Sort Order of Shopify REST Collections

Question

Trying to nail down what the sort order is for Shopify's REST collections. Specifically I'm working with orders and customers at the moment.

I found this closed thread discussing the ability to sort collections, and the API docs don't mention it at all for either orders or customers.

However, customers have a documented search API, which does have an order parameter as an option. I'm not sure whether I can use it as a sort of substitute for the regular list API call. This doesn't seem to work properly for example - it returns more than one result.

/admin/customers/search.json?query=&limit=1

Orders don't have a documented search endpoint, but I do get a response when hitting

/admin/orders/search.json?query=&limit=1

Although it has the same issues as the customer search endpoint. I found this thread saying that orders are always returned most recent to newest by date - and inspecting the response I'm getting now that seems to be true although I could have sworn I've seen them come back in a different orders, it almost seems indeterminate.

Would like to know if that's the case for sure, and the same for customers. I seem to be getting them returned back in created_at order ascending for customers. Is that always the case?

Also, ID's for both customers and orders don't seem to be in created_at order, which is bizzare given that the have the since_id parameter in pretty much all their collections (which I found and promptly built my incremental pulling strategy on top of). I guess I'll have to use created_at instead.

Answer 1

The thread you linked to (apart from being really old) is referring to Collections (with a capital C), which are how groups of products are defined in Shopify (e.g. Shoes, Coats, Hats, etc.).

The 'collections' you're referring to (Customers, Products, Orders, etc.) are returned in descending date order (i.e. newest first) if the since_id parameter is not supplied, and in ascending order if it is supplied. Note that this should correspond with a descending id ordering, that's the idea at any rate as it allows you to use since_id to paginate properly (as you're doing).

Double check that you're getting wonky id ordering and if you are, please post the store domain you're seeing it on as well as a sample of order ids so that we can look into it.