A merchant is experiencing an issue where orders containing both digital downloads and physical products are being marked as “Partially Fulfilled” immediately after the digital items auto-fulfill. This prevents their third-party logistics provider (3PL) from detecting the physical items that still need shipping, as the 3PL system only pulls orders with “Unfulfilled” status.
Proposed Solutions:
Disable Shopify’s automatic fulfillment setting in checkout configuration
Use Shopify Flow with a built-in Wait command to delay digital item fulfillment by ~10 minutes
Consider the Order Automator app for automated fulfillment with delays
Root Cause Discussion:
The underlying issue may be that the 3PL is reading entire order status rather than individual “Fulfillment Orders” (line-item level assignments). Investigating whether the 3PL’s integration or WMS can handle fulfillment orders properly could provide a more permanent solution.
Status: The original poster is following up with their 3PL to explore integration capabilities. The discussion remains open with actionable next steps identified.
Summarized with AI on October 24.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
Good evening. Appreciate any insights or help you can share.
PROBLEM: Looking to solve a challenge where an order with a combination of a digital download and a physical product is preventing my 3PL from “seeing” the physical products that need fulfillment. Their system only pulls orders that are paid and in an “Unfulfilled” status.
DESIRE: I need to implement a timed delay (approximately 10 minutes) to prevent the overall Fulfillment Status from being changed to “Partially Fulfilled”.
I do not want to do manual fulfillment of the digital files (currently plan to use Digital Downloads) and would prefer the customer receive their files right away. None of the Shopify Flow documentation shows how to implement the delay in changing the fulfillment status.
I have already looked at the topics below and they do not work.
Do you have auto-fulfil turned on under your Shopify checkout settings? If so, you could try turning it OFF. What’s probably happening right now is that you have it ON and the digital ones are instantly getting fulfilled, which marks the order overall as “partially fulfilled.”
If you turn OFF auto-fulfill, you could still automatically fulfill the digital ones with a delay. As @Maximus3 suggested, Order Automator could help here
Zooming out, the root problem is your 3PL reading the full order. Ideally, they would act on “Fulfillment Orders” (their specific line items for them) and not the entire order. But a lot of 3PLs still don’t use this. Do they have their own Shopify integration or is it going through another tool or their WMS?
I’d try to disable automatic fulfilment and fulfil inside a flow, where you can have a delay.
Flow has a bunch of triggers and actions around this.
This way your 3PL would see unfulfilled order and your digital download will be fulfilled after a small delay.