Changing Fulfillment Status

[Knightlite]

I have a shop in which I sell computer software.  When a customer orders a product, upon payment the product is electronically delivered, but also the customer will get a disk by mail. So when an order is placed although the electronic download has been fulfilled the disk has not been sent.

I would like to be able to mark in someway the orders that have been shipped from the unshipped orders. Is there some way I can put a custom field in the list of orders, like some sort of check box, or color code, so I can tell which orders have been shipped and which orders have not, even though all orders are marked fulfilled?

Or how can I set the order to partially fulfilled?   I used to use PrestaShop in which it could color code various stages of fulfillment. Any help would be appreciated.  

[Olivia]

Hey, @Knightlite!

Welcome to Shopify Community. My name is Olivia and I work here.

I'd be so glad to help you figure this out today. I have been thinking it over for a little while now, and I thought of a solution that will offer both you and your customers the best user experience.

What if you set-up two separate products - one digital file, and one physical product. What will this accomplish? From an inventory point of view, these items will fulfill separately, and this will allow your orders to become partially fulfilled once the digital file is triggered and sent.

Let's break it down even further.

1. Use a free app (if you aren't already) like Digital Downloads to manage and automatically fulfill your digital files. 
   
   
2. Now, I'm sure you're thinking that would mean the customer has to 'buy' both items separately. The solution? Set up product bundles for both items to be sold together at the cost of one. The reason I recommend using an app to create bundle products, is because we want to keep the inventory and fulfillment of each product separate, but keep the price the same.
   
   Check out some product bundle app solutions:
   - Bundle Products and Discounts
   - Bundler (free plan available)
   - Bundle Builder (free plan available)
   Have a question about any of the apps here? Reach out to the app devs for support. 
   
   
3. From your Admin, you will easily be able to distinguish orders that are fulfilled and partially fulfilled to action anything requiring your attention. Best part is you can purchase your shipping labels directly from us using Shopify Shipping and get them out in no time. 

We look at a tonne of websites each day, and from a buyer perspective I think there's a lot of value addition to have the products sold as a bundle. Though, I'd love to hear thoughts from other community members on what they are doing to achieve set ups like this or what their recommendations might be.

Let me know your thoughts so far, and I'd love to chat further.

Warm regards,

[Knightlite]

Hi Olivia,

Thank you so much for trying to help.  Unfortunately the solution would not really work out for me. First, I would have to duplicate all products. Second, the customer wants both the digital download and a physical product.  The customer wants to download the software right away and also have a physical disk sent to his or her house by mail.

It would be good if there was a user-defined field that allowed the merchant to mark orders in varying states of fulfillment themselves. The picture below is what my current store looks like. I can mark the order as "Preparation in progress,"  "Shipped, and other conditions."  

It just would be nice to have some way the merchant can show different states. Just anything or any field that the user can mark would be helpful. It could be as simple as a checkbox.

Thanks again for your help.

James

[Olivia]

Thanks for getting back to me and sharing those details, @Knightlite.

In this case, scratch what I said. I actually think our Digital Downloads app alone will be the perfect solution for you. One of the many features of our free Digital Downloads app is you can attach digital files to existing physical products as outlined in our app's help doc:

Once a product is fulfilled, the digital portion can still be triggered automatically (or manually if you prefer), and all that would be left to do is fulfill the physical portion of the product within the Admin. This way, there's no need for different stages of fulfillment if the digital file is always sent immediately (by the app), and open orders for the physical bit would require manual fulfillment by you. 

What do you think? Let me know!

Warm regards,