Just wanting to share a suggestion to help improve the flow of phone order taking for stores that specialise in gift giving services such as florist, cakes, food hampers and gifts, which use shopify not as a shipping service/ecommerce but as a way to sell products to be delivered on a certain days, using only the local delivery service or pickup.
What I feel is missing, which would help immensely would be a section for the local delivery details, which would include delivery date and day, card message, special delivery instructions and safe to leave options. This would streamline order taking especially for big days like valentines day.
Currently our set up uses Draft Order Magic App to allow us to add the features needed for gift services, however this requires us to keep going back and forth between the order sheet and draft order page. It would be a lot easier and more streamline to just have this implemented onto the new order form, especially for people who are less tech savy who get confused when there are too many steps, instead of just the one form.
Secondly having the option to add a section for delivery dates on the online store on the cart page before checkout.
I personally have spoken to a few florists and food/gift hamper shops who find there is much too many apps needed to be used to make their store run well as a shopify local delivery store. Unlike for stores that only ship their products, making their monthly fees increase, which within the gift giving industry can be tough on small businesses to take on, especially at a time where sales are low due to the economic climate.
Sarah, the distinction you described is important: this is a scheduled local-delivery workflow, not a shipping-first checkout.
Before adding another app, I would test one staff-facing intake record with these fields kept together:
recipient name and phone
delivery or pickup date and time window
card message
delivery instructions / safe-to-leave
product and variant
payment status
The acceptance test is simple: can a less technical staff member take the call once, without reopening the draft order, and do all six values still appear on the order-to-fulfillment handoff?
Roughly how many phone orders do you handle on a normal day versus Valentine’s Day, and which of those fields is most often missed today? That would show whether the first fix should be the staff order form or the online cart date selector.
I understand the disappointment in Shopify when you’re trying to run your business efficiently. However, what they do for you, they must do for everyone.
One thing people tend to forget is that Shopify is first and foremost an e-commerce platform, not an all-in-one vertical-specific business management system. There are apps to fill the gaps required for each individual business. This is intentional. Can they improve? Absolutely. Should they give you everything you need? I would hope not! That would make our fees skyrocket.
Stick with apps. That’s why they exist. I am sure there are plenty of app developers in here who would be happy to go through some things and see about creating a better app for you and other florists.
Hi **kai_xing,
**
We take many phone orders on a daily basis, i can’t give you a specific number as this changes on the daily basis, both for same day delivery and for future delivery dates. However on days like valentines day, our phones are ringing non stop. Previously we had a website on another platform that had a phone order form which allowed us to do this on one form and process payment all on the same page.
What i am suggesting/requesting is editable sections on the “new order” form, where we can add these dates. Currently we are using draft order magic to add these attributes to our orders. On our website, we have implemented an app to allow us to add delivery and pickup dates to each order.
The issue is without using an app like draft order magic, this information doesnt save as an attribute, and show on the invoices sent to customers. It also stop automatic tagging on orders for dates so that we can see what actually needs to be delivered today or tomorrow, as there is no way for us to decipher this without the tag.
Shopify is a great platform, however i find it definitely caters more to the shipping only stores, rather that us local delivery stores.
Sarah, that clarifies the real dependency: Draft Order Magic is not just adding fields. It is creating the order attributes that feed the customer invoice and the date tags your team uses to separate today’s and tomorrow’s deliveries.
So the smallest useful scope is not another broad app search. I would define one shared six-field order contract for phone and online orders, then verify that 10 test orders preserve the delivery date, recipient details, card message, instructions, safe-to-leave choice, invoice output and date tags.
That would show exactly where the phone-order path breaks without asking you to replace the working online delivery app. Would a one-page implementation spec plus a 10-order acceptance checklist for your exact workflow be useful?
Hi **Maximus3,
**
Thank you for your response.
I would disagree with this, I don’t think having a delivery date implemented into shopify’s native ordering system should increase the monthly fees. It’s not a big ask to add. Features like this should be standard, as there are a lot of gift giving services using the shopify platform. I understand that shopify was initially made for e-commerce, however they should be able to adapt and grow to assist a “newer” large userbase who only offer local deliveries, that have been using the shopify system for years. This is not an issue for just our own individual business, brick and mortar businesses have had to move to online sales to stay open, to keep customers and sales as the majority of people nowadays only place orders online or over the phone, instead of coming directly into the store.
Most florists and cake shops I speak to use shopify for the ease of design and price, as they cant afford to have webdesigner do this for them, but do struggle with the fact there is no easy way to add simple details like delivery date/day, without having to pay another monthly fee with an app to capture this one extra detail.
I understand they cant give us everything, but a delivery date would be very useful for a lot of us small businesses.
I mean the staff-facing Create order path in Shopify Admin—the path used when someone phones the shop. Your existing online-store delivery-date app can stay unchanged.
The check would be whether a phone order created there can carry the same delivery fields into order attributes, the customer invoice and your date-based tags. If the native Create order screen cannot expose those editable fields, that is the exact boundary the implementation spec should document rather than suggesting another broad app search.
So the first scope should be the backend phone-order path only, tested against same-day and future-date orders. Is Shopify Admin > Orders > Create order where your staff starts those phone orders today?
To be honest, asking for a simple feature may sound easy but there is so much more to it. for example:
adding a delivery date (sounds simple enough right?) then it grows into something like, days where you do not deliver, times you do not deliver, holidays, delivery hours, radius, etc etc. It’s always one thing leading to another.
I haven’t been using Shopify for long (a year or so) but from what i’ve seen is Shopify provides what majority of users would use and they focus on the future like AI etc. but when it comes to customizing stuff, they usually leave that for apps.
“I would define one shared six-field order contract for phone and online orders” I am usure how to do this, but this is how we currently take orders:
Go to Shopify Admin > Orders > Create order, then once we have selected our product, we save and click more actions > Draft Order Magic, once it loads, I created an “order attribute” template, which houses all these attributes discussed, which we fill in. Then after saving, I go back to the draft order to complete the customer profile, billing and shipping address, add the local delivery fee and then process payment.
I personally have gotten used these extra steps however many of my older colleagues struggle with this and get confused by the back and forth.
Thanks Sarah — that clarifies the workflow. The main friction is not creating the draft order itself; it is that the delivery details live in a second app step after the draft is saved, and staff then return to Shopify to finish the customer, address, delivery fee and payment. That handoff is exactly where someone can lose context or miss a field.
The next useful check is where Draft Order Magic stores those values after Save. Do the delivery date, card message, instructions and safe-to-leave details appear back on the Shopify draft/order as notes, tags or metafields, or are they only visible through the app? Please do not share any customer details — just the field labels and where they appear is enough. That determines whether this can be simplified inside the current Shopify workflow or whether it needs a different intake method.
Once i click back to the order, they become editable fields under “Additional details” once the order has been processed, they are also saved under Additional Details, which can be edited. Here is an example of a test order we did a while ago, as well as the new order example.
That is the key detail—thank you. It confirms the values are not being lost: Draft Order Magic writes them back to Shopify as editable Additional details. The actual problem is the staff workflow before and after the save, not field persistence.
The bounded acceptance result is now clear: the same six delivery fields should be captured once, remain editable under Additional details, appear on the invoice where needed, and continue to support your today/tomorrow tags. At this point the next step would be implementation and QA rather than more public diagnosis. If you want, I can outline a fixed scope for that exact result.
I would agree for the online store, however my main suggestion is to do with the backend, which is only accessible to the employees. Relating to the order form which you use to create orders. So creating a delivery date section shouldn’t be a major addition, as you know the dates you are open, and dates you are closed.
This is a simple calendar addition for you to select dates, which can be done using third party apps like draft order magic, which is what we are mainly discussing, the mention of the online date picker is just a side mention.
Values being lost is not the issue here. It is just the workflow of order taking, wanting the order date and card message to be attached to the one form, so that we don’t have to go back and forth between the app and the order form. Currently I have a flow to auto tag the date and day, depending on what is shown in the attributes.
Sorry if I am misunderstanding what you are saying here.
Could you please outline the suggestion you have to do this?
Sounds like you already got that pretty streamlined with the app templates. Couple clicks and you’re ready to go for the order. You made it sound like you had to go in and add all those fields every time. But that app is really useful in your case. That is cool.
That app is using order attributes to create those fields. I’m not exactly sure what you want Shopify to do in this workflow… Do you think these fields should already be there? I think @prov1 is right on this one. Trying to do something so “simple” could turn out to be a complete mess by the time it’s all worked out. Very few draft orders are going to use those.
Everyone hates having to do more clicks. That’s business though. I think people expect too much from Shopify to accommodate their specific needs. You need one thing, I need something different, others need something different.
One thing you could do is simply save a draft order with those already there, with some random product, and keep it saved and open. Then when you take a phone order, just duplicate that order, it already has everything in it, and you can fill out customer-specific information.
You’re not misunderstanding—I should correct my wording. I don’t see a supported way to inject arbitrary fields directly into Shopify’s native pre-save Create order form. Shopify’s current Admin UI extension targets begin on the saved draft-order details page, through an action or pinned block: Draft orders
So there are two realistic paths:
Lighter: save the draft once, then use one draft-order action/block to capture the delivery date and card message and write the attributes/tags in one step. This removes the Draft Order Magic detour, but not the first Save.
True one-form: use a separate internal order-entry screen that captures products, date and card message together, then creates the Shopify draft order with those values attached. That is a larger custom app.
The smallest sensible next step is a fixed feasibility check against one redacted draft and your six fields, ending with a field map, the supported path and a 10-order acceptance checklist. If you want me to take that scoped check, say yes and I’ll send the exact scope and price before any build.
Yes I believe as someone younger, this flow works fine, however the main issue is with other staff finding this not to be streamline, especially since with our previous webhosts we have used, they have had delivery dates implemented, into the order form with a simple date selecting calendar.
The suggestion is to have a date selector in the Create order form, for example under notes or something similar to this, accompanied by a delivery date column for ease of search. Im sure that there are more than enough businesses using shopify who need delivery dates for this to be a feasible addition to the site. The gift giving industry is massive, for example everyone has a birthday, and many people organise deliveries to be sent on specific dates. Having to pay $15USD extra is a decent amount of money for small businesses for one extra field, ontop of the rest of apps.
However I do appreciate your suggestion on having a “template” draft order, I will try this to see if this helps these collegues, however I do see this getting lost within the other draft orders/pending orders.
For the one-form suggestion, i’m assuming this needs to be built, and doesn’t actually exist yet?
I will try with the draft order you mentioned and as mention by @Maximus3 .
However this post is mainly to highlight to the shopify developers what would be such a great improvement to us local delivery businesses using shopify. They have provided local delivery fees, and I feel this is the next crucial missing detail in shopifys system for delivery/pickup businesses. Maybe i’ve posted this in the wrong sub, but was unsure where else to send out this suggestion to shopify.
Thank you all for your time, I have to go now. Great chatting with you all and have a lovely rest of your day,
Yes — your understanding is right. The true one-form option I described would need to be custom-built; it is not a native Shopify screen that exists today.
So your original post is a valid product-feature request, not a configuration mistake. The saved-draft template is the sensible no-build workaround to test for now.
Thanks for explaining the staff-use case so clearly, Sarah.
