Shopify Local Delivery: Zones, Delivery Days & Time Windows (2026)

Shopify's local delivery decides where you deliver and what it costs: up to 10 zones per location by radius or postcode, a fee and a minimum per zone. It doesn't decide when. There are no delivery days, no time windows, no cap on how many orders land on one evening, and it only works with Shop Pay among the express wallets. Keep native local delivery for the zones and add a delivery-date app for the schedule: the weekdays you deliver, time windows with caps, a lead time and a cutoff, checked at checkout.

The worked example throughout is a food store, because food shows every gap at once. The same setup applies to florists, grocers, wine shops and anyone with their own vans.

What Shopify local delivery does — and doesn't

Local delivery is set per location in Settings → Shipping and delivery. It gives you:

• A radius of up to 100 miles / 160 km, or a list of postal codes (up to 3,000 characters).
• Up to 10 zones per location, each with a delivery fee, up to 3 price-based rules (for example, free over $40) and a minimum order amount.
• Delivery instructions and a local-delivery fulfilment flow in Shopify admin.

What it leaves out:

Why local delivery isn't showing at checkout

"Shopify local delivery not showing" is the most common complaint about the feature. Work through these causes in order:

1. The customer used an express wallet. Local delivery only appears with Shop Pay and standard checkout. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay and PayPal customers never see it.
2. The address is outside the zone. A radius is measured from the location's address. A postcode list must include the customer's exact postcode in the format they typed.
3. The cart is under the zone's minimum order amount. Local delivery is hidden until the cart reaches it.
4. The items are stocked at a location without local delivery. Delivery is offered from the location fulfilling the order. If inventory sits at a warehouse without local delivery enabled, the option disappears.
5. Two zones share postcodes. Shopify shows only one of them, so an "express" and a "standard" zone covering the same area can't both appear.
6. A product is in a shipping profile that excludes it. Check which delivery profile the product belongs to.

Always test with the address, cart and payment method the customer actually used. A test with a card and your own postcode won't show any of these.

The express-wallet catch

Shopify's help page says it plainly:

"Local delivery works with Shop Pay, but doesn't work with other accelerated checkouts such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, Amazon Pay, or PayPal."

When a shopper taps Apple Pay or Google Pay, local delivery simply isn't offered. They see shipping — which a local-only food store may not have — or pickup. On a phone, where most food orders happen, that's a lot of customers.

It's a silent failure. You test with a card, local delivery shows, everything looks fine. The Apple Pay customers who never saw a delivery option just close the tab.

There are two honest options. Shopify's documented fix is to deactivate those express checkouts if local delivery is core to your business. The alternative is to keep them and make sure those customers still have a sensible path, usually pickup. No app can make local delivery appear inside Apple Pay. What a checkout validation Function can do is make your other rules — opening hours, delivery dates, capacity — hold on every payment path, express wallets included.

Delivery days and time windows

Native local delivery has no schedule, so the first thing a food store adds is one. Decide:

• Delivery weekdays — the days your vans run.
• Time windows — 2-hour windows suit most food delivery; 1-hour windows for hot food on a tight radius.
• Lead time — how many days' notice you need. Same-day for a kitchen, 1–2 days for a butcher or a meal-prep service.
• Cutoff — the time after which "today" disappears. If the last window starts at 19:00 and you need two hours, the cutoff is 17:00.
• Closed dates — bank holidays and days you're shut.

OrderRules adds all of these as a delivery date and time-window picker on your product and cart pages, and on the checkout page for Shopify Plus stores. See how to offer delivery time slots and delivery time slots, cut-offs and capacity.

Different days for different areas

Here's the honest boundary. Some stores deliver to the north side on Tuesdays and the south side on Thursdays. Shopify can't do that natively, and neither can OrderRules: its delivery rules vary by product, not by address, so every customer sees the same days and windows.

If you're a single kitchen with one delivery radius, one schedule is usually enough, and it keeps the calendar simple for customers.

Cap each window

A delivery window has a real ceiling: how many drops one driver can make in it. Without a cap, a busy Friday puts twelve orders in the 18:00–20:00 window your one van can do eight of.

Give each window a capacity and, if needed, a cap per delivery date across all windows. When a window fills, it greys out in the picker. The cap only holds if it's also checked when the order is placed — Shop Pay, Apple Pay and the Buy Now button can skip the page the calendar sits on. OrderRules checks the date, window and cap at checkout with a Shopify Function, on any plan, and releases the place when an order is cancelled. See delivery capacity limits.

One limit worth knowing: OrderRules' delivery rules can't tell local delivery apart from shipping. If you also ship nationwide, the same delivery schedule applies to shipped orders — fine when every order is local, something to plan around when it isn't.

Delivery minimums

Native local delivery gives each zone its own minimum order amount, and for most food stores that's the right tool: it applies to delivery only, so pickup customers can still buy a single coffee. Set it above the point where a run loses money once the driver is paid.

Two things to know. The minimum inherits the Shop-Pay-only limitation, like everything else in local delivery. And OrderRules doesn't add a cart-value minimum — its minimums are per-product quantities, such as "at least 6 of this pastry". If you need a store-wide minimum that applies whatever the delivery method, Shopify's Checkout Blocks app has order value limits that work on every payment method, including express wallets.

Enforce your opening hours

Native local delivery has no concept of opening hours and will take a delivery order in the middle of the night. Add store hours so checkout closes when the kitchen is off, with a clear "we're closed, back at 11" message instead of an order you'll refund. OrderRules enforces this at checkout on every payment method. See how to set store hours.

Add pickup, and turn off shipping you don't offer

Enable Pickup in store per location. Pickup is your pressure valve: every pickup order is one you don't pay a driver for and one that doesn't use a delivery window. Native pickup only shows a "ready in X" message; for customers to book a pickup slot with a cap, see the Shopify in-store pickup scheduling guide.

If you only deliver locally, remove or empty your shipping rates so the only options at checkout are local delivery and pickup. Nothing frustrates a local customer more than a "shipping" line on a hot-food order.

Getting the numbers right

• Radius — what your drivers can reach with hot food on time, not the maximum Shopify allows. A tight 3–5 km radius usually beats a 20 km one.
• Minimum order — above the point where a delivery loses money once the driver's paid. If a run costs you $8, a $12 minimum barely breaks even; many food shops land at $20–30.
• Fee vs free-over-threshold — a flat fee covers the driver; "free delivery over $40" lifts your average order. Shopify's three price-based rules per zone let you do both.
• Different rules per zone — a higher fee or minimum for the farthest suburb keeps distant drops worthwhile.
• Orders per window — what your drivers can reach in one window, less a buffer. The capacity calculator works it out from drivers and minutes per stop.
• Window capacity — drops per hour per driver × window hours × drivers, minus a buffer for traffic.

By shop type

The schedule above fits most local food stores. Farm shops, butchers and raw-food pet shops each need a few settings on top. The numbers below are examples, so swap in your own.

Farm shops and CSAs

A farm shop sells in weekly cycles. Take orders from Sunday evening to Wednesday 18:00, pick on Thursday, deliver on Friday and Saturday. Set that window as your store hours so checkout is shut on pick and delivery days, with a message saying when orders reopen. Then offer only Friday and Saturday as delivery days (Advanced).

Cap the box product at what you can pick: a weekly limit of 80 is a shared total across all shoppers (Pro). If members pay through a subscription app, their renewals count toward that cap but are never blocked, so leave room for them. Update stock each Monday from the actual harvest. For the dormant season, add the closed weeks as closed dates. The store stays browsable while checkout is shut.

Butcher shops

Fresh meat runs to a prep cutoff. If you cut next-day orders from 06:00, next-day delivery closes at 16:00 the day before. Set that as your cutoff, with a one-day lead time.

Cap the day at what the counter can prep. Use a store-wide daily cap of 30 orders, or a daily cap on the fresh-meat collection so sauces and pantry lines stay open (a collection cap counts items, not orders). Give whole lambs and dry-aged joints their own 5–14 day lead time and a per-delivery-date cap, so you promise six lambs for Easter Saturday, not twenty (Advanced).

Plan Easter and Christmas six weeks out. Raise the cap for the surge weeks, unpublish turkeys after your supplier deadline, and add Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day as closed dates. Your own van with insulated boxes covers 5–10 miles. Beyond that, use a refrigerated courier.

Raw-food pet shops

Raw and frozen food can't sit overnight waiting for staff. Set store hours to when you're in to pack, so every order goes straight from the freezer into insulated packaging. Cap the raw-food collection at what you can pack in a day, for example 50 items, and leave dry food and toys uncapped.

Food subscriptions need two checks. Renewals count toward your caps but aren't blocked, so size the raw cap to include them. And set renewal days to land on days you deliver, such as Monday to Thursday, not on a Sunday when you're shut.

For prescription diets, use an Rx-verification app to control who can buy. OrderRules can't target verified customers. It can add a per-customer limit to curb stockpiling, which works for logged-in customers only: guest checkout is blocked while it's on.

Your own drivers or a dispatch app?

• Your own drivers — cheapest for a tight radius, and you control the customer's last impression.
• A dispatch or routing app — as you grow, an app like EasyRoutes batches orders into routes and gives customers live tracking.

Keep the division of labour straight: the routing app moves orders; OrderRules controls which orders you accept — inside your hours, on a day and window you run, within capacity. The same split is covered in how to start a food delivery business on Shopify.

The app stack at three sizes

Install one app per layer. Two delivery-date apps on one store fight over the same cart fields, and customers see two pickers.

Leave loyalty apps, mobile apps and multi-vendor apps until the core runs cleanly. A mobile app on top of broken store hours only shows the same problem on more screens.

Local delivery on your store vs on the marketplaces

You could run local delivery through DoorDash or Uber Eats instead, but they take 15–30% of every order and won't enforce your hours or capacity. Running it on your own store keeps that margin and gives you the controls above. The common play is to use the apps for discovery and move repeat customers to your own store. See own Shopify store vs food-delivery marketplaces.

Where OrderRules fits — and where it doesn't

OrderRules is the schedule and rules layer on top of Shopify's local delivery:

• It adds delivery weekdays, time windows, per-window and per-date caps, a lead time, an order cutoff, closed dates, scheduled pickup and store hours, all checked at checkout on every payment method.
• It doesn't draw zones, calculate distance-based rates, vary the schedule by postcode, tell local delivery apart from shipping, add a cart-value minimum, make local delivery appear in Apple Pay, or route drivers. Native local delivery, a postcode-aware delivery app or a routing app handle those.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Only testing with a card. Place a test order with Apple Pay to see the express-wallet gap before your customers do.
• No schedule. Local delivery without days and windows means customers expect tonight when you meant Thursday.
• No capacity cap. One busy night buries the kitchen and the driver.
• Overlapping postcode zones. Only one will show at checkout.
• Leaving shipping on when you only deliver locally.
• Too wide a radius. Cold food and late deliveries hurt your reviews faster than a small delivery area ever will.

Quick setup checklist

1. Zones — radius or postcodes for the areas you'll actually drive to, with a fee and minimum per zone.
2. Express wallets — deactivate them, or make sure their users have pickup.
3. Shipping off — if you only deliver locally.
4. Pickup on — with scheduled slots if you want to cap collections.
5. Delivery days, windows, lead time and cutoff — one schedule, or a postcode-aware app if you need different days per area.
6. Window caps — checked at checkout.
7. Store hours — checkout closes when the kitchen's off.
8. Test with Apple Pay and a real customer address.

Items 1–4 are native Shopify. Items 5–7 are OrderRules, unless you need different days per postcode.

The bottom line

Shopify local delivery gives you the map: zones, fees and minimums. It doesn't give you the calendar, and it only works with Shop Pay among the express wallets. Set the zones natively, decide what to do about Apple Pay, then add delivery days, time windows and caps that are checked at checkout.

Start OrderRules free to add delivery days, time windows, capacity caps, scheduled pickup and store hours alongside Shopify's local delivery.