A guide for bakeries
Standing orders for a bakery on Shopify
How to sell one loaf every Saturday, picked up at the counter, and get one list each morning of what to bake and who is coming for it. Step by step, using Still Works Standing Orders.
A standing order is a subscription with a day attached. The customer chooses Saturday and a sourdough, and a sourdough is waiting for them every Saturday until they skip a week or pause. The shop side is the part that matters: you decide which days you bake, when orders close so you know the count, how many loaves a day you can make, and which days you are shut. The app charges the card when orders close, so nobody is paying for bread that is not on the list.
The whole setup takes one sitting. Everything below happens inside your Shopify admin.
Before you open the app, decide three things
| Decision | What it means for a bakery | A typical answer |
|---|---|---|
| Which days you hand bread over | These become the days a customer can choose. Bake days with no pickup do not count. | Thursday and Saturday |
| When orders close | How long before pickup you need the count. The card is charged at this moment, and the customer can skip or change right up to it. | Two days before, at 9 p.m. |
| How many you can make | A limit per item per day. When a day reaches it, new customers see that day as full and can ask to be told if a spot opens. | Forty sourdough, twelve rye |
Write those down. The next twenty minutes is typing them in.
1. Install the app
Install Still Works Standing Orders from the Shopify App Store and open it from Apps in your admin. The first page is Today, and until setup is done it shows a short checklist instead of the morning list. The menu has four items: Today, Customers, Set up, and Settings. Set up is a page with tabs, and you will go through them in order.
2. Locations: where the bread is collected
Set up, then the Locations tab. Choose Pickup, give it the name your customers know (The bakery, or the street name if you have two shops), and pick the matching location from the Shopify list. Add pickup instructions if the door is not obvious: side entrance, ring the bell, ask at the counter. Click Add location.
The app checks two things in Shopify before it accepts the location: local pickup has to be turned on for it (Settings, Shipping and delivery, Local pickup) and it needs a full street address (Settings, Locations). If either is missing the app says which one, because without them checkout would never offer pickup there.
If you also deliver locally, add a second location and choose "Local delivery: you deliver on the day". It is a name for the run; Shopify's delivery zones decide who can choose it. It behaves like a pickup day, with its own count each morning.
3. Week: the days you bake and when orders close
The Week tab shows seven boxes. Tick the days customers can collect. Under "When do orders close?" set the lead, for example two days before at 21:00. That gives you Thursday night to know Saturday's count and Friday to mix and shape.
If Saturday needs more notice than Thursday, untick "Same cutoff for every day" and give each day its own. Click Save the week.
4. Plans: what can be ordered, and how often
The Plans tab is where the bread goes. Add a plan: your open days are already ticked, and How often offers every week, every two weeks, and every four weeks, with the first two ticked. Click Choose products and tick the loaves you are happy to bake on a standing basis, or tick every product in the store. Click Create plan.
Two small choices on the same form. A percentage off, if you want a standing order to cost a little less than walking in. And Pay: each time, or a block of four, eight, or twelve paid up front. Most bakeries leave it at each time. The prepaid block is for a season, and the section on holiday bakes below explains it.
The green message after saving has a "See it as a customer" link. Keep it for step 7.
5. Capacity: how many of each loaf, each day
The Capacity tab is a grid: a row for each product in a plan, a column for each open day. Type a number where you have a limit and leave a box blank where you do not. There is an "Every day" box per product if the number is the same all week. Save.
The limit is per item, not per order. When Saturday's sourdough reaches forty, the product page shows Saturday as full for sourdough. Someone ordering a rye can still choose Saturday. One customer whose order alone is bigger than the limit does not close the day; it appears on Today with a flag so you can decide.
6. Calendar: the days you are shut
The Calendar tab shows twelve months with your open days marked. Tick the holidays you close for from the list and click the close button. Click any single date to close it, or to give it a limit different from the weekly one. A closed day with standing orders on it moves those orders to the next open day and emails each customer to say so. Open it again and, if orders have not closed yet, they move back.
7. Put the choice on your product page
Open the "See it as a customer" link from step 4. Under the price you should see a Standing order choice next to the ordinary one-time purchase, with a Day, a How often, and a first pickup date that only offers days with room. If the choice is not showing, Set up, Overview has a link that opens your theme editor with the app's block switched on. Save the theme and look again. Nothing in your theme's code changes.
8. The texts and emails your customers get
Shopify already sends the pickup messages, and the app tells Shopify when to send them. Two settings make them yours, both linked from Set up, Overview under "Texts and emails". Under Settings, Checkout in Shopify, allow a phone number as a contact method so checkout can ask for one and Shopify can text. Under Settings, Notifications, open "Ready for local pickup" and "Picked up by customer" and put your own words in, like which door to use and until what time.
The app sends its own short emails from your shop's name: a welcome when a standing order starts, a reminder the day before orders close so the customer can skip in time, and a note when you move or close a day.
9. What the customer does, and never emails you about
They pick a loaf, choose Saturday and every week, and check out with Pickup and their card. From then on, their account on your store has a page for the standing order. On it they can skip the next one, pause, resume, change to another of your days, update the card, or cancel. Each of those is a button, and each one changes your list without a message to you.
10. Saturday morning
Open the app. Today is the list for that day: totals of each item at the top, then every customer and what they are collecting, marked paid. Print it or download it as a file. When a loaf is bagged and named, mark that order ready and Shopify sends the customer its "ready for pickup" note. Mark everything ready at once when the shelf is full. If someone does not turn up, mark it a no-show and it is recorded without a refund or an email.
Under the list is a forecast for the next two weeks, so you can see Thursday's count before you order flour. The strip along the top of Today jumps to any upcoming day.
11. What happens with the money
Each standing order is charged once when orders close, never twice for the same day. If a card fails, the customer gets an email saying so with a link to update the card, and the app tries again on days one, three, and seven. If it still fails, the standing order is paused, not cancelled: nothing more is charged, it is off your list, and the customer can update the card and resume from their account whenever they like. The app never takes a share of your sales on any plan; the plans are flat monthly prices listed in the App Store, and the smallest is free.
12. Holiday bakes and a paid-up season
Two things a bakery asks for around November. The same product page can also take a one-time order for a chosen day: a customer picks the pie and the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and it lands on that day's list with the standing orders, counted against that day's limit. And a plan can be sold as a block paid up front: twelve Saturdays of panettone from the first of December, one charge. A skipped week or a day you close carries the credit forward instead of losing it.
Where to go from here
The Still Works Standing Orders page has the plain description of what the app does and does not do, and the App Store listing has the plans. If something in this guide does not match what you see, email the studio and it gets fixed the same business day.