Shipping Date Rules: User Guide

How to set up the app and show the ship date on your product pages

Shipping Date Rules shows shoppers, right on the product page, the day their order ships. You set your working days, close holidays and vacations on a calendar, and give products with certain tags extra preparation time. The date is calculated in the shopper’s browser, in their language.

1. Getting started
2. Calendar
3. Rules
4. Preview
5. Settings
6. Show the date in your store
7. How the date is calculated
8. Languages
9. If the date does not appear
10. Uninstall, privacy and support

1. Getting started

After installing, open the app from Apps → Shipping Date Rules in your Shopify admin. Everything is on one page, with five tabs.

1. Opening days. In Calendar, choose the days of the week on which you prepare and ship orders.
2. Closures. In the same tab, click a day to close or open it as an exception, or close a whole period for public holidays and vacations.
3. Rules. In Rules, give more working days to products with certain tags, for example made-to-order or pre-order products.
4. Settings. Choose the working days for products without rules, how the message presents the date and the warehouse time zone.
5. Check. In Preview, simulate an order to see the date the customer will see.
6. Save. Nothing appears in the store until you save at least once. After that, every change reaches the store as soon as you save.
7. Add the block. Add the “Shipping date” block to your product page from the theme editor (see section 6).

Until you save, a bar at the bottom of the page reminds you that the store is still using the previous configuration. Discard brings back the saved version.

2. Calendar

Opening days

The days of the week on which orders are normally prepared and shipped. Click a day to switch it between Open and Closed. The calendar starts the week on Monday, Sunday or Saturday, depending on your store’s country.

Closing or opening a single day

Click a future day in the calendar to close it as an exception (for example for a stocktake). Click an exceptionally closed day again to undo. On a day that is normally closed, a click opens it as an exception (for example a Saturday before the holidays). Past days cannot be changed.

Closing a period

Under Close a period, pick the first and last day and click Close period: every day in between is closed. Use it for public holidays, vacations and long weekends. No public holidays are preloaded, because they depend on your country and your business.

Upcoming exceptions

The list on the right shows the upcoming closures and openings, with Remove to cancel one. When old dates pile up, a button removes all past exceptions at once.

3. Rules

Rules give products with certain tags more preparation time. Each rule has:

• Name, to recognize it, and an Active switch to pause it without deleting it.
• Product tags: type a tag and press Enter. The app suggests the tags already used in your store.
• The product must have at least one of the tags, or all of them (with two or more tags).
• Minimum working days of preparation for those products.
• Only for out-of-stock variants: the rule applies only when the variant the customer chooses has quantity 0 or less but is still for sale (Continue selling when out of stock). In-stock variants follow the other rules.

Example: a rule with the tag made-to-order and 10 working days. A product with that tag, ordered on a Monday with weekends closed, ships on the Monday two weeks later.

Products without any matching rule use the working days set in Settings.

Example for products made to order: tag the products made-to-order and turn on Track quantity and Continue selling when out of stock on their variants. Set 1 working day in Settings and create a rule with the tag made-to-order, 10 working days and Only for out-of-stock variants. A size in stock (for example after a return) ships after 1 working day; a size with quantity 0 or less ships after 10 working days. Closures such as December 24 to January 6 are skipped in both cases.

4. Preview

Pick an order date, type one or more product tags and, if you want, tick Variant out of stock but still for sale: the panel on the right shows the message the customer will see, the rule applied, the working days and every day that was counted, open or closed. The preview uses your current changes, even before you save them.

5. Settings

• Products without rules: the working days of preparation. 0 means same-day shipping if today is open; 1 means the next working day.
• Message for customers: “Available to ship from …” (the first day the product can ship) or “Ships by …” (the day by which it will be shipped). The date is the same; the message is translated into the customer’s language.
• Time zone: the time zone of your warehouse. It decides what day it is for your store, wherever the customer is. At the start it is the time zone set in your Shopify store.

6. Show the date in your store

Add the “Shipping date” block to the product page from the theme editor. No code changes are needed.

1. In the app, open Guide and click Add to the product page. The theme editor opens with the block already added. Otherwise go to Online Store → Themes → Customize and open a product page.
2. In the product section, click Add block and choose Shipping date under Apps.
3. Drag the block where you want it, for example under the price or above the Add to cart button, and click Save.

The block shows “Available to ship from …” or “Ships by …”, as chosen in Settings, in the customer’s language, with the date in bold. On the product page it uses the product’s tags automatically.

App blocks require an Online Store 2.0 theme, such as the free themes in the Shopify Theme Store. Blocks belong to a single theme: when you publish a new theme, add the block to it again.

7. How the date is calculated

• With 0 days, the order ships today if today is a working day, otherwise on the next working day. With 1 or more days, it ships on the Nth working day after today.
• If a product matches several rules, the rule with the most days applies. In the cart, the slowest product counts.
• On the product page the date follows the variant the customer chooses. Rules marked Only for out-of-stock variants apply to variants with quantity 0 or less that are still for sale. If the variant cannot be bought, the date is hidden. In the cart these rules do not apply.
• Tags are compared without distinguishing upper and lower case.
• Exceptional closures and openings in the calendar take precedence over the weekly opening days.
• Today’s date comes from the warehouse time zone, wherever the customer is. The date is calculated in the customer’s browser, so it stays up to date even when Shopify serves the page from its cache.

The app shows when an order ships, not when it is delivered: delivery times depend on the carrier and the destination.

8. Languages

• The message in the store is translated automatically into the language in which the customer is browsing: Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Spanish and Swedish. For other languages, English is used.
• The date is also written in the customer’s language and according to their conventions, for example “Friday, September 25” or “venerdì 25 settembre”.
• The app follows the store languages and needs no settings: customers see a language only if it is enabled in Settings → Languages.
• The app’s admin page is in the language of your Shopify admin account: English, French, German, Italian or Spanish; otherwise in English. The block name and settings in the theme editor are translated into the same languages.

9. If the date does not appear

• Check that you have saved the configuration in the app at least once.
• Check that you added the block to the theme you are looking at, and that the theme is an Online Store 2.0 theme.
• If no day is open, no date can be calculated: check the opening days and the closures.
• For a variant that cannot be bought the date is hidden. For products made to order, turn on Track quantity and Continue selling when out of stock on the variants.
• If the theme updates the cart without reloading the page, the date updates on the next page load.

10. Uninstall, privacy and support

The app has no account and stores its configuration in your Shopify store. When you uninstall it, Shopify deletes the configuration, and the block stops showing. The app does not collect personal data of your customers: see the Privacy Policy.

Need help? Write to shipping-date-rules@jef.it.