Hey team,
Shopify Flow is a super powerful way for our apps that are heavily leaning on automation flows. However, we often find ourselves building Flow Actions for apps we develop that shouldn’t be needed (IMHO).
For example, we work a lot with fulfillment orders. However, if we broadcast the fulfillment order ID, a merchant isn’t able to use it directly to check details about the fulfillment order. We need either a custom step to fetch it using the GraphQL API action.
Is there an appetite to create more of these build-in reference types so merchants can directly use them for other flow actions without any intermediate steps?
Stefan
Do you mean that if you want to send a fulfillment order as part of a trigger payload, you cannot automatically get data for it in Flow, but rather need to use a Send HTTP request action to fetch it?
Yeah, indeed. If we push the customer_reference or the order_reference, it’s directly usable in a Shopify Flow action following the trigger. However, this isn’t the case for a fulfilment order*.
Ideally, we would be able to push more of these native types and Shopify automatically recognizes them and allows a merchant to use them in their flows.
A fulfillment_order_reference is just one example. I see also scenarios for a return_reference.
Theoretically, I believe it’s possible to pass a fulfilment_order_reference to the trigger and tell the merchant to use it as a variable for their next step, but it’s making things more error-prone and native references like a sales order are already supported so it requires extra explanation.