Hello Shopify world,
I run a company which makes lighting fixtures. We build each light to order and so we run a 6-8week shipping lead time. I have a Fedex account with discounted rates which I have linked to my Shopify store. Our lights go into different size boxes and weights. How do include/account for that lead time when setting up my calculated shipping rates?
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Great question, @AuthenticDesign
We actually have a guide here that goes over a variety of steps you can take to properly address your processing times and ensure the verbiage on your store communicates that clearly to your customer. That way you mitigate any miscommunications between when the customer expects to receive their order.
If there is anything else I can help you with, please let me know.
Great question indeed. I need the same information. Unfortunately when I click on the link by Dirk I get “We could not get that page”. @Dirk , can you please check on the link?
Is there any movement on this, or documentation within Shopify 2.0 that identifies how to set this up? While it has been identified as a “niche case”, it is actually extremely broadly used outside of the Shopify world. By not including this type of feature Shopify is really only accounting for smaller retailers with stock on hand, not large businesses which produce their own goods. As Shopify has expanded to include much larger and more complex brands, they really need to extend their feature sets to accommodate them. The only two solutions I’ve found or woefully inadequate. The first is simply updating verbiage on the product page so that the user can see a lead time for the product. However, if you have customers you will realize the most import factor of your customer base - they don’t read 
. The second is to use the blanket Processing Time option in the Shipping and Delivery, however this also won’t work for most businesses. Some products may take 1 day to produce, others a week. It really depends on the business. Plus, the Processing time option in the Shipping and Delivery admin only provides 3 options, the longest of which is 2 days.
There are really only two ways this could be done properly, either add a lead time to the product, or add a lead time to the shipping option. In both cases it really should be added by Shopify and not require some adhoc solution.