The next generation of fulfillment is coming. What you need to know

Fulfillment & Inventory
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1

:woman_raising_hand: Do you build or maintain apps that:

  • Read or write delivery profile
  • Integrate with markets or shipping rate logic
  • Touch delivery or fulfillment information
  • Fulfill, route, notify on, or edit orders and fulfillment workflows
  • Serve multi-location, or omnichannel merchants

If you said yes to any of those, this update is for you!

Shopify is releasing a set of fulfillment upgrades that help merchants sell across more locations, delivery methods, and markets. Now is the time to prepare your apps to support merchants through these updates.

Here’s what’s coming:

  • Market-driven shipping: A new model that organizes shipping rates around the markets merchants sell into, giving them better control over how rates combine at checkout.

  • Ship and pickup in one order: Shopify Plus merchants can now let customers choose both shipping and store pickup in a single checkout.

  • Split shipping: We will be phasing out the manual split shipping toggle in admin.

>> Read the full details in our partner announcement blog.

:alarm_clock: Timeline to lock in :alarm_clock:

  • Now: Feature preview is live for testing. Make all updates necessary.

  • October 1, 2026: Apps that aren’t compatible will show a warning to new installs.

  • July 1, 2027: All 3 features become the default experience for all qualified merchants.

Test your apps thoroughly and make updates by October 1, 2026. You don’t want to hit merchants with surprises during BFCM.

Coming to Dot Dev?
Attend our workshops “Build for market-driven shipping” and “Prepare your app for Shopify’s new fulfillment flows” – both happening July 21.

2

We appreciate that there is an acknowledgement of inaccurate shipping costs for multiple profiles (or locations?), but “rate consolidation” sounds exactly like “rate merging” that exists today that doesn’t solve the issue. Is there any more details on how third-party carriers will be able to leverage “rate consolidation” so what we can avoid incorrect shipping costs for the customer?

Thanks!

3

Hey Nick, for information about how rates will combine at checkout see this section of the feature preview overview and this explanation from the community forum. Let me know if you have questions after taking a look.

4

This sounds a lot like you are making shipping WORSE for your customers. It’s already a mess and removing the ability to manually split a shipment as we see fit would be a HUGE step backwards.

5

I would advocate for pickup/ship to be an option rather than forced for merchants, and same with split shipping.

We’ve already had merchants complain about the pickup/ship functionality not being compatible with their business practices.

With split shipping, some merchants don’t want to give customers the option to select different rates per shipment, when using apps, we have the ability have the blended rate show up exactly as required as one set of options even when multiple shipments are used, having split shipping permanently on will give customers too many options and allow them to select invalid combinations. The alternative, is to make shipping apps behave the same as in-built shopify rates whereas if setup under ‘all products’ with the new market driven shipping, result in a single carrier service call rather than the different behaviour where it’s split up.

6

@Tom_Tubbiola Can you give us more details of your concerns?

The goal of these changes is not to take control away from merchants or make shipping less flexible. In fact, we’d love to reduce the manual work required to manage advanced fulfillment scenarios. Order should be split automatically based on the merchant’s shipping setup, inventory locations, delivery methods, and routing logic.

This should also give customers a more accurate checkout experience. You will still be able to manually split a shipment after an order is placed with this release but note that it can create downstream confusion: customers won’t see the expected number of shipments at checkout, and the right details may not appear on the confirmation/ thank-you page.

We recognize that changes of this scale may come with growing pains, which is why partner feedback and real-world examples are so important. Examples of shipping configurations or workflows that depend on manual splitting would be especially helpful as we continue testing and preparing the rollout. Feel free to email us at fulfillment-upgrades@shopify.com too.

7

Hello @Min_Liu! We’re happy to provide 1:1 support with any merchants you send our way. But in general, merchants will still be able to use Shipping Functions to customize their setup, including recreating the rate logic and blended-rate experience that works for them today.

Can you also give us specific scenarios where the current behavior could produce invalid rate combinations or prevent your app from returning the intended set of options? Here or via email (fulfillment-upgrades@shopify.com) is good with me!

8

So shipping has always been restrictive in Shopify, ‘features’ that Shopify introduces doesn’t always work in merchants favour. Ever since multi origin shipping was made mandatory, a lot of merchants had issues with this, whilst Shopify made some workarounds available (for example setting up rates directly in Shopify wasn’t calculated per shipment), this came nearly a year after merchants complained, and before that, Shopify’s response was basically ‘it’s working as intended’, whilst i understand Shopify may want to move in a certain direction feature wise to cater for other things down the track, I’m a firm believer of giving merchants the tools they need, not to force business practices on merchants so they can use your platform - because merchants do leave, and it’s a lose lose for both Shopify and app developers.

Moving on though - apps and live rates are still calculated per shipment should an order be split (and i’ve already confirmed in the market driven shipping thread that this behaviour isn’t going to change for apps), we have capabilities in our app to calculate the rate for each shipment so the final rate adds up to be the desired total (i.e as if it shipped with one shipment). For example they may want to show a standard rate which is say $10 and an express which is say $20 (i’ve simplified the numbers for this example). If there were two shipments, we may return the standard rate for one shipment as $10 and $20 and the other shipment as $0, so when split shipping is disabled, customers see the correct rate.

Now with split shipping enabled, customers will have the ability to pick, they may say, oh for the items in shipment one i’m happy with standard so i’ll select that and pay $10 and for the other, it’s free so i’ll select that, now suddenly, the customer has selected a mixed mode shipment, only paid $10 and expect half the order to come express, whereas the merchant doesn’t want to do that - it costs them more to ship two separate packages and the intention was they either select standard or express. Even if we returned each shipment as $5 for standard each and $10 for express each, customers can still select half the order standard and the other half express for $15 and expect the merchant to ship out two separate packages - which can cost a lot more.

Another use case for this is a find a lot of merchants create multiple locations in Shopify to track inventory separately, but they only actually ship from one location (whether that means they don’t use the locations feature as intended for whatever business reason, or they do backend stock transfers before they ship), so in such cases the merchant has no desire to ship multiple packages and always intended to ship a single package.

Allowing customers to choice complicates the merchants business and forces them to offer customers services they don’t intend to offer.

I’ve already had a merchant reach out when the ship + pickup feature was initially announced and i think you guys have had a discussion around that, i’m not sure what the outcome was, but the concerns are the same, it’s unfair to force businesses to adopt business practices that Shopify wants them to.

9

hi @Min_Liu . Acknowledging this is a lot of change for partners and merchants, and some growing pains are involved. At the end of the day there will be more tools to model both inventory and fulfillments the way a merchant of any scale can reach their customers. Will address what is available today based on some of your concerns:

  • In market driven shipping, merchants are given the capability to consolidate rates in different ways. In your example, if the standard rate is $10 and an order is expecting two shipments, it is possible to say the total shipping price is $10 (taking the higher rate and markng the second shipment as “included”) or $20 (summing the two $10 rates). The big unlock here is the decoupling of routes from fulfillment center to the customer, and the pricing of those routes. Will make sure to include this in our help docs

  • Split shipping unlocks rate flexibility for buyers to account for situations where an item is particularly important to get earlier than the rest. Should merchants not want to offer this, use of the shipping functions can hide or reorder rates.

  • Happy to share that physical inventory is also on feature preview. Physical inventory feature preview - Shopify developer changelog with more refinements expected in the coming months. We learned that merchants are creating multiple locations to organize what can be fulfilled vs what should not be. The use of bins to manage unfulfillable items in a single location like damaged goods or incoming inventory via stock transfers better models this than virtual locations.

  • Legacy routing using orders.shipping lines are accumulating errors in the system for merchants that can otherwise achieve higher sales by making goods more accessible. Fulfillment orders are the best way to model what happens when a merchant makes a sale that would have otherwise been lost because a pickup location did not have all the items the customer wanted. We are seeing positive merchant impact on this front and hope that folks that are routing orders can help us meet merchants where they are, especially as they scale to new fulfillment centers, develop a retail footprint and reach new markets.

Reaching out via our email thread so we can address more specifics. Stay tuned!

10

Hi @akat

Thanks for reaching out.

Whilst the example you’ve given for market driven shipping does work for flat rates it doesn’t work for live/app rates, the $10/$20 rates was just an simplified example but these will be live rates with varying amounts, as i understand, live/app rates will still be split by location without the possibility having a carrier service single request.

Can you explain how we can use functions to hide split shipping? as far as i’m aware delivery customisations can only hide, reorder or rename rates, we can’t use it to remove rates from an entire shipment and add it to another.

The physical inventory i can see useful for some stores, but still doesn’t help when the customer actually has multiple stores, stock items at separate locations but still only want to charge the customer one set of rates.

My concerns lie with shipping rate calculations only, this is before any orders are created, however, with market driven shipping, will the current order routing priority settings be retained? I think they will still be needed as merchants need a way to specify how locations are prioritised. I don’t have any concerns with this process though.