This guide is specifically for triggering pre-order fulfillment for charge-upfront pre-orders. For charge-later and deposit-upfront pre-orders, please refer to our triggering Shopify deferred charges guide. For capture-only pre-orders, see our triggering payment links guide.

What happens when fulfillment is released? #

When you release fulfillment for pre-orders, PreProduct will remove the fulfillment hold on your Shopify orders, changing their status from “hold” to “unfulfilled”. For stores using other platforms like BigCommerce, releasing fulfillment will create new orders in your platform.

Releasing fulfillment for all pre-orders #

1. Navigate to a listing’s dashboard from within PreProduct. On the left-hand side of the dashboard will be a ‘Release fulfillment’ button.

2. You will now see a list of variants for that product. Review the list to ensure you’re ready to release fulfillment for all pre-orders.

3. Click the ‘Release fulfillment’ button.

Releasing fulfillment for specific pre-orders #

1. Navigate to a listing dashboard from within PreProduct. On the left-hand side of the dashboard will be a ‘Select and release fulfillment’ button.

2. All customers who have pre-ordered the product will be displayed. You can search, filter and select specific customers for fulfillment release. Feel free to also use the “Newest #” and “Oldest #” boxes which let you select X number of pre-orders from the filtered results or select all results via the top left checkbox (we have a video here which walks through this screen’s features).
3. Once you have selected the customers you wish to process, click on Actions and then ‘Release Fulfillment’.

Releasing fulfillment for specific line items #

If an order has more than one held line item, you don’t have to release them all at once. Before pressing the release button, you’ll see a list of the order’s variants, each with a tick-box. Leaving every variant ticked (the default) releases the hold on the whole order, exactly as described above. Untick any variants that aren’t ready yet, and only the selected line items become fulfillable. The line items you leave unticked stay on hold until you release them.

This works on any Shopify store, on every Shopify plan. Unlike charging a subset of line items (which is Shopify Plus only), releasing fulfillment per line item is available to all Shopify merchants.

For paid, charge-upfront and capture-only pre-orders, the variant picker is purely about choosing which line items to release for fulfillment. For charge-later and deposit-upfront (deferred charge) pre-orders on Shopify Plus, charging a subset of variants also releases just those line items’ holds automatically on a successful charge, see triggering Shopify deferred charges for more.

Line-item-level release applies to Shopify stores only. On other platforms like BigCommerce and WooCommerce the whole order is pushed across in one go, and only once it’s fully paid.