Not shipping perishables on a Friday

Shopify has no setting for which days you ship. There is nothing that says Monday to Wednesday only. But the job it is standing in for — keeping Friday's cheese out of a weekend depot — is something Shopify can do, on a schedule, without anybody having to remember.

Holding an order until you are ready to ship

A fulfillment hold stops an order being shipped until the hold is released, and Shopify even has a reason made for this case: "The fulfillment hold is applied because of an unknown delivery date."

Shopify Flow can place that hold and lift it again on its own:

• Place it. A workflow triggered when an order is created can put it on hold — Flow's action "changes the status of the order that triggers the workflow to On hold." Flow's own condition list has no day of the week, so the check for placed on Thursday afternoon or Friday is a small piece of code inside the workflow, which Flow allows: dates such as an order's created at can be passed in.
• Lift it. A second workflow on a schedule — Flow's Scheduled time trigger "starts a workflow at a time and date that you specify, with options to repeat the workflow on a specific schedule" — releases them first thing on Monday. Because a schedule starts with no order in hand, that workflow first fetches the held orders and then works through them one by one. And the release lifts every hold on an order, so an order held for another reason goes out too.

Flow is free on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus; it is not available on Starter. And it holds the whole order. If a Friday order holds both a cheese and a tea towel, the tea towel waits too. Holding just the perishable line and shipping the rest is something you do on the order itself in the admin, not something Flow selects.

Perishables leaving on the wrong day? Describe your shipping days →

What checkout still tells the customer

This is the part that catches people. If you set delivery dates yourself — Shopify's manual delivery dates, on every plan — two sentences on the same Shopify page are easy to read one at a time:

"Weekends don't count as fulfillment time."

"Weekends and statutory holidays are included in the estimated delivery dates calculation."

The first is about preparing the order; the second about the parcel in transit. Put together, the delivery date shown at checkout assumes the parcel can travel over the weekend — which is exactly what your hold prevents. A customer ordering on Friday can be shown a Tuesday arrival for a parcel you will not send until Monday. The estimate is worked out at checkout, before the order exists; a hold placed afterwards cannot reach back and change it.

If your checkout uses Shopify's automated delivery dates instead (Basic and above), those are documented separately, and these two sentences are not about them — check which one your store uses before you rely on either.

The cutoff is not yours to set either. "The business day cutoff time is 12 pm in the local timezone of the shipping origin." A merchant who ships until two in the afternoon asked in 2024 how to change it, and the only answer, from a Shopify Partner rather than Shopify itself, was that as far as they knew it "isn't editable".

There is one lever, and it is the first sentence. Because weekends do not count as fulfillment time, a longer fulfillment time pushes the estimate past the weekend on its own — set it to cover the days you hold, and a Friday order is no longer promised a Tuesday. It is blunt: it lengthens the estimate for every order, including Monday's, which you could have shipped at once. Where that costs too much, set the expectation in words instead — in the product description, or a line at checkout.

Which route is yours

What Shopivibe does

If Flow's hold-and-release fits, build it in Flow — it is free and it is Shopify's own.

Where this becomes worth asking for is when the rule has more than one shape: "hold anything chilled that is ordered after Wednesday noon until Monday, but ship ambient items straight away, and skip Monday if it is a bank holiday." That is a rule about which items, which day and which calendar, kept working as your range changes.

Two things to say plainly. The date checkout shows is Shopify's — worked out before the order exists, from the delivery settings above, so the lever for it is fulfillment time rather than the hold. And placing and lifting holds is built for you, not switched on. A person here takes it on straight away and has it working in your store within 24 hours.

Shopivibe solves the problem in your store and keeps what it adds maintained, including when Shopify changes something underneath. Shopivibe is free during early access, with 3,500 credits included. Credits beyond the included 3,500 cost $0.06 each.

Know which days your parcels can travel? Describe it in your own words →