How Orderkraft fits in
Orderkraft is a Shopify embedded app. You install it from the App Store and it runs inside your Shopify Admin like any other app, with its own pages under the Apps menu. It doesn’t replace anything you already have. It adds a layer for the production side of made-to-order.
What Orderkraft reads from Shopify
Orderkraft reads from your store rather than maintaining duplicate copies:
- Orders, via the
orders/createwebhook, so it knows when a made-to-order item has been sold - Products, so you can pick which ones are made-to-order
- Locations, so you can mark which ones produce versus fulfill
Most data stays in Shopify. Orderkraft only stores what it needs locally (the bill of materials, the materials catalog, and made-to-order orders for reporting) and reads the rest live.
What Orderkraft writes to Shopify
When you set up a made-to-order product, Orderkraft writes a few things back to your store:
- A Made to Order metafield on the product, so other apps and themes can see it
- A Production Lead Time metaobject linked to the product, holding the time ranges and the calculated lead time
- A Location Type metafield on each location (fulfillment, production, or both)
- A Split Shipments fulfillment constraint, once you turn it on
- A theme app block called Lead Time Block that renders the lead time on the product page
- A
manufacturing_statusesmetafield on orders with made-to-order items, holding the production status of each line so customer accounts can show it
Because these are stored on Shopify itself, your data stays portable. If you ever uninstall, Orderkraft cleans up the metafields and metaobjects it created, but your products, orders, and locations remain untouched.
What lives only in Orderkraft
A few things only make sense inside the app:
- The bill of materials for each made-to-order product
- The catalog of raw materials and components that go into a bill of materials
- Manufacturing orders, their holds, and the production timeline behind each one
- The local copies of made-to-order orders that power the dashboard
- Your subscription state
Shopify gets the parts that are useful outside the app: the status of each order line, and an event on every status change. The detail behind it stays in Orderkraft, like who put an order on hold and why, or which location is building it.
How Orderkraft reaches the rest of your stack
Production events are published to Shopify Flow as triggers: a manufacturing order created, started, put on hold, cancelled, or completed. From there you can tag orders, notify customers, or hand off to any other app that Flow talks to, without an integration to build or maintain. See Automate with Shopify Flow.
Production status also shows up in the two places people already look for it. Shopify Admin gets a block on the order page listing what’s being built for that order, with the full timeline a click away. Customers get a status badge on their own order page, once you add the block in the customer account editor.
What Orderkraft doesn’t do
It’s not a warehouse management system, and it doesn’t replace your accounting, shipping, or POS apps. It doesn’t manage inventory for finished goods (Shopify does that). It doesn’t talk to your machines or schedule work on the production floor.
If you need any of that, you’ll keep using the tools you already have. Orderkraft fits next to them.