How do I hold all fulfillments to ship in-stock and pre-order items together on Shopify?

In this article, we’ll show you how to use Shopify Flow to automatically hold all the fulfillments in a mixed cart order to ship together. We'll also show you how to do manually do so without Shopify Flow.

This way if your Shopify store has enabled Split Shipping in Checkout but your customer would like their in-stock item(s) to be shipped with their pre-order item(s) together, you can fulfill their request.

Using Shopify Flow to automatically hold all the fulfillments in a mixed cart order to ship together

You can follow these steps to automatically place all fulfillments "On Hold" when a customer requests their mixed cart order (a regular in-stock item and a pre-order item) to be shipped together.

This will be our final Flow:

1. To begin, from the Shopify admin, open the Flow app.
2. Create a new Flow and name it appropriately (e.g. "Hold order fulfillments if order contains a pre-order item").
3. Choose "Order created" for the Flow trigger.
4. Add a condition to check if the order is a mixed cart order. The conditions for this are shown below:

IF:

• At least one of order / line items
  • At least one of custom attributes
    • Equal to: _EarlyBird
    • AND
    • Equal to: Pre-order

AND:

• At least one of order / line items
  • Selling plan id
    • Empty or does not exist

5. Create an action for when this condition is true and choose "Hold fulfillment order".
6. Select "OTHER" as the reason, and enter some custom text, e.g. "Waiting for all items to be in-stock."
7. You can optionally tick the box to Notify customers of the hold, but this shouldn't be necessary if you've made it clear on your product page that items will be shipped together.
8. Save your Flow and Activate it to make it live.
9. You can now place a test mixed cart order, or wait for a real one to see it in action.

Once an order is placed which meets these conditions, you'll see the Hold appear automatically:

Manually hold and combine all fulfillments in a mixed cart order on Shopify

To manually hold and combine fulfillment for mixed cart orders on Shopify, follow these steps:

Hold Fulfillment

1. From Shopify Admin, go to Orders
2. Find the customer’s mixed cart order you want to put on hold
3. In the Unfulfilled section, click the ... menu and select Hold fulfillment.
4. Choose the items to put on hold and select a reason from the dropdown menu.
5. Click Hold fulfillment.

Combine Fulfillment

1. Go to Orders in your Shopify Admin again.
2. Click the order you want to merge fulfillments for.
3. In the Unfulfilled section, click the ... menu and select Merge fulfillment.
4. Select the items you want to combine into one fulfillment.
5. Click Merge fulfillment.

Release Fulfillment

1. Wait for the pre-order items to arrive
2. Go to the customer’s mixed cart order again and select “Release fulfilment”
3. Now you can fulfill both the in-stock and pre-order item to be shipped together.

Need help?

If you have any questions about holding fulfillments for your Shopify mixed cart orders, feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn or email us at support@shopside.com.au to see how we can help!