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Orderkraft
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Set up your first made-to-order product

This is where Orderkraft starts being useful. You pick a Shopify product, tell Orderkraft how long it takes to make, and from then on the product is treated as made-to-order: its delivery date is calculated rather than guessed.

What you’re actually setting up

A made-to-order product in Orderkraft has two times attached to it:

Production time is how long it takes to actually make the item. From starting production to finishing it. Not including packaging or prep for shipping. Most merchants set this to match their typical turnaround.

Dock-to-stock time is the gap between “it’s made” and “it’s ready to ship.” Quality checks, packaging, labeling, anything else that happens after production wraps but before it leaves your facility.

Both are set as ranges (min and max), in the unit that makes sense for your workflow: minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months. If production usually takes 5 days but sometimes 7, set a range of 5-7 days. Customers see the total lead time on the product page, computed from both ranges.

Steps

  1. Open Orderkraft and go to Products.
  2. Click Add product. A Shopify product picker opens.
  3. Pick the product you want to set up as made-to-order.
  4. Set the production time range and unit.
  5. Set the dock-to-stock time range and unit.
  6. Click Save.

That’s it. Orderkraft does the rest:

  • The product is flagged as made-to-order on your Shopify store
  • A production lead time metaobject is created and linked to the product
  • The lead time becomes available to the storefront so customers can see it

Ranges versus single numbers

You can set min and max to the same number if your turnaround is consistent. Most production isn’t, though, and a tight range (5-7 days) sets a more honest expectation than a single number that’s secretly the average of a wider band.

Changing or removing it later

To change the times, open the product in Orderkraft and edit the bill of materials. The metaobject on Shopify updates automatically, and the storefront reflects the new range on the next page load.

A product’s production strategy is what makes it made-to-order in the first place. Every product in Orderkraft has one: Regular, Made to order, or Built on the fly. Regular is ordinary Shopify stock. Made to order is what this page sets up. Built on the fly is for products assembled from parts the customer picks in the cart. Moving a product away from Made to order deletes the bill of materials on its variants, and that can’t be undone, so the app asks before it does it.

To remove the made-to-order flag entirely, open the product and archive it. The metafield and metaobject are removed from Shopify and the product goes back to behaving like regular inventory.

Setting up many products at once

Once a few products are in, editing them one at a time gets old. The products list and a product’s variants list both let you select rows and change them together:

  • On Products, Change production strategy moves several products between regular, made-to-order, and built on the fly in one go. The same warning applies in bulk: moving made-to-order products to another strategy deletes their bills of materials.
  • On a product’s variants, Update lead times overwrites the production and dock-to-stock times on every selected variant, which is the fast way to bring a whole size run onto a new turnaround.

What’s next

The basics are done. The remaining setup steps are optional but worth doing: