Overview
Partnered with the client—a popular online retailer specialising in luxury perishable food—to modernise how the team manages delivery commitments for temperature-sensitive products. We designed a custom Shopify app that orchestrates slot capacity, checkout guidance, and fulfilment exports, eliminating fragile spreadsheets and manual data entry. The result is a single source of truth that keeps shopper promises aligned with warehouse reality.
Client Background
The client is an international purveyor of caviar, smoked fish, and prepared delicacies with both retail and direct-to-consumer operations. Their brand depends on precise shipping windows, tight cold-chain controls, and white-glove customer service, making delivery predictability a core business requirement. Existing processes struggled to keep up with peak-season order volume and complex carrier rules.
The Challenge
The fulfilment team managed delivery promises through ad-hoc spreadsheets and email threads, which introduced errors, duplicated effort, and late discoveries of carrier restrictions. Shopify’s default checkout could not account for slot capacity, state-based blackout rules, or per-product handling differences. Operations also needed a repeatable way to export validated orders, roll back mistakes, and keep stakeholders informed in real time.
The Solution
We engineered a full delivery-date management layer inside Shopify. The backend service maintains live, archive, and backup slot inventories via metafields and nightly automation. Custom checkout extensions surface only viable delivery options, enforce restricted destinations, and capture customer preferences. Shopify Functions hide carrier methods that conflict with the chosen slot, while admin blocks let staff review and amend draft or placed orders without leaving Shopify. A React/Polaris operations console drives batch exports, rollback workflows, and socket-powered status updates, creating an auditable path from checkout to fulfilment.
Key Features:
- Smart checkout date picker that reads live slot capacity, respects cut-off times, and writes structured cart attributes.
- Customer address selector and signature waiver controls to speed repeat deliveries and meet carrier compliance.
- Automated slot maintenance service that rolls schedules forward from configurable business rules and archives history.
- Operations workspace with bulk export, rollback, CSV generation, and real-time progress messaging for large batches.
Tech Stack:
Node.js (Express), React & Polaris, Shopify Functions & UI Extensions, Shopify Admin API
Results
Fulfilment planners now rely on an always-fresh slot catalogue with automated cut-off logic, eliminating the daily spreadsheet shuffle. Checkout shoppers see only valid delivery dates and shipping speeds, reducing support escalations. Warehouse teams export clean, validated order files in minutes and can roll back batches safely when needed. (Confirm quantitative metrics such as time saved, error reduction, or conversion lift with the client.)
Highlights:
- ⏱️ Automated slot refresh removes daily manual updates and late-night spreadsheet edits.
- 🚀 Batch exports now complete in minutes with live progress feedback to planners.
- 💬 Checkout guidance reduced support tickets tied to missed or invalid delivery promises.
- 📦 Slot usage increments instantly on order creation, keeping capacity forecasts accurate.
Key Takeaways
Fusing Shopify checkout, admin tooling, and bespoke automation created a resilient fulfilment control tower for perishable goods. The project demonstrated the value of handling capacity logic at the platform edge while keeping operators in familiar Shopify UI.