We have multiple online stores to represent different aspects of our brick-and-mortar business. We have a retail site and the estimated shipping date for that is working as needed since it represents the products we have on-hand and ready to go. The rest of our online stores are for made to order products for different audiences. Most of these go into production the business day after an order is made with a production time of 10-15 business days depending on the specific product; one store is dedicated to taking pre-orders where production begins at the end of the sale period, like for fundraisers or people registering for an event, with a similar 10-15 business day production time. We have clear information on order completion on the product pages, but customers usually don’t pay attention to it, so we get a number requests on when orders will be shipped. The customer’s email notification has estimated times removed via code editing, and we have estimated times turned off in the settings, but the admin page of invoices still shows an estimated date based on the ship time and some customers report seeing that date somewhere (though test orders on our part have not shown where). Is there a way to show a realistic estimated ship date for these orders on the order status page, especially for the pre-order store where production begins at the end of the sale and not the date of order?
Thank you for sharing your use case! Unfortunately, estimated delivery dates don’t generate a new delivery date after checkout based on pre-sale end dates or production start dates.
However, once you ship the order and add a valid tracking number, and the carrier provides an expected delivery date, the order tracking view in both your online store and the Shop app will automatically update. It will replace our initial delivery estimate with the carrier’s updated delivery date so customers can see new, realistic delivery expectations to understand when an order will arrive.
I wasn’t thinking of adjusting the estimated date on already existing sales but more if there was a way to key new orders to an estimated date based on the latest date of the specific products ordered, such as a date entered in a custom metafield or to a standardized production time if no date is provided in the field.
Hey @SportsAccs,
Shopify’s ETA system is basically built for “we have the item → we ship it”, so once you’re dealing with made-to-order or preorder timelines, it just can’t show a realistic date. Even if you turn off the estimate in notifications, some customers still catch a leftover “expected delivery” somewhere on the order page because Shopify pulls that from transit time, not your production schedule.
Most shops in your situation handle it 1 of 2 ways: they either add a small custom snippet on the order status page that pulls a production window from a metafield (so it shows something like “Ships 10–15 business days after production starts”), or they send customers to a tracking page that lets you put your own status updates. That way they’re seeing your timeline instead of Shopify’s random guess.
If you want the second option, ParcelPanel works well because you can add custom statuses like “production starts after preorder closes” or “in production”. It keeps people from emailing every few days asking when their stuff is going out.
Hope this helps a bit! If it does, feel free to mark it as a solution so others can find it too 
Thank you very much for the explanation. We have a custom status app for order tracking like you say, and estimated production and delivery times on all the product pages and FAQs and the like. I think a lot of people just don’t bother to read them. Anyway, thanks again, and I’ll consider this closed.