Manage Orders, Fulfill Shipments And Organize Products With Shopify

Your store is doing well enough that the busywork is starting to hurt. Someone is copying orders from a marketplace into your shop by hand, someone else is pasting tracking numbers into shipping emails, and nobody is quite sure which products sit in which collection. If you sell on Shopify, most of that can be handed to software. Shopify exposes the inside of your store through APIs, a way for software to talk directly to other software, so a script, an app or an AI assistant can do the clicking for you.

What Shopify does

Shopify describes itself as a complete commerce platform for starting, growing and managing a business, selling online, in person, on marketplaces, through social channels and, it says, now inside AI chats. Behind the storefront is a developer platform with a GraphQL Admin API, a Storefront API and a Customer Account API, an older Admin REST surface, 206 webhook topics (messages Shopify sends to your systems the moment something happens), Shopify Functions for customizing backend logic, and tools like Hydrogen and the Shopify CLI. Shopify also runs four MCP servers, connection points built for AI agents, tied to what it calls the Universal Commerce Protocol, so agents can search products, build carts, complete checkouts and track orders. More on the Shopify website.

What you can get done

Our catalog maps Shopify to 20 business capabilities. These are the ones most store owners will feel first.

Order Fulfilment Management

Orders are the heartbeat of the store, and 51 operations sit behind this capability. The useful thing is being able to ask questions of your orders, and to bring in sales that happened somewhere else, without exporting spreadsheets.

• GET /orders.json lists recent orders, filtered by things like status or date.
• POST /orders.json records an order that came from another channel, such as a marketplace or a phone sale.
• GET /orders/count.json counts the orders that match a filter, handy for a quick daily number.
• GET /orders/{order_id}.json returns one order’s line items and totals.
• PUT /orders/{order_id}.json updates an order’s note, tags or contact details.

Omnichannel Order & Fulfilment Management

Fulfillment is the moment an order becomes a shipment. With 99 operations here, your warehouse system or shipping tool can tell Shopify what went out the door and keep the tracking current, which is what your customer actually watches.

• POST /fulfillments.json marks items as fulfilled, across one or more fulfillment orders at once.
• POST /fulfillments/{fulfillment_id}/update_tracking.json changes the carrier tracking on a shipment.
• POST /fulfillments/{fulfillment_id}/cancel.json cancels a fulfillment created by mistake.

Customer Data Management

Your customer list is worth more when it stays in step with your other tools, like your email platform or your support desk. This capability carries 129 operations.

• GET /customers.json pulls a list of customers, a page at a time.
• POST /customers.json creates a customer record, for example from a sign-up form outside Shopify.

Storefront Platforms

Collections are how shoppers browse: “new arrivals”, “gifts under fifty”, “winter”. A custom collection is one you pick by hand rather than by rules. Keeping these tidy through software means a seasonal launch is a script, not an afternoon. There are 101 operations here.

• GET /custom_collections.json lists the hand-picked collections in your store.
• POST /custom_collections.json creates a new one.
• GET /collections/{collection_id}.json returns one collection’s details.
• GET /collections/{collection_id}/products.json lists the products inside a collection.

Inventory Management

Knowing what you have on hand keeps you from selling what you cannot ship. These 39 operations let another system read your inventory items directly.

• GET /inventory_items.json fetches several inventory items at once by their IDs.
• GET /inventory_items/{inventory_item_id}.json returns the details of a single item.

Workflows that put it together

A workflow is a recipe of several calls made in order to finish a real job. APIs.io catalogs 22 for Shopify, and these cover the daily work of running a store:

• Create Order and Fulfill places an order, finds its fulfillment order, creates a fulfillment with tracking and reads the order back.
• Cancel and Restock an Order confirms an order, cancels it with a reason and puts the stock back.
• Tag and Close an Order tags an order and closes it as completed.
• Create Product With Variant creates a product and adds a priced variant, such as a size or color.
• Add a Variant to an Existing Product adds a new option to a product you already sell.
• Archive a Stale Product checks a product’s status and archives it only if it is still active.
• Create Collection With a Product sets up a custom collection around a product.
• Create Customer With Address creates a customer and attaches a mailing address.

Ask for it in plain language

Our conversational overlays for Shopify map everyday questions to the operation that answers them, so an AI assistant knows which call answers which question. These are the kinds of things you can ask:

• “Which of my store’s orders from the last 60 days are still unfulfilled?”
• “How many orders did I get since the start of the month?”
• “How do I import a sale made on another channel as an order in Shopify?”
• “How can I change the tracking number on a shipment that’s already fulfilled?”
• “Which products belong to one of my collections?”
• “Which customers signed up between two dates?”

APIs.io holds 86 of these overlays for Shopify. You can browse one in the Shopify Account API phrasing overlay.

Getting started

Shopify is a paid platform with self-serve signup, and it is a hosted service, meaning your software calls Shopify’s endpoints rather than running anything yourself. Your developers will want the GraphQL Admin API documentation, the GraphiQL explorer for trying queries in the browser, and the Storefront API documentation. On APIs.io, see the Shopify profile, the GraphQL Admin API, the Storefront API, the Customer Account API and the Webhooks API. Write down the one store chore that eats the most hours each week, and start there.