Turn off shipping confirmation emails premanently

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

Merchants are frustrated by their inability to permanently disable Shopify’s automatic shipping confirmation emails. The core issue affects businesses with non-standard fulfillment models—such as subscription services with delayed shipping, pickup-only stores, or those using third-party shipping platforms.

Current Limitations:

  • Only “shipment out for delivery” and “shipment delivered” notifications can be disabled in Settings > Notifications
  • Shipping confirmation emails cannot be turned off globally
  • Manual workaround exists: uncheck “notify customers” for each individual order, but this is impractical at scale
  • Another workaround: auto-fulfill orders while disabling notifications, but this prevents proper order tracking

Merchant Concerns:

  • Emails confuse customers when orders aren’t immediately shipped
  • Creates duplicate notifications when using email marketing platforms (Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Omnisend)
  • Shop App also sends “Shipped” notifications when only labels are created
  • SMS notifications cannot be customized (grayed out)

Proposed Solutions:

  • Some merchants customize email templates to say “order is being processed” instead of “shipped”
  • API users can set “Notify_Customer” to False when using Fulfillment API
  • Shopify Plus stores reportedly have more control over this feature

Status: Unresolved. Despite years of requests and multiple forum threads, Shopify staff indicate this works for “90% of merchants” and offer only to pass feedback to developers with no timeline. Community remains dissatisfied, viewing the forced notifications as poor UX that damages customer relationships.

Summarized with AI on October 29. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
5

I did some digging before I made this post. There is a similar question asked and Shopify customer service responded saying that they could put in requests but there’s no promise what happens in development. Many of the users in your Shopify community were unhappy, as you can read for yourself:

https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Discussion/Disable-order-confirmation/td-p/493291

You say that this option works as-is for 90% of your customers; are you saying the other 10% serve an insignificant portion of Shopify’s incoming revenue? Is there no way to just assist us in turning this setting off permanently for our shop? I suppose we will put in a request for adding this feature, but if I can give no estimated time of delivery on such a feature then you’re not really providing us with anything we need in this situation.

Are you going to allow 10% of your customers to be unhappy with the functionality of their Shopify store? If so, I guess I can’t expect anything to happen for us and we will pursue a drastically more costly and time-consuming solution. Not sure why we would be forced to take that path, but you aren’t assisting me with any workable solution.

Please put in the request for the feature, but without knowing if or when it could possibly be implemented it really doesn’t make much of a difference. Thank you for your time, but we remain unsatisfied with your response.

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