Setting up different delivery durations/ lead time

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment

Topic summary

A Shopify merchant is seeking ways to display different delivery lead times for dropshipped products from multiple warehouses, with processing times ranging from 3-10 days for some items to 25-30 business days for products shipped from China.

Proposed Solutions:

• Custom metafields approach: Create a metafield to assign expected shipping times to each product, making this information visible below the “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button. Implementation requires editing theme code, with a YouTube tutorial provided.

• Custom shipping rates workaround:

  • Disable automatic estimated delivery dates in Settings > Shipping & Delivery
  • Create separate shipping rate groups for each lead time (e.g., “Made to Order - 2 weeks”)
  • Use the “Custom delivery description” field to display lead time text (e.g., “Ships within 2 weeks”)
  • Note: This prevents estimated delivery dates from showing at checkout for all products

Current Status: The discussion remains open with multiple implementation options suggested but no confirmed resolution from the original poster.

Summarized with AI on November 7. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
5

I have the same issue with our store. Some of our items are made to order.

A workaround you could try;

  1. Go to Settings > Shipping & Delivery > Expected Delivery Dates - disable ‘Manual Delivery Dates’. This will stop an estimated delivery date from being shown at checkout

  2. Create a custom shipping rate for each lead time and include the products related to that lead time. For example ‘Made to Order - 2 weeks’

  3. Add zones and shipping rates to this custom group.

  4. For ‘Rate Name’ - set as ‘Custom’ under ‘shipping rate’, name the ‘Custom rate name’ something like Standard/Express or whatever you want.

  5. The important bit - under ‘Custom delivery description (optional)’ add text to describe the lead time. I.e. Ships within 2 weeks.

Now when a customer is checking out there are no estimated delivery dates shown, but it does show the lead time text.

Please bear in mind that this will mean there are no estimated delivery dates shown for items with no lead time, either.

Hope this helps.

Thanks