A while back I wrote about the problem with production planning for Shopify subscriptions — specifically, that Shopify gives you absolutely no way to see your scheduled fulfilments in aggregate. You can see them per customer. You cannot see them per day. And if you're a baker who needs to know on Tuesday how many loaves to prepare for Friday, that's a bit of a problem.
My solution at the time was decidedly scrappy: a Google Apps Script that queried the Shopify GraphQL API and dumped data into a spreadsheet, which I then had to pivot myself. It worked. It was free. It was also deeply annoying to maintain, required manually running a script, and felt rather like fixing a car with gaffer tape.
That has now changed.
Introducing Fulfillment Planner
Fulfillment Planner is a Shopify Admin app — built directly into the Shopify admin UI — that solves the production planning problem properly. No spreadsheets. No scripts to run. No copying data between tabs. Just a clear, real-time view of what needs to be fulfilled and when.
I built it primarily for Jack's Bread, but the underlying problem isn't unique to micro bakeries. Anyone selling made-to-order or perishable goods on Shopify subscriptions — or anyone who simply needs to see their open orders organised by fulfilment date rather than order date — will hit the same wall. Fulfillment Planner knocks it down.
What it does
Daily Fulfillment View
When you open the planner, it immediately loads all your open orders and organises them by fulfilment date. No refresh required. No export to wrestle with. You get a clean, actionable view of today, tomorrow, and as far ahead as your scheduled fulfilments run. It's the daily production plan you always wanted but Shopify never gave you.
Pivot-Style Metrics Dashboard
At the bottom of the planner sits a dynamic summary table — think of it as the pivot table from the old Google Sheets solution, except it updates automatically and you didn't have to build it yourself. For each day and each fulfilment status, you can see total quantities, weighted quantities, and remaining quantities at a glance. One look tells you everything you need to know before you start baking.
Subscription Order Forecasting
When you're running a subscription model with monthly prepayment, there's an awkward gap: customers who haven't been billed yet have no open orders in Shopify, so they're invisible to any standard fulfilment view. But you still need to bake for them.
Fulfillment Planner addresses this by looking at past order history to estimate upcoming fulfilments — even before the orders exist. If a subscriber reliably takes a loaf every Friday, they'll appear in your production plan for next Friday whether Shopify has raised their order yet or not. It means your numbers are based on who you're actually baking for, not just who's been invoiced.
The planner also flags when an upcoming fulfilment is the last one from a prepaid subscription period. That's a useful heads-up — it gives you the chance to reach out proactively before a subscriber quietly lapses, rather than noticing after the fact.
Batch Fulfillment Actions
This is where the planner earns its keep beyond just visualisation. You can select multiple fulfilment orders at once and act on them in bulk: mark a batch as ready for pickup, or at the end of day mark them all as picked up. All directly from the planner interface, without having to open each order individually. For a busy bake morning when you need to move fast, this matters.
At a Glance Fulfillment Details
The day-level view gives you the summary. Drill down into the line item product grouping and you get the full picture: individual fulfillments, customer details, and status. You can filter by status and select specific fulfillments within a day for targeted batch actions. It's the right level of detail, available when you need it, out of the way when you don't.
Smart Quantity Weighting
One thing the old spreadsheet script did that no off-the-shelf tool ever managed: handling half-loaf variants sensibly. The planner carries this logic forward with configurable weighted multipliers. A "half" variant counts as 0.5 towards your production total, not 1. Your bake quantities are accurate, not misleading. This is flexible too and can use metafield for product fractions, or simply look for "half" in variant titles.
Why it exists
The short version: Shopify is genuinely excellent at a lot of things, and production planning for made-to-order goods is not one of them.
The longer version is in my earlier post, but the gist is this: after searching for any tool — app, report, integration — that could show me aggregated scheduled fulfilments by date, and finding nothing, I built a proof of concept in Google Sheets. It solved the problem, but barely. Every time I wanted my production numbers I had to open a spreadsheet, run a script, and hope the data was fresh. Not ideal at 6am with flour on my hands.
Fulfillment Planner is what that spreadsheet wanted to be when it grew up.
Who it's for
Obviously it's for Jack's Bread — that's why it exists. But the feature set is general enough to be useful to any Shopify merchant who:
- Sells subscription products with scheduled fulfilment dates
- Produces goods to order rather than shipping from stock
- Needs a daily or weekly production plan rather than a per-order view
- Wants to manage fulfilment actions in bulk without clicking through individual orders
Micro bakeries are the obvious fit. But the same logic applies to meal kit boxes, fresh flower subscriptions, locally-roasted coffee, or any other business where "what do I need to make and by when" is a question you're currently answering with a spreadsheet, a whiteboard, or educated guesswork.
What's next
Fulfillment Planner is currently running in production at Jack's Bread, where it's replaced the spreadsheet entirely.
If you're a Shopify merchant — micro bakery or otherwise — who's been wrestling with the same production planning problem, I'd love to hear from you. I'm looking for a small number of shop owners to try the app free of charge and share feedback. No cost, no commitment, just honest input from people who'd actually use it.
Get in touch via the contact page and mention Fulfillment Planner — I'll get back to you directly.
Fulfillment Planner is a Shopify Admin UI Extension built with React, Shopify's Polaris web components, and the GraphQL Admin API. No external backend, no third-party data handling — your store data stays where it lives.
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