This issue has been brought up a couple times and has unfortunately not been fixed. It has to do with how the 'Notes from Buyer' field is imported from Shopify orders. After creating support tickets with both companies and receiving messages from Shopify developers about this issue, I hope to provide a comprehensive breakdown and potential solution. I will make one assumption to create examples, that ShipStation uses GraphQL to query from the Shopify API, as I do not know what is actually used.
- The Problem
- Shopify has 2 relevant fields, 'Notes' and 'Additional details'
- As seen on Shopify:
- These fields are titled 'note' and 'customAttributes' in Shopify's API, and I will refer to them as such from now on
- https://shopify.dev/docs/api/admin-graphql/2024-10/objects/Order#field-customattributes
- https://shopify.dev/docs/api/admin-graphql/2024-10/objects/Order#field-note
- 'note' is the actually relevant field needed, as it contains gift messages and other information from the customer
- 'customAttributes' is rarely needed (never, in the case of our company), as it is utilized by Shopify's partner Apps and plugins for tracking information
- When imported, these fields are added together, as seen in ShipStation
- Because of this, we have to manually remove the 'customAttributes' from every order affected
- Shopify has 2 relevant fields, 'Notes' and 'Additional details'
- The API
- When talking with ShipSation, I received this data as an example of Shopify's message:
- *Clarification - this example does not have the "Happy Birthday!" as it was from a different order
- While yes, this is the data sent from Shopify, 'NotesFromBuyer' represents the field as requested/queried from the API, not Shopify's original data
- I believe that ShipStation set up a query that concatenates the two fields together and labels them as 'NotesFromBuyer', instead of leaving them separate
- The Solution
- The ShipStation query would need to be edited in order to fix the issue, as Shopify's API does provide both fields separately to query from, seen in their linked documentation above and this example GraphQL query:
- {
order(id: "gid://shopify/Order/11142312460310") {
id
note
customAttributes {
key
value
}
}
} - As changing this field may have unintended consequences for some users, I propose adding a Shopify Store Settings checkbox to opt-into excluding 'customAttributes' from 'NotesFromBuyer' (toggling between the original imported field and a 'note' only field)
- If this is entirely wrong, a bug is preventing the query from being changed, or any assistance is needed, I have contact with Shopify Developers and they have offered to assist in a meeting between developers
Thank you for making it through my breakdown, I hope it proves useful and we can improve the platform for ShipStation's customers!
