Shopify Fulfillment Integration Working — But How Do We Pass the Auto-Generated Shipping Document to Our 3PL?

Shopify App Store
,
1

Hi everyone,

we’re currently setting up a marketplace integration with our Shopify store via a custom API app developed in the Shopify Developer Dashboard. The integration itself is working well so far — we already completed a successful test order that was automatically transferred into Shopify.

We also connected our fulfillment provider through a separate custom app in the Shopify Developer Dashboard. This connection is also working correctly: the test order was automatically forwarded from Shopify to the fulfillment provider and could be processed successfully.

However, we ran into one issue during testing:

For marketplace orders, an automatic shipping document is generated and attached to the order inside Shopify. This document needs to be downloaded, printed, and included in the shipment by the fulfillment provider.

At the moment, the fulfillment provider receives the order data correctly, but does not have access to this automatically generated shipping document.

So our question is:

How does the fulfillment app / API integration need to be configured so that the fulfillment provider can access and retrieve the automatically generated shipping document within the corresponding Shopify order?

Would really appreciate any tips or experience with this setup — thanks a lot in advance!

2

Hi @PinkDaisyMunich

It sounds like this is a known limitation with our API, there’s no field on Order, Fulfillment, or FulfillmentOrder that surfaces a downloadable URL for those documents — they’re only accessible via the admin UI’s print/download flow.

I checked the schema to confirm:

  • Fulfillment exposes trackingInfo (carrier, tracking number, tracking URL) but no label/document URL.
  • FulfillmentOrder exposes merchantRequests, supportedActions, deliveryMethod, etc., but nothing for attached documents.
  • Order has customAttributes, note, and metafields — these are the only places where a file reference could live, but only if something explicitly wrote it there.

For marketplace integrations (Marketplace Connect / Managed Markets / Amazon FBM etc.), the label PDF lives in the order timeline in the Shopify admin and is intended for the merchant to download and print. See Fulfilling Marketplace Connect orders and Printing shipping documents for the manual flow.

Options to get the document to your 3PL:

  1. Re-upload to a file metafield on the order. When the order syncs, have someone (or an automation) download the label PDF from the admin and attach it as a file metafield on the order. Your 3PL app can then read the metafield via the Admin API and pull the file from the resulting MediaImage/GenericFile URL.
  2. Use order notes / custom attributes. If your marketplace source can pass a label URL into the order at sync time, store it in customAttributes or note. The 3PL fulfillment app can read those directly.
  3. Forward out-of-band. Email/SFTP/storage bucket between the merchant ops team and the 3PL. Not pretty, but it’s the most common pattern today for marketplace-supplied labels.
  4. Have the 3PL purchase the label. If the marketplace allows it (some do, some don’t), shift label creation to the 3PL side. Then the document originates in their system and you never need to pass it through Shopify.

Which marketplace is generating the label?