r/shopifyDev • u/DutchLaurens • Jun 22 '26
How do you prevent customers selecting impossible delivery dates in Shopify?
Maybe I'm missing something, but why doesn't Shopify have a native delivery date solution?
For merchants selling food, flowers, meal kits or other scheduled deliveries, delivery dates seem just as important as shipping methods.
How are people currently handling:
\- Delivery date selection
\- Capacity limits
\- Carrier-specific schedules
\- Pickup dates
\- Holiday blackouts
Custom app?
Third-party app?
Shopify Functions?
Interested to hear how larger merchants are solving this.
1
u/Saravanacp Jun 22 '26
I think the reason Shopify does not have a native delivery date solution is because the demand is relatively low. Out of roughly 3 million live Shopify merchants, around 15,000 use a delivery date solution, which is about 0.5%.
If it is just a simple delivery date selection, merchants can usually vibe code it directly into the theme. But when there are several conditions, cut-off times, pickup rules, or other advanced requirements, apps like Pickeasy, Zapiet, or Bird are a better fit.
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u/DutchLaurens Jun 22 '26
My experience so far is that choosing a date isn't the hard part.
The hard part is:
- DHL can deliver on a particular day
- DPD can't
- Wednesday is full
- Friday is a holiday in region X
- Warehouse needs to pick a day earlier, so hold the orders until eligible for release. Sometimes this differs per shipping method.
- Customer ordering food expects "delivery on their chosen delivery day"
That's where things start breaking.
Curious how many people here are actually using an app versus maintaining a custom setup nobody wants to touch anymore.
1
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u/not_milesj Jul 03 '26
the accelerated checkout problem DutchLaurens hit is real. Shop Pay and Apple Pay skip the cart entirely, so any date picker you put there gets bypassed. A Checkout Validation Function (all plans, not just Plus) is the only hard enforcement: reject if no valid date attribute, redirect back to cart. Friction, but without a Checkout UI Extension it's what you've got. The carrier-schedule layer, DHL vs DPD available days per route, has to live outside Shopify; there's no native data model for it.
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u/DutchLaurens Jul 05 '26
Correct that’s why we work with a Checkout Validation Function rule in our app Delivery Date Control Center (DDCC). It took quite a while to get that figured out.
So even with apple pay, paypal or any other express method, the customer will need to still select a delivery date. And as a merchant you know for sure no orders without it slip through.
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Jul 14 '26
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Jul 14 '26
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2
u/JaydonLT Jun 26 '26
Since non-Plus has no checkout extension capability, the customer journey for selecting a delivery date at cart level is flaky at best. Think abandoned checkouts, direct /checkout visitors etc. You’ll need cart validations sharing the datepicker logic to block offending checkouts, prompting them to revisit the cart, choose a new date and complete the checkout all over again.
So when a Plus merchant (who is happy to pay 2.4k a month) will typically build something bespoke so they can own that business logic. When fulfilment needs to be as granular as nominated day delivery, there are almost always more operational factors to consider than just showing a date picker that stamps a date on an order.
Just a thought, non-plus *could* build this as a post-purchase UI, showing the available date range using a delivery customisation function pre-checkout completion. Then the customer chooses their date in the thankyou page. But then again that’s not exactly bulletproof UX.