Editing Deadline
What is the Editing Deadline?
The Editing Deadline is the time window you give customers to make changes to their order after they complete their purchase. During this period, customers can edit items, quantities, shipping addresses, and more before the order is sent for fulfilment.
How this works?
We can allow customers to edit their order up until the point that the order is marked as "Fulfilled" in Shopify. An order is typically marked as "Fulfilled" when you print the customers shipping label.
However, we recommend giving your customers a select amount of time (minutes/hours/days) to allow for a consistent and defined period of time set by you. This communicates a clear expectation to customers and creates some necessary urgency.
Recommended Settings
We recommend the following editing deadlines based on data provided from our current merchants
Slower ship out times: 30-60 minutes
Shipping out fast: 15 minutes
Real-world example: Oh Polly, a fast fashion retailer, uses a 15-minute editing deadline. This simple change reduced their customer support tickets from 2,000 in June 2024 to just 48 in June 2025.
How to Set Your Editing Deadline
Navigate to Settings in your Order Editing dashboard
Locate the Editing Deadline setting
Select from the drop down your preferred time window (in minutes
If your shopify is on manual capture, select disable editing after an authorization payment is captured.
Click Save
Need help deciding? Consider your fulfilment speed and customer expectations. Faster fulfilment operations typically work best with shorter deadlines (15-20 minutes), while standard operations can offer longer windows (30-60 minutes).
Note: Shopify will automatically place an order on hold for 1 hour after when a consumer interacts with Order Editing. This is default behaviour and completely normal.
Important: Using External Systems (3PL, WMS, ERP, iPaaS)
If your store uses an external system to manage orders - such as a 3PL, WMS, ERP, or iPaaS - you'll need to set up a Shopify Flow to accommodate the editing deadline if these systems are not reading live edits in Shopify.
Why this matters: These external systems often automatically pull orders from Shopify immediately after checkout. We use Shopify Flow to prevent this, giving customers their full editing window before the order is sent to your external system.
Which Shopify Flow Do I Need?
The type of Flow you need depends on how your external system downloads orders from Shopify. There are three options:
Delayed Payment Capture Flow - For systems that pull orders based on payment status
ON-HOLD Tag Flow - For systems that pull orders based on the fulfilment status
Released Tag Flow - For systems that only pull orders based on set tags
Last step: Payment Capture
If you are using a Delayed Payment Capture Flow, the final step needed is to switch from Automatic Payment Capture to Capture at Fulfilment. This will ensure all changes made to an order are sent correctly to your external system.
This works by enabling shopify to read the information set on Shopify Flow instead of automatically capturing the payment. Allow customers to take advantage of their set post-purchase editing capabilities, while ensuring streamless integration with your external system.
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