Orders & fulfilment

Hold & release (automatic fulfilment timing)

Updated 19 August 2026

An order for three weeks away should not sit in today's pick list. Hold & release parks future orders on a fulfilment hold and releases them automatically at the right time. Your warehouse only ever sees what should ship now.

Available on the Advanced plan and above.

Set it up

Open Order management → Settings and find Ship date & release:

Turn on Hold and auto-release orders.
In the Release field that appears, set how many days before the ship date orders are released. 0 releases on the ship date itself. 1 gives your team a day's head start.
Select Save on the save bar at the top of the page.

How it behaves

New scheduled orders get a Shopify fulfilment hold named Scheduled Delivery. They show as On hold in your order list, which keeps them out of pick lists, auto-fulfilment, and most 3PL feeds.
Each day, Flare releases the orders whose ship date is within your lead window. They flip to unfulfilled and ready, and your normal fulfilment flow or 3PL takes over.
Released orders are also tagged Ready to Ship. The Ship N days before delivery field in the same section decides which day that is. On the dashboard, the This week card counts how many orders are ready to ship today.
Releasing early by hand is fine. Open the order in Shopify and release the hold. Flare will not fight you on an order you have consciously released. Turning the feature off releases new orders from the start, and existing held orders can be released from Shopify in bulk.

Why teams turn it on

Your unfulfilled list becomes your actionable list.
3PLs and auto-fulfilment apps that grab everything unfulfilled stop shipping birthday gifts three weeks early.
Paired with ShipStation, the queue sorts itself by real ship dates.

Good to know

Holds apply to shippable orders. Pickup orders are not held.
If another system also manages holds, decide who owns timing. Two systems releasing each other's holds is the classic conflict. Ask us, or Sparky, if you are unsure.
Hold & release runs off the ship date, so transit times matter. See how Flare decides dates.