A guide for bakeries
Bakery pre-order pickup days on Shopify
Most bakeries that sell online do not want orders for any day. They want pre-orders for the days they bake, closed in time to plan the dough, and picked up at the counter. This guide covers bakery pre-order pickup days on Shopify: the local pickup settings, how to offer a pickup day with plain Shopify, and how Still Works Standing Orders turns it into one bake list per day.
1. Decide three things first
| Decision | What it means | A typical answer |
|---|---|---|
| Pickup days | The days a customer can collect. Bake days nobody collects on do not count. | Thursday and Saturday |
| Cutoff | How long before pickup you need the count to mix and shape. | Two days before, at 9 p.m. |
| How many you can bake | A number per item per day, so you never promise more than the oven holds. | Forty sourdough, twelve rye |
2. Turn on local pickup
Go to Settings > Shipping and delivery > Local pickup and open the location your customers collect from. Turn on local pickup for it, choose the expected pickup time from Shopify's list, and write pickup instructions: which door, which counter, until what time. The location needs a full street address under Settings > Locations, or checkout will not offer pickup there.
If you only want pickup for bread, put the bread in its own shipping profile under Settings > Shipping and delivery with no shipping rates. Then checkout offers pickup only, and nobody pays to ship a loaf that would arrive stale.
Shopify's own pickup emails are under Settings > Notifications. Open "Ready for local pickup" and add your own words. When you mark an order ready in Shopify, that message goes out.
3. Offer a pickup day with plain Shopify
Local pickup tells Shopify where. It does not ask when. Plain Shopify has no pickup date at checkout, so you build the choice into the product.
- Open the product under Products and add an option called Pickup day, with one value per date you bake: Thu Oct 22, Sat Oct 24, and so on.
- For each date's variant, turn on Track quantity, set the quantity to how many you can bake that day, and leave "Continue selling when out of stock" unticked. When the day is full, that date shows as sold out.
- In Online Store > Themes > Customize, add a text block on the product page with the rule: "Pre-orders close two days before pickup at 9 p.m."
- At each cutoff, set that date's quantity to zero or delete the variant, and add the next date.
- For the bake list, go to Orders, filter by delivery method to local pickup, and choose Export. Sort the file by variant to group each day.
This works, with limits. The quantity counts per variant, so if a loaf comes in two sizes, each size has its own count for the day instead of one shared number. Dates have to be added and closed by hand on every product. And a regular who wants the same loaf every Saturday has to order it again each week.
4. Pickup days in Still Works Standing Orders
Still Works Standing Orders keeps the pickup day, the cutoff and the limit in one place, and takes both standing orders and one-time pre-orders for a chosen day. Everything happens inside your Shopify admin, under Set up in the app.
- Locations. Add the bakery as a pickup location and match it to the Shopify location from step 2. The app checks that local pickup is on and that the address is complete, and says which is missing.
- Week. Tick the pickup days. Under "When do orders close?" choose one to seven days before and a time, for example two days before at 21:00. Untick "Same cutoff for every day" if Saturday needs more notice than Thursday.
- Plans. Add a plan with the loaves you bake to order and how often a regular can choose: every week, every two weeks, or every four weeks.
- Capacity. A grid with a row per product and a column per pickup day. Type how many of each you can bake, or leave a box blank for no limit.
- Calendar. Close holidays in one click, or any single date, and give a date its own limits, such as more pies before Thanksgiving.
On the product page, next to the one-time purchase, the customer sees a Standing order choice with a day and how often. The one-time choice gets a Pickup day dropdown, which the theme block setting "Let one-time buyers pick their day" controls and which is on by default. Only days whose cutoff has not passed are offered. A day that is full for that item is shown as full and cannot be chosen, and the customer can leave an email under "Tell me if a spot opens" to hear when room frees up.
One-time pre-orders are paid at checkout. Standing orders are charged when orders close, and regulars can skip, pause, change their day or swap a loaf from their account until then. Both kinds land on the same list and count against the same limits.
On pickup morning, open Today. It shows the total of each item to bake, then every customer and what they are collecting. Print it or download it as a CSV file. Mark orders ready one at a time or all at once, and Shopify sends each customer its ready for pickup message. A forecast for the next two weeks sits under the list.
The app is free for up to 10 active standing orders, with one pickup location. Find it on the Shopify App Store.
Related guides
Where to go from here
The Still Works Standing Orders page has the plain description of what the app does and does not do. If something here does not match what you see, email the studio and it gets fixed the same business day.