Partially fulfill an order

[bbuchler]

I have a customer who placed an order, and one of the 3 items is a custom made item.  I can fulfill and ship the other two.  How can I indicate that on the order and send a corresponding email from the system to remind them that 1 item is going to be a 2 week process, while the other will ship right away?

[Miles · Accepted solution]

Hi, @bbuchler!

I'm Miles from the Social Care team at Shopify.

You'll be happy to hear that you can indeed partially fulfill orders and edit notifications that are sent to your customers as well.

Partially Fulfilling an Order

There are two methods you can use when you're only fulfilling part of an order. Method 1 is used if you are using Shopify Shipping, and Method 2 is used for all other shipping methods.

If you're using Shopify Shipping, please follow these steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Orders.

2. Click the number of an unfulfilled order.

3. To buy a shipping label for your order, select Create shipping label.

4. From the Fulfillment page, change the number of products that you want to fulfill for each line item in the Items section.

5. Select the shipping method in the Shipping service section.

6. If you want to send a notification email to the customer right away, then select Send shipment details to your customer now. This option is available only if you have an email address for the customer on file.

7. Click Buy shipping label. The order screen updates to display the order's Fulfilled and Unfulfilled items.

If you're not using Shopify Shipping, please follow these steps:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Orders.

2. Click the number of an unfulfilled order.

3. Optional: If you're using multiple locations, and if you want to change the location that you're fulfilling your order from, then click the name of the location on the fulfillment card, and select Change location. Select the location that you want to use, and click Save.

4. Click Marked as fulfilled.

5. From the Fulfillment page, change the number of products that you want to fulfill for each line item in the Items section.

6. Enter the tracking number from your shipping provider in the Tracking information section. The tracking URL appears in the customer's Shipping confirmation and Shipping update emails.

7. If you want to send a notification email to the customer right away, then select Send shipment details to your customer now. This option is available only if you have an email address for the customer on file.

8. Click Fulfill items. The order screen updates to display the order's Fulfilled and Unfulfilled items.

9. If you want to review the order's fulfillment details or add a tracking number, then click Add tracking in the Fulfilled section of the order.

For more information around order fulfillment, including partial fulfillment, please check out this guide.

Editing the Notification Customers Receive

When you are fulfilling an order (whether partially or fully), this will pull from your Admin > Settings > Notifications > Shipping Confirmation Template. If you go into that template, you'll be able to edit it. By default, the system will know when you complete an order or if you've only fulfilled part of the order and send the appropriate email.

For example; when an order is partially fulfilled, your customers will get an email stating: "Some items in your order are on the way." Once the final items are completed, they'll get another email confirming their order is now complete.

For more information around editing notifications, please check out this guide. As the templates are written in HTML, we also have a guide on HTML references for you to use.

Please let me know if you have any questions on this at all.

Have a great day!

[bbuchler]

Thank you, it worked great.

[JayGroup]

@Miles  Thank you for providing this information and @bbuchler thanks for kicking off this stream.  Very helpful!  Management of partial orders has recently come up internally at our fulfillment company.  We work with many brands (Startups and global accounts) who have had challenges maintaining inventory (either supply chain issues or just knocking it out of the park with sales).  These clients typically have multi-line orders and very high order volumes.  lets use the example of a 3 line order.  All 3 lines might be back ordered.  The new inventory arrives at our warehouse at different times.  To keep their clients happy they request us to ship the individual items as they arrive to us.  So one order may turn into 3 shipments.  Our internal WMS is capable of managing backorders and holding them until inventory can be allocated but its not designed to be an order management system.  I know Shopify has this functionality to hold the orders and release the partial lines as individual orders to us the fulfillment partner, when product becomes available.  Is this as manual of a process as outlined below for Shopify clients or is their an automation that can be set up to allow them this functionality and reduce a potential FTE on our clients side from having to manage this daily?  Can you direct me to any training video's I can share with our clients or specific examples?  Additionally we would want to make sure that orders that are being filled are prioritized by the end consumers order date FIFO.  Again we have logic in our internal system and developers, programmers on staff to accommodate the needs but I believe Shopify has this functionality and it would be a much cleaner process I believe for it to origin in Shopify.  Your feedback and guidance is greatly appreciated.  

[kingstore]

Shopify does allow you to create multiple shipments for orders where you will partially fulfill the orders. It is easiest to utilize a system to handle this automatically, for instance in SKUSavvy, when an item is marked as a backorder item, it will create a shipment for the products that can be fulfilled, where you will go through the normal fulfillment process, and a second shipment for the backorder item. Once there is enough inventory in the system it will re-open the order and fulfill the second item. 

For context here is the back-ordered setting (which will trigger a backorder flow for the item):

Next, here are the two shipments created for the order:

Finally, you can see the order shipments updated on Shopify (different products, same scenario)

For this to work, it needs to either be manually created as a back-order, and split within Shopify, or you will need to have a system like SKUSavvy which can continue and update information in real-time.