Orders & fulfilment

Hold & release (automatic fulfilment timing)

Updated 23 July 2026

An order for three weeks away shouldn't 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

In Shipping settings:

Turn on Enable automatic order hold/release.
Set Release orders this many days before the ship date — 0 releases on the ship date itself; 1 gives your team a day's head start.
Save.

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/ready, and your normal fulfilment flow (or 3PL) takes over.
Released orders are also tagged Ready to Ship when you use the ready-window setting ("How many days before delivery do you ship your orders?"), and the dashboard's View orders ready to ship link filters to them.
Releasing early by hand is fine: open the order in Shopify and release the hold — Flare won't fight you on an order you've consciously released. Turning the feature off releases new orders from the start; 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 aren't 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 unsure.
Hold & release runs off the ship date, so transit times matter — see how Flare decides dates.