What Shopify's 2026-01 Bulk Operations Update Changes

Concurrency Goes From One Job to Five

Shopify's API version 2026-01 changes how many bulk operations an app can run at once. Before 2026-01, an app could run only one bulk operation of each type — bulkOperationRunMutation or bulkOperationRunQuery — at a time per shop. As of 2026-01, an app can run up to five bulk query operations per shop simultaneously, and Shopify's own changelog frames the same change as running up to five bulk operations per shop simultaneously. That's a shift from a strictly serial queue to a parallelizable job model for large exports — teams running big product, inventory, or order syncs can now split them into parallel jobs instead of chaining them.

A Breaking Default Change: groupObjects

The same 2026-01 release flips a default that can silently change your JSONL output shape. The groupObjects argument on bulkOperationRunQuery now defaults to false, changed October 29, 2025 and flagged by Shopify as a breaking API change requiring action. Any JSONL parser written against the old grouped-by-parent output format will get flat output unless the query explicitly passes groupObjects: true. For bulkOperationRunMutation, groupObjects is now deprecated entirely — Shopify notes it does not affect the order of output files because mutation outputs don't have parent objects, so mutation integrations can simply drop the argument.

Mutations and Upload Limits Also Changed

Two more changes in the same release affect how large an ERP or PIM import batch needs to be chunked. Bulk mutations can now execute any mutation — previously bulk mutations only supported a limited set of actions. And file uploads for bulk mutation input can now be up to 100MB, up from a prior 20MB ceiling.

One constraint hasn't moved: a bulk query operation still has to complete within 10 days, or Shopify stops it and marks it failed. And in API version 2026-01 and higher, the deprecated currentBulkOperation polling query is replaced by bulkOperation(id:) — while Shopify's own guidance still recommends subscribing to the bulk_operations/finish webhook over polling, since it limits the number of redundant API calls; webhook delivery isn't guaranteed, so polling remains a necessary fallback.

What to Re-Test Before Upgrading

For any integration syncing Shopify with an ERP, PIM, or 3PL through bulkOperationRunQuery or bulkOperationRunMutation, three things are worth checking before moving past API version 2025-10: re-test JSONL parsers against the new groupObjects default, re-check whether previously serial import/export jobs should now be split into parallel jobs to use the added concurrency headroom, and confirm any status-polling code has moved off the deprecated currentBulkOperation query.

Sources

• Perform bulk operations with the GraphQL Admin API
• Bulk operations group objects default changed to false
• Faster bulk operations