Made-to-order in Orderkraft

In Orderkraft, “made-to-order” is a property of a Shopify product. A product is made-to-order when it has a bill of materials attached to it. That’s the unit of setup, and that’s what flips the product from “inventory we count” into “thing we build when sold.”

The bill of materials

A bill of materials connects a Shopify product to:

• The raw materials and components used to build it
• A production time range (min and max), in minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months
• A dock-to-stock time range (min and max), in the same set of units

The production time is how long it takes to actually make the item. The dock-to-stock time is everything that happens after production but before the item leaves your facility: quality checks, packaging, labeling. Both are stored as ranges, because most production isn’t perfectly consistent, and ranges make for more honest promises than averages.

Adding a bill of materials to a product does three things:

1. Marks the product as made-to-order via the Made to Order metafield
2. Creates a Production Lead Time metaobject on the product with the time ranges and a calculated total lead time
3. Makes the product visible in Orderkraft’s Products list

Removing the bill of materials reverses all three. The product goes back to behaving like normal Shopify inventory.

Raw materials and components

Orderkraft has two terms for inputs to a bill of materials: raw materials and components. Raw materials are the basic things you build with, like fabric, wood, metal, or fasteners. Components are intermediate things you assemble from raw materials, like a frame, a cushion, or a chassis.

Components can have their own bills of materials, so a finished product can be made of components which are themselves made of raw materials. Most builds aren’t flat lists of parts, and the component layer is what lets Orderkraft model the actual structure.

You maintain the raw materials and components catalog yourself, inside Orderkraft. Shopify doesn’t know about them.

What the customer sees

If you’ve added the lead time block to your theme, the lead time shows up on the product page as a line like “Made to order / ships in 5 - 7 days.” The number comes from the bill of materials, so updating the lead time on Orderkraft updates the storefront on the next page load.

If you’ve enabled split shipments, made-to-order items ship separately from regular stock in the same order, so the customer’s stocked items aren’t held up while production runs.