Floristflow

Adding a delivery date picker to Shopify

Shopify has no way for a customer to choose when an order should arrive. It sells products that ship whenever they ship. A flower shop sells an arrangement for a Tuesday afternoon, and the date is the order.

What a florist needs a date picker to do

Offering a calendar is the easy part. The reason generic date pickers fail in a flower shop is everything around it:

  • Same-day cutoffs. Orders after 2pm cannot be delivered today. The picker has to stop offering today at 2pm, not take the order and disappoint someone.
  • Lead time. An arrangement takes time to make. A window opening in twenty minutes is not a real option.
  • Capacity per window. One van, one afternoon. When 2–4pm is full it has to stop being offered.
  • Closed days and blackout dates. Sundays, public holidays, the week you shut. Entered once, honoured everywhere.
  • Delivery areas. A date is meaningless if you do not deliver to the address. The picker checks the postal code first and says so before checkout, not after.

Where the picker goes

On the cart page, as a theme app block you place in the theme editor. For older themes and for themes with a cart drawer rather than a cart page, there is an app embed that puts the same picker in the same place without touching your theme’s code.

It takes your theme’s own fonts and colours, so it reads as part of your shop rather than something bolted on.

The date has to reach the bench

A date a customer picked is only useful if the person making the arrangement can see it. The same date, window and delivery area come out on the printed ticket, appear on the day’s run in the admin, and match what the till writes for a walk-in — because all of them read the same settings.

See how the whole app fits together, or compare it with running separate apps.

Early access

Floristflow is $100 a month and opening up to more shops soon.