How do you set up a custom fulfillment service in Shopify?

Should your warehouse connect by email or through an app?

Shopify lets you connect a service with an app or set up one that receives orders by email; the email route has one condition:

Once it's active with products assigned, marking an order fulfilled in your Shopify admin sends the service an email with the order details. Unlike app-based services, it doesn't automatically update the order status, so keeping the order up to date falls to you.

How do you add the service and assign products to it?

The setup runs in this order:

1. Activate the service in Settings > Shipping and delivery.
2. Assign the products it will ship.
3. Decide whether paid orders reach it automatically, in Settings > General.
4. If you also stock those products yourself, rank which location ships first in Order routing.

To activate the service, go to Settings > Shipping and delivery in your Shopify admin, click Add fulfillment service in the Custom order fulfillment section, enter the provider's name and email address, and save. Activating it creates a fulfillment location where you can stock products.

Next, assign products to it so the service can fulfill orders for those products: open each product and, in the Inventory section, select the fulfillment service.

The service's location doesn't use up your plan's location limit. Shopify caps active locations at 2 on Starter, 10 on Basic, Grow and Advanced, and 200 on Plus, but custom fulfillment services are listed separately, under App and custom fulfillment locations in your Locations settings, and don't count toward that cap.

So a Basic store already running 10 active locations can still add the warehouse. It doesn't have to deactivate a shop or move to Plus to make room.

Should paid orders go to the service automatically?

On the email route, marking an order fulfilled is what sends the service its email, so the real choice is who sets that mark. Shopify's custom fulfillment page adds that with automatic fulfillment, orders are marked fulfilled when they're paid — in effect, each paid order is emailed to the warehouse with no step on your side.

Stores start on manual fulfillment. The switch is Automatically fulfill the order's line items in the Order processing section of Settings > General, and Shopify suggests automatic fulfillment when you use fulfillment services for all of your products.

Keep manual fulfillment, and mark each order fulfilled yourself, if any of these apply:

• You ship some orders from your own stock, such as urgent ones. Automatic fulfillment marks every new order fulfilled, so you can no longer sort out the ones you still need to ship.
• You make products to order, sell pre-orders or sometimes run out of stock.
• You want to offer partial fulfillment without issuing a refund.

If you capture payments manually, an order is fulfilled automatically only after you capture the funds, and in-store pickup orders aren't fulfilled automatically at all. A separate option, Automatically fulfill all orders, even those with a high risk of fraud, makes automatic fulfillment disregard the order fraud analysis.

Which location ships an order when you stock a product in both places?

You can stock the same product at both the service's location and your own locations simultaneously, for example to fulfill urgent orders from your own stock while standard orders go through the service.

Each location keeps its own inventory count, which can't be pooled with the others, and Shopify assigns each order to a location through your order routing.

The default routing rules prefer a location that has every item in the order, then one in the destination market, then the closest one. None of them knows which location you meant for standard orders.

If the warehouse should ship first, Shopify's order routing setup covers that case for a third-party logistics service or warehouse: in Settings > Shipping and delivery > Order routing, add a Use ranked locations rule, drag the rule to the top of the list, and drag that location into the topmost location group.

For a single urgent order, change the order's location to one you manage and fulfill it from there; Shopify notes that the fulfillment service then never receives a fulfillment request for that order. With automatic fulfillment, the order is marked fulfilled, and emailed to the service, as soon as it's paid, so change its location before then.

What if your service needs more than an email?

If your fulfillment service requires more than an email to process orders, Shopify says you can hire a Shopify Partner to develop a custom app that integrates directly with Shopify (see hiring a Shopify developer).

If you no longer want to use the email service, you can delete it; if inventory is assigned to it, you first need to select a new location to inherit the stocked inventory and unfulfilled orders.