Configure your delivery rules

Open ShipsBy → Settings → Delivery rules in your Shopify admin. Changes apply to the storefront as soon as you hit Save — use the live preview panel on the right to check the result before publishing.

1. Cutoff time

The cutoff is the daily deadline after which new orders are processed the next business day. It uses your store's local timezone (from Shopify's store settings), so you never have to think about UTC.

• Example: cutoff 15:00 — an order at 14:40 starts processing today; an order at 15:10 starts tomorrow.
• On Growth and Pro, the widget shows a live countdown to the cutoff: “Order within 3h 12m”. On Free, the cutoff still affects the computed dates — it just isn't displayed as a countdown.

2. Processing time (business days)

How many business days you need between receiving an order and handing it to the carrier. Business days are the days you actually work — defined by your dispatch days and holidays below.

• 0 days — you ship same-day (before cutoff).
• 1–2 days — typical for most stores.
• Need longer for specific items only? Use overrides instead of raising the global value.

3. Dispatch days

The weekdays you actually hand parcels to the carrier. Untick the days you don't ship — most stores untick Saturday and Sunday. Days that aren't dispatch days never count as processing days, and a package can't be dispatched on them.

4. Holidays

Holidays are treated like non-dispatch days: processing pauses and dispatch is pushed past them.

• Preloaded calendars Growth: enable public holidays for France, United States, United Kingdom or Germany with one toggle each. The calendars are maintained by us and update every year.
• Custom dates Growth: add your own closures — summer break, inventory day, trade shows. Each entry is a single date or a date range.

How the settings combine

For every product page view, ShipsBy computes, in your store's timezone:

1. Start day — today if before cutoff, otherwise the next day.
2. Dispatch date — start day + processing days, counting only dispatch days and skipping holidays.
3. Delivery window — dispatch date + min transit days to dispatch date + max transit days for the visitor's zone.

The result renders as “arrives between Tue, Jul 14 and Thu, Jul 16”. A fully worked example with a weekend and a holiday is in the FAQ.

Saving & publishing

When you save, ShipsBy writes your compiled configuration to a metafield on your shop. The storefront widget reads that metafield directly from the page — this is why it renders instantly with zero network calls, and why a save takes effect on the next page load.

Next: set up shipping zones for different destinations, or style the widget.