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Processing time in Delivery Promise

Adding processing time to the delivery promise for optimal EDD

Haim avatar
Written by Haim
Updated over a week ago

PDQ now lets you define Processing Time using a Shopify metafield — so you can give customers a more accurate delivery estimate based on how long each product takes to prepare before shipping.

For example:

“Arrives in 5 business days”

(2 days processing + 3 days shipping)

Setting up processing time

There are 2 ways to set how long it takes to process an order before it's shipped:

⚙️ Manually setting processing time

This one's simple, you just enter a fixed number of processing days (e.g., 2) for each and any shipping method.

🆕 Processing time metafield

PDQ can also pull the processing time directly from your Shopify catalog. This one's recommended for advanced logic setups.

🔧 What Is a Processing Time Metafield?

It’s a custom field you can create in your Shopify admin, either on the product or variant level (using the metafield name from PDQ). PDQ will read the value from this field and combine it with your shipping method's Transit Days to display a full delivery window at checkout. It currently supports single values (e.g., 2) = 2 business days.

✅ Setting up the processing time metafield

  1. Go to your Shopify Admin > Settings > Custom Data

  2. Choose Products or Variants (depending on how specific you want to be)

  3. Click “Add Definition” to create a new metafield

  4. Use this format:

    • Namespace.key: pdq.processing_time (or your own custom name)

Type: Text (single line)
​

What happens at checkout?

PDQ uses the highest processing value across all items in the cart, adds it to the selected shipping method’s transit days, and shows the combined delivery promise to the customer.

Some other details:

What if there's more than one variant?

We use a "waterfall method".

  1. First PDQ checks the variant metafield

  2. If it’s missing, it falls back to the product metafield

  3. If both are missing or invalid, we use your manual fallback value in PDQ's UI

Also, note that PDQ uses the highest processing value across all items in the cart to ensure accuracy.

That's it, happy processing! And as always, if you have any questions we're always available in the chat.

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