of treating the boundary as exact.

3

Thanks! Although there’s no SLA, is there a typical observed delay or known worst-case latency? Is an overlap of a few hours generally sufficient?

4

No official number that I know of, in practice I’ve seen it settle within minutes rather than hours. Since it isn’t guaranteed though, I wouldn’t rely on a fixed overlap alone, pairing this with order webhooks as a backstop is safer than widening the polling window.