Hello, I’ve had some reports this morning of what looks to be a regression in the cart behaviour for POS extensions. We are using the bulkCartUpdate method on the Cart API to add a number of products to the cart as a bulk operation. When doing this it appears that the variant information is not shown on the cart overview anymore as it once was.
For example, below we have selected the $100 Denomination variant for this Gift Card product but as you can see when it is in the cart this information is not visible, it just shows the product title. It should have “$100“ under the title where the “Tax-exempt“ and “Digital item” text is.
To see the selected variant I need to go into the specific line item details. This also appears to happen when I add the same product variant via the native Shopify UI so I don’t think the issue is specific to the Cart API method we are using.
Let me know if this makes sense, seems like something has changed here, can someone from Shopify please explain what’s happening here?
No it doesn’t seem to be limited to the “Digital items“ definitely something going on here.
Here is the same product with different variants (Small / Medium) added to the cart, one via the native Shopify interface, the other via the bulkCartUpdate Cart API, one shows the variant the other does not?
Adding the variant again via the Shopify UI instead of the cart API stacks with the original so it does indeed register as the correct variant behind the scenes, it’s just not showing that it is the “Small“ variant in the cart
Hey @simon_b - thanks for the detailed investigation here (and the screenshots — super helpful). This does seem odd, especially after you ruled out the different types of variants.
Just to help with the investigation on our end, could you let me know which POS app version you’re running and whether you’re on iOS or Android? Does this happen with just a regular addLineItem prop? Either way, I think my next step here is to dig into this further for you internally, but having those details will be super helpful for narrowing down the issue. Hope to hear from you soon.
Hi @Alan_G thanks for your response. I’m running the latest version of POS on iOS (10.20.0) and Android (10.19.3) and can see it happening on both platforms.
I’ll run a test in our dev environment now using addLineItem to see if this also results in the issue. I’m tipping not as no one else has raised this and it’s likely that is what most devs use. We use the bulkCartUpdate to help speed up the process of adding multiple items to the cart at once, although it is still slow, had a number of merchants complain about this but that’s a different matter
@Alan_G looks to be working when using addLineItem, here I’ve used both methods and you can see the Gift Card added via the bulk method doesn’t show variant but the other item, added via the singular method does.
We would use the addLineItem method instead but with our previous testing it was taking around a second per item added, this might have changed since though as this was early days we did that testing.
Hi @Alan_G any update on this? Were you able to confirm the behaviour on your side? I believe @Victor_Chu added the bulk cart update feature for us originally, which we were very appreciative of btw .
Let me know if there is anything else I can do to help.
Hey @simon_b sorry for the wait here, and thanks again for narrowing this down (the screenshots and side-by-side comparison were super helpful). Based on everything you’ve shared this does seem like something specific to how bulkCartUpdate handles the variant display in the cart, especially since addLineItem works as expected and the underlying variant data is correct.
I’m going to dig into this further on our end and see what I can find out. I’ll follow up here once I have more info. In the meantime, addLineItem should work as a fallback if you need it. I know it’s not super ideal given the performance concerns though. Let me know if you notice anything else in the meantime!
Hi @Alan_G no we unfortunately cannot use addLineItem instead. As I mentioned previously merchants are already not happy about the speed of add to cart as is, many have flagged this, some even deciding not to use Shopify POS as a result. The UX impact would be too great if we made it even slower. So this is a fairly important issue for us, not having the variant displayed is preferable to reduced speed but also not a great UX.
Hey @simon_b - just following up here, thanks for your patience. We have a fix in the works for this. I still don’t have a concrete date for when it will be deployed, but I’ll see if I can confirm that for you on my end here and loop back once I have that info.
Hi @Alan_G no worries at all, I understand this likely is a lesser used method in the broader extension ecosystem, we just happen to lean on it quite heavily.
Thanks heaps for the update and continued support.
Hey @simon_b - sorry for the delayed reply on this. We did push a fix for this on our end a while back. Please let me know if you’re still seeing the issue and I can for sure take a look
Hi, I wanted to add to this thread because we seem to be running into a very similar issue.
The main difference is that, in our case, we are using api.cart.addLineItem rather than bulkCartUpdate.
Variants added through our POS UI extension are correctly added to the cart and are visible when opening the line item details, but the variant title/subtitle does not show in the main POS cart overview.
Environment:
POS UI Extension API tested: 2026-04 and 2026-07
Device: iPhone 12 Pro
Shopify POS version: 11.8.0
I updated Shopify POS today, and this is the newest version available for my device
The issue was also happening on the previous Shopify POS version
Our app adds one or many items to the POS cart. The core call we are using is:
Adding the same variant manually through Shopify POS shows the variant correctly in the cart overview.
Adding the same variant manually with a discount still shows the variant correctly.
Adding the same variant manually with staff attribution still shows the variant correctly.
Adding through our app adds the correct variant, and the variant appears in line item details, but not in the main POS cart overview.
We removed possible causes from our app flow, including line item properties, hidden _ properties, discounts, staff attribution, customer, cart properties, note, and bulkCartUpdate.
The issue still reproduced with only this minimal call:
We also tested sequential and parallel addLineItem calls, and the issue happened in both cases.
We did look into bulkCartUpdate, but it was not appropriate for our use case at this time, so we are currently using addLineItem.
I’m not sure if the April fix mentioned above was focused on the Shopify POS app/runtime itself, the POS UI Extension API version, the specific bulkCartUpdate flow, or something else we may be missing.
Since we updated both the POS app and the extension API version and still see the issue, could Shopify confirm whether the fix was expected to cover api.cart.addLineItem as well?
Just confirming that the earlier fix in this thread was narrowed around bulkCartUpdate, but what you’re describing with api.cart.addLineItem does seem like something worth looking at separately on our end.
Happy to raise this internally and see if we can confirm what’s happening there.
One quick thing that would help narrow this down: are the variants being added long-existing/synced products, or are they newly created shortly before calling addLineItem? Also, if you have a short screen recording showing the same variant added manually vs through the extension, that would be useful for the investigation.
Hey @Alan_G and @Mitchel just an FYI, I can’t reproduce this issue on my side.
I have two extensions, one using the bulk cart API and the other using the individual line items API. The latter does not exhibit this behaviour when I add items to the cart, however I’m using a cart transform so perhaps that changes things?
Hey @simon_b - thanks for checking this on your side and sharing that extra context, that’s really helpful.
Hey @Mitchel - just checking in here, are you still seeing this on POS 11.8.0 or a newer POS build? If so, could you confirm whether the variants are long-existing/synced products or newly created shortly before the api.cart.addLineItem call? It would also be helpful to know whether your extension is using a cart transform, since Simon mentioned he isn’t able to reproduce this with addLineItem while using one.
If you’re able to share a short screen recording showing the same variant added manually vs through the extension, that would still be useful for narrowing this down on our end here.
- sorry for the delayed reply on this. We did push a fix for this on our end a while back. Please let me know if you’re still seeing the issue and I can for sure take a look 