Possibilities of handling orders with negative total amount

Products and Orders APIs
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1

Hi!

We’ve done a POS order integration for a client, that creates POS orders in Shopify and attach them to retail stores (shopify locations) & optionally the customer in Shopify. This enables the customer to browse their orders across physical and online sales channels and does a bunch of other things based on order data, it works great!

We’d now like to also import returns from physical stores to Shopify. The term order in their POS is broard and basically entails any kind of movement of product between the physical shops & the customers. A purchase is an order, a gift is an order, a return is an order.

They cannot guarantee a reference order, that correlates to the order where the item was originally purchased for various reasons. For these types of orders, if it’s even possible, the customer would like to insert the order with negative line item(s) amount.

This is possible today, however it seems like the total amount of the order must be 0 or greater than zero. Is there any way to get around this? We’re currently using orderCreate 2024-10, we could do draft orders, but i’m not sure if the same limitations applies here? Could discount applications exceed the original amount? Can shopify enable flags that makes this possible?

Anyone has had similar problem?

Thanks in advance! :partying_face:

2

Currently, the order architecture doesn’t support negative line item prices or negative order totals. I did some testing on my own with both orderCreate and draftOrderCreate with negative prices, they explicitly reject with the error “Cannot send negative price for line_item.” Even trying to use discounts that exceed the line item total just caps the order at $0.00 rather than going negative.

I’ll pass this feedback on to our product teams for you as a feature request.