Multi-Fulfillment Orders
Rebuilt checkout to support orders with multiple shipments and mixed delivery methods— while collapsing complexity into a simple "lowest price vs fastest" choice for buyers.
2
Primary Options
Lowest price or fastest—covers most buyer intent
Mixed
Delivery Methods
Ship some, pick up others—in a single order
The Broken State
Before this work, Shopify checkout had a fundamental limitation: it assumed one cart equals one fulfillment.
The worst case was genuinely broken. If your cart had items requiring different delivery methods—say, one item for pickup and another for shipping—the checkout simply couldn't complete. Buyers didn't know why. The cart just wouldn't work.
The "working" case wasn't much better. If you had items shipping from multiple warehouses, checkout hid all the complexity. Buyers saw a single rate—the cheapest combined option—with no delivery dates, no cost breakdown, no visibility into the fact that their order would arrive in multiple packages. Merchants absorbed the complexity on the backend.
It was lose-lose. Buyers made decisions without information. Merchants dealt with confusion post-purchase.
The UX Problem
When you surface this complexity—showing buyers that their order has multiple shipments with different dates and potentially different costs—how do you avoid making checkout feel overwhelming?
We worked on this for months. Many approaches we tried didn't feel clean enough.
The breakthrough came from an insight by Tobi: most buyers care about one of two things. Either they want everything at the lowest price, or they want everything as fast as possible. Those two options cover the vast majority of intent.
When you have a multi-fulfillment order, checkout presents two clear options: lowest price or fastest. Pick one, and we optimize all the shipments accordingly.
If you want more control, you can expand and see the individual shipments—different delivery dates, different costs, different carriers. You can mix and match based on your preferences. But most buyers never need to.
Progressive disclosure with smart defaults. The complexity exists for those who want it; everyone else gets a simple binary choice.
We validated this approach carefully. Buyers going through multi-fulfillment scenarios weren't negatively impacted—conversion held. Those who wanted more options could find them, and they converted too.
Platform Reality
This wasn't just a UI project. Checkout, order models, and cart data were fundamentally built assuming single fulfillment per order.
Over the years, Shopify had expanded order models to support multiple fulfillments on the backend. But the data flowing from cart to checkout didn't have room for multiple shipments. APIs assumed single fulfillment. The refactoring touched models, APIs, and merchant customizations that depended on the old structure.
The platform work was the iceberg below the surface. The visible UX was the tip—the data model changes underneath were an order of magnitude larger.
What's Still Coming
The hardest case is mixed delivery methods—some items ship, some you pick up. Most buyers ship everything. Some pick up everything. A small subset wants to mix: ship the gift, pick up what I need today.
This should happen on the storefront in most cases. But checkout needs to make it possible too. A buyer sees shipping times, decides they're not fast enough, and wants to switch some items to pickup.
Making that discoverable without cluttering the default experience is the challenge we're still working on.
Prioritization. Multi-warehouse shipping was more common and unlocked our partnership with Amazon on Buy with Prime—merchants using Prime fulfillment alongside their own warehouses needed this to work.
Mixed delivery methods matters more for enterprise deals: big box retailers with hundreds of locations offering ship-from-store and pickup. Important, but a different strategic priority. We chose the partnership.
The word "shipment" undersells it. This is really about multi-fulfillment—recognizing that a single cart might have items going different places, arriving different ways, at different speeds. The UI challenge is collapsing that complexity into choices buyers can actually make.