How to Fulfill Orders in Shopify: Labels, Partial & Auto

Fulfilling an order in Shopify means recording that its items have shipped, or been picked up or delivered, so the order moves from Unfulfilled to Fulfilled and the customer can be told. Shopify's fulfilling orders section says you can fulfill orders yourself, use a fulfillment service, or combine both methods.

If you pack and ship your own parcels, the first two sections and the run sheet near the end are the whole routine; each section after them covers one situation (a capture setting, automation, outside services, pickup, bulk work, fixes), so the table below and the contents list send you only to yours. Shopify Help Center pages were read on November 4, 2026, and our development store's admin on November 8, 2026.

Which Fulfillment Path Does Your Order Take?

You select a fulfillment method for each product, so one order can use different methods for different items, as its app fulfillment page explains. Find each item's row below, then jump to its section:

How Do You Fulfill a Shopify Order Yourself?

Shipping your own parcels comes down to two choices made in the same place: whether to record the shipment by hand or let a Shopify label do it, and whether the customer is told. The two parts below take the manual route first and the label route second.

Mark the Order as Fulfilled

These are the desktop steps from Shopify's fulfill an order instructions, with the quantity check from its partial fulfillment steps and the switch in step 5 as our test admin showed it as of November 8, 2026:

1. From Orders, open the order. In the Unfulfilled or In progress section with the items you're shipping, click Mark as fulfilled.
2. Check the quantity of each item you're shipping.
3. Optional: enter the Tracking number from your shipping provider. Shopify might recognize its format and select the carrier for you.
4. Optional: if no carrier is selected, or the wrong one, choose it from Shipping carrier.
5. Optional: make sure the customer notification is on to send a shipping confirmation email. It's available only when you have the customer's email address.
6. Click Mark as fulfilled.

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Shopify's help calls the step-five control Send a notification to the customer; the form in the frame below labels it differently, and our test section records what we found there.

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After that click the order's fulfillment status changes to Fulfilled, and the tracking number appears in the shipping confirmation and shipping update emails. If your carrier wasn't detected, your manual choice takes priority over automatic detection, as Shopify's order tracking page notes.

Two limits sit around these steps. An order without a shipping address can't take a tracking number, and while you're still picking and packing you can mark the section In progress instead, from the menu beside the button. To decide which orders to fulfill first, filter them by their fulfill by date.

Buy a Shopify Label or Enter Your Own Tracking Number?

The two routes differ in what Shopify does for you after the parcel leaves:

A label starts from Create shipping label in the order's Unfulfilled section, as Shopify's label buying steps describe. Before you can buy labels, your business needs an eligible fulfillment location, and eligibility varies by carrier and country.

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Choosing the service, paying and printing are the label guide's job: our walkthrough of buying and printing a label from an order covers them, including the printer formats.

Without any tracking number, the delivery state is yours to record. Shopify's Mark as delivered steps let you mark the order as delivered once the customer has it; until then the order status page keeps showing On its way.

Shopify's Learn With Shopify channel gives a live demo of packing and shipping orders from 9:30 in the May 2025 tutorial below, and of printing labels from 14:38. Its first half covers packaging, shipping rates and choosing a carrier, which this guide leaves to the shipping guides; screens may have changed since it was recorded, and no step above rests on it.

Fulfilling Part of an Order or Several Locations

Partial fulfillment happens two ways: you choose it, or the order arrives already divided. The three parts below cover both, then the tools that move items between fulfillments.

Fulfill Only Some of the Items

Shopify's partial fulfillment steps are the same form as above: you enter the item quantities that you want to fulfill and ship the remaining items separately, for example when an item is out of stock or is a pre-order.

Take an order of three items: two are on the shelf and one is a pre-order. You fulfill the two, and the order shows Partially fulfilled; when the third ships and you fulfill it, the status becomes Fulfilled. This guide comes back to that same order in the payment section, because under one capture setting the third item decides when the money arrives.

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The waiting item keeps its stock set aside. Shopify's Help Center counts units in an unfulfilled order as Committed, set aside and not for sale, and Shopify's developer documentation adds that after the order is fulfilled, Shopify decrements the committed quantity.

The full list of statuses an order can carry, and how they relate to payment status, is in our answer on what Shopify order payment and fulfillment statuses mean.

When Shopify Splits the Order for You

Items that can be fulfilled together sit in one Unfulfilled section. Shopify's fulfill an order instructions list three cases that divide an order into several:

• Stock: an item that no single location has enough of on its own.
• Items that can't ship together: checkout splits pre-orders, subscriptions and items on different shipping profiles into separate shipments.
• Ship and pickup in one order: part of the order is delivered and part is collected.

Within each fulfillment, items are grouped by location and delivery method, so you can tell what to ship and what the customer picks up. In these three cases, Shopify notes, fulfilling part of the order isn't optional: you fulfill each section on its own, though you might be able to merge some of them first.

The stock case comes from order routing. When no single location can fulfill an online order, Shopify's location fulfillment rules either split it across locations or let the highest-priority location oversell the product. To divide a section yourself instead, our answer on how to split a fulfillment in Shopify walks through it.

Change Location, Split or Merge a Fulfillment

Shopify's steps put Split fulfillment in the ⋯ menu of the Unfulfilled section. In our development store that menu listed it on one order on October 30, 2026 and not on another on November 8, 2026; Shopify's fulfillment page doesn't say when it's absent, and our test doesn't show why.

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You can move items because of stock availability or shipping costs, or to expedite a delivery. Shopify's change location steps start from the section's menu, and our answer on how to change the fulfillment location of an order covers the cases where the action is missing.

Merging is the reverse of a split and only joins fulfillments from one location; our answer on merging fulfillments in Shopify has the steps.

When Does Fulfilling an Order Capture the Payment?

Shopify's payment authorization page lists four ways a payment can be captured, and automatic capture at checkout is the default. The other three tie the money to fulfillment or to your own click:

The three-item order from the partial fulfillment section shows the trap. With capture when the entire order is fulfilled, shipping the two items on the shelf collects nothing; the money waits for the pre-order item. Shopify puts it plainly:

The setting lives in Settings > Payments under Payment capture method. Capture at fulfillment and capture per fulfillment apply only to orders placed after you turn them on, and neither is compatible with fulfillment apps that require a Paid order status before they start.

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With manual capture, an order sits as Authorized until you click Capture payment in its Authorized section, which changes it to Paid; you can capture the full payment or a partial amount. Automatic capture as items are fulfilled is available only on the Shopify Plus plan, and our answer on how capture per fulfillment works covers its conditions.

Should You Turn On Automatic Fulfillment?

By default, your store uses manual fulfillment. Shopify's order processing guidance draws the line by what you sell and who ships it:

• Automatic when you exclusively sell digital downloads or gift cards, or use fulfillment services for all of your products.
• Manual when you make products to order, sell pre-orders, sometimes run out of stock, or want to offer partial fulfillment without issuing a refund.

For a store that ships its own parcels the warning is direct: if you package and ship products yourself, don't turn on automatic fulfillment. All new orders are marked as fulfilled, which stops you sorting them to find the ones that still need shipping. The setting also doesn't apply to in-store pickup orders.

To switch it on, go to Settings > General, and in the Order processing section select Automatically fulfill the order's line items, per Shopify's automatic fulfillment steps. Two optional checkboxes appear under it:

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The first is Notify customers of their shipment. Shopify's own page tells it two ways: its introduction says the customer receives an email telling them their item has shipped, while its steps make that email an optional checkbox. While the two disagree, tick the box if customers should get the email; our test records what the box showed.

The second, Automatically fulfill all orders, even those with a high risk of fraud, makes the automation disregard the order fraud analysis. Whether automatic fulfillment holds risky orders when that box is off is the subject of our answer on whether Shopify holds fulfillment for high-risk orders; the Shopify pages on order processing, holds and fraud analysis that we read on November 8, 2026 don't say that it holds them.

Two interactions follow from the switch. If you capture payments manually, you have to capture funds before an order can be automatically fulfilled. With a fulfillment service app, the fulfillment request goes out when the order is paid, and a custom fulfillment service's orders are marked as fulfilled at that moment.

The rest of that settings screen, from the order confirmation step to automatic archiving, is covered in our guide to order processing in Shopify's checkout settings.

What Stops You From Fulfilling: Holds and Risky Orders

Two things can make an order wait before you ship it: a hold someone placed on purpose, and a risk rating that tells you to check first.

Fulfillment Holds

Under a hold, Shopify's fulfillment holds page says, your inventory can be reserved, but fulfillment is blocked until the hold is released. Orders On hold are left out of the Unfulfilled list in your admin, so they won't show up while you work through that list; an order with one fulfillment on hold and one unfulfilled displays as Unfulfilled instead.

You place a manual hold from the menu beside Mark as fulfilled, with Mark as on hold and a reason, up to 10 per fulfillment, and remove it with Release hold; Shopify Flow, available on various plans, can do both automatically. Shopify's system hold table lists five holds that apps and services place:

• Marketplace authorization pending
• Managed Markets authorization pending
• Awaiting return items
• Pending upsell offer: the order stays On hold for one hour while the customer accepts or declines a post-purchase offer.
• Unknown delivery date: placed on orders with a selling plan that needs fulfillment at an unscheduled date, usually pre-orders.

A system hold can be overridden, but Shopify warns that this might breach your agreement with the app or service that placed it. Which holds you can release yourself, and what to check first, is in our answer on whether you can release a fulfillment hold.

Orders Flagged for Fraud Risk

When an order shows that its fraud analysis isn't available yet, Shopify's fraud analysis page says to wait for the fraud analysis to finish before you fulfill the order. The reason to review first is the cost of getting it wrong:

On the Grow plan or higher, or with Shopify Payments, the Order risk evaluation view of an eligible online credit card order can show one of three lines of guidance: You can fulfill this order, Confirm with the customer before fulfilling, or Consider canceling this order. What each level means and what to check is in our guide to Shopify fraud analysis risk levels and guidance.

Orders Assigned to a Fulfillment Service, Dropshipper or POD App

Outside fulfillment falls into three groups, and each changes which button you press, if any.

App Fulfillment Services: Request Fulfillment

The request runs through four stages on Shopify's fulfillment service page:

On when In progress starts, Shopify's general fulfillment page differs: it says the service marks the order in progress when it accepts your request.

The Mark as fulfilled button isn't available on orders assigned to fulfillment service locations. Shopify's manual fulfillment instructions say that to fulfill such an order yourself, you first change its location to one you manage. Our answer on what to do when you can't mark an order as fulfilled lays out the options.

Changing your mind depends on the service's answer. A request that hasn't been accepted can be canceled directly from your admin; once it's accepted, you send a cancellation request to the service and wait for its response.

Custom Email Fulfillment Services

Shopify's pages disagree on whether you may mark these orders yourself. The considerations on its general fulfillment page, read on November 4, 2026, say that if an order is assigned to a third-party fulfillment service, you can't manually mark it as fulfilled or in progress.

Its custom fulfillment page, read the same day, says that after you activate a custom service and assign products to it, you fulfill orders by marking them as fulfilled, which sends an email with the order details to the service.

Our test shows what one order offered, not which of Shopify's pages is right. An order stocked at a custom email service in our development store on November 8, 2026 offered Request fulfillment, not Mark as fulfilled; its form ended in Send fulfillment request, and the order then read Fulfilled straight away, before anything had shipped. So click the button your order shows, and set the form's Notify customer switch before you send the request.

Shopify's custom fulfillment page says an order displays Fulfilled only after all items are shipped; our one-item test order read Fulfilled first, so don't take that status as proof of shipment. With an app, by contrast, you request fulfillment and wait for the service's answer. With automatic fulfillment on, custom-service orders are marked as fulfilled when they're paid.

In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Orders
2. Order details
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In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Orders
2. Order details
3. Unfulfilled

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In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Orders
2. Order details
3. Fulfilled

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Shopify's custom fulfillment page adds that, unlike app services, custom services don't automatically update the order status in your admin, so you follow progress with the service directly and can add its tracking to the order yourself; our answer on how order status works with a custom email fulfillment service covers what you update yourself. The service is added in Settings > Shipping and delivery under Custom order fulfillment, per the activation steps.

Dropshipping and Print-on-Demand Apps

Shopify's app fulfillment page describes the split plainly: some dropshipping apps automatically mark items as fulfilled when they ship, and others require you to order your customer's items within the app. Print-on-demand apps mostly mark items as fulfilled when the order ships. For the exact routine, Shopify sends you to the app's developer.

Shopify Collective, on Shopify's list of recommended dropshipping and print-on-demand apps and recommended there for merchants in the United States, works differently: orders are fulfilled by suppliers, and payments are processed automatically when they ship. Setting a store up for this model, from suppliers to shipping profiles, is the subject of our guide to setting up Shopify for dropshipping.

Pickup and Local Delivery Use Different Buttons

Shopify's pickup fulfillment steps and local delivery fulfillment page replace Mark as fulfilled with their own sequence:

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For pickup, Mark as picked up marks the order as fulfilled once the customer collects it. Automatic fulfillment doesn't apply to in-store pickup orders, and a bulk Mark as fulfilled marks them as picked up without sending the Ready for pickup email. Setting pickup up, location by location, is in our guide to fulfilling pickup orders in the Shopify admin.

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For local delivery, no automatic delivery email is sent unless you mark the order as delivered, because local deliveries generate no carrier tracking events. Cancel delivery moves an order from Ready for delivery back to Unfulfilled. Zones, prices and route planning are in our guide to fulfilling Shopify local delivery orders.

Fulfilling Many Orders at Once: Bulk Actions or Batches

The two tools solve different problems: bulk actions change statuses, batches organize the physical work.

The bulk route, from Shopify's bulk fulfillment steps:

1. On the Orders page, select the orders to fulfill.
2. Click Mark as, then Fulfilled.
3. Optional: select the checkbox that sends your customers a shipping confirmation notification.
4. Click Mark as fulfilled to finish.
5. Add tracking numbers to each order afterwards, if you have them.

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The bulk action applies only to orders you fulfill yourself, not to orders fulfilled by a fulfillment service; those use the bulk Request fulfillment action instead.

A batch lets you group up to 250 fulfillments by criteria such as product type or shipping destination, and, by default, walks them through Pick, Print and Pack to Done. Batch recent orders takes only unfulfilled orders from the last 14 days; Create batch takes the orders you select.

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Shopify's batch fulfillment steps end with Close batch, which completes your fulfillment and archives the orders in the batch; for what closing did in our store, see our test. Deleting a batch doesn't cancel its orders or change their status.

Shopify's batch page says batch fulfillment is available to all stores, but you can buy labels inside a batch only in countries where Shopify Shipping is supported, and a location a fulfillment service manages for you doesn't make your store eligible to buy them. Our answer on fulfilling orders in batches covers the steps.

What Your Customer Receives When You Fulfill

Most customer notifications are sent automatically and can't be turned off, but Shopify's notification list names the fulfillment emails you can stop:

On the Shopify Plus plan, the store owner can contact Shopify Support to turn off specific email and SMS notifications.

Because each fulfillment in an order is fulfilled separately, a customer whose order ships in parts can receive more than one shipping confirmation. What that customer sees across two parcels is in our answer on what a customer sees when an order ships in two parcels.

Shopify's own pages name the notification controls differently. Its fulfillment page says to select Send a notification to the customer when you fulfill, and Add tracking in the Fulfilled section for tracking added later. Its notifications page says to deselect Send shipment details to your customer now, and to use Edit tracking from the section's menu.

The wording differs, and the screen decides: the shipping confirmation is decided by the notification control in the fulfill form, shown in the frame in the Mark as fulfilled steps, and later tracking starts from the Fulfilled section. What our admin showed for both is in our test.

To send an email again, Shopify's order details page points to the order's Timeline, with Resend email under the email you want to send again; what the Timeline showed in our store is in our test.

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After you add tracking, customers can check their shipment on the order status page without contacting you; without tracking, it shows On its way until you mark the order as delivered. Two things are outside your control: Shop app tracking notifications can't be turned off or edited by merchants, and if you customized the shipping confirmation or update templates, Shopify can't include the order status page link in those emails.

How to Undo or Correct a Fulfillment

Most fulfillment mistakes have a fix in the order itself. Shopify's cancel fulfillment steps, its tracking steps and the bulk, label and service pages give these:

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Canceling a fulfillment sends the order back to Unfulfilled, ready for a new label or a new fulfillment. If you bought the label in Shopify, void it first; the cost is credited to your account. Our answer on what happens when you void a Shopify shipping label covers the money and the window.

The Help Center pages on fulfilling, bulk fulfillment, fulfillment services and canceling orders that we read on November 4, 2026 name no time limit for canceling a fulfillment, though the bulk page says the Cancel fulfillment requests action fails when it's too late for the service to cancel. The label void window above comes from Shopify's voiding page and limits the label, not the fulfillment.

When a fulfillment service canceled the fulfillment but couldn't update its status in Shopify, you can change the order to Unfulfilled yourself. That step is a record, not an instruction to the service:

If you don't confirm the cancellation with the service, the order might still ship and you'll be charged for the product and the fulfillment. Our answer on reverting a Shopify order to unfulfilled covers when the action appears.

Subscription and Pre-order Orders

Shopify's subscription fulfillment page and its pre-order pages set four cases apart:

• Pay-per-delivery subscriptions: the subscription app creates each new order, and it's managed and fulfilled the same as a non-subscription order.
• Prepaid subscriptions: one order with a Scheduled status until a fulfillment date is reached, when that cycle's inventory is reserved. You can't reschedule, but you can click Fulfill early in the Scheduled section.
• Pre-orders: checkout shows the pre-order item shipping separately from available items, and an order with no scheduled date can carry the Unknown delivery date hold. You can also place an unfulfilled pre-order on hold when it isn't ready.
• A high-risk first subscription order: fulfill or cancel it, because subsequent renewals fail if the original order is flagged as high risk and stays unfulfilled.

Pre-orders also bring the payment question back: the three-item order in the payment section is exactly this case. Deposits, payment windows and ship dates are in our guide to Shopify pre-orders.

Fulfilling From the Shopify App or POS

In the Shopify mobile app, open the order and tap Mark as fulfilled in its Unfulfilled or In progress section; you can scan a tracking barcode instead of typing it, and select several orders with checkboxes to fulfill them together. Splitting and merging need a desktop or the web version, a limit that sits on the list in our answer on what you can't do in the Shopify mobile app.

Shopify POS reads two ways on one page. Its unfulfilled orders page, read on November 4, 2026, notes that you can't mark orders as fulfilled in Shopify POS, only in your Shopify admin, and then describes activating Mark as fulfilled from the cart. While they disagree, split the work by order type:

• An existing unfulfilled order: fulfill it in your Shopify admin.
• A new in-store sale: the POS setting Mark in-store order as fulfilled, under More > Settings, decides whether the order is created as fulfilled.
• A POS order shipped to the customer's address: always created as Unfulfilled, whatever the setting, so you fulfill it in the admin.

Our own test· November 8, 2026

Where Our Test Store Differed From the Help Center

Key takeaway

We ran test orders in a Shopify development store on November 8, 2026, with the admin in English and Shopify's test payment gateway. One had two products, one of them ordered twice, shipped from one location, with part of it fulfilled with a tracking number and the notification switched on by hand, then run through a batch; another was stocked at a custom email service. Seven results change what you should do:

Our test store against the Help Center, November 8, 2026

What Shopify's Help Center says	What our store showed	What to do
Fulfill form: select Send a notification to the customer to send the shipping confirmation	The form opened inside the order with a Notify customer switch, off on the first form of our order and on for its second	Look at the switch on every form and set it yourself; our test doesn't show what decides its position
Automatic fulfillment: Notify customers of their shipment is an optional checkbox	When we chose automatic fulfillment, Notify customers of their shipment was unticked	Tick it before you save if customers should be told their order shipped
Tracking later: the fulfillment page says click Add tracking in the Fulfilled section; the notifications page says click ⋯, then Edit tracking, in the Fulfillments section	A fulfillment that already had tracking showed Edit tracking in its ⋯ menu; one without tracking, on our custom-service order, showed + Add tracking on the section	Use + Add tracking if you see it; otherwise open the Fulfilled section's ⋯ menu
Resending: click Resend email under the email in the Timeline, followed by a dialog titled "Resend order confirmation?"	The timeline entry for the shipping confirmation carried View email, with no Resend email button beside it	Click View email and look for Resend email in what opens
Close batch completes your fulfillment and archives the orders in the batch	With no documents created and no labels bought, Close batch left our order Unfulfilled in the batch and Partially fulfilled on its page, and the button became Reopen batch	Mark the orders as fulfilled, or buy and print their labels, before you close the batch
Custom service: Shopify's custom fulfillment page says you fulfill orders by marking them as fulfilled, which emails the service	Our order at a custom email service offered Request fulfillment, not Mark as fulfilled; its form ended in Send fulfillment request, and the order then read Fulfilled	Click the button your order shows, and don't take Fulfilled as proof it shipped; check with the service
Split: click the ⋯ menu in the Unfulfilled section, then Split fulfillment	On our order's Unfulfilled section, the ⋯ menu listed Add to batch and Change location, not Split fulfillment	Open the menu on your own order before you plan a split

Source: Shopify Help Center pages read November 4, 2026, and our development store on November 8, 2026.

In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Orders
2. Order details
3. Mark as fulfilled

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In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Orders
2. Batches

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This was one store, so your admin may differ. We didn't buy a label or test a fulfillment service app or the mobile app, and we didn't confirm that our custom email service received its email, because its address was a test one.

Order Fulfillment Run Sheet

Steps one and two decide whether you should ship at all, step three decides which button you press, and step five, or the label's Send shipping information to customers option, is what emails the customer.

The Bottom Line

For parcels you ship yourself, fulfillment in Shopify is one button, surrounded by settings that decide what that button triggers: the customer email and the payment capture. With outside services, you may not press it at all.

Frequently Asked Questions