Processing time is how long your team needs to prepare an order before the carrier picks it up. PDQ adds it to the method's transit days to show the full delivery estimate:
"Arrives in 5 business days" = 2 days processing + 3 days transit
Two ways to set it
1. Manually, per shipping method
On the method's Delivery Promise, set Min/Max Processing Days (e.g. 2). Applies to every order on that method.
2. Per product/variant, via a metafield (recommended for granular setups)
PDQ reads a Shopify metafield and combines it with the method's transit days.
In Shopify: Settings → Custom data → Products (or Variants) → Add definition → name it
pdq.processing_time, holding a single value = business days (e.g.2).
On the method's Delivery Promise, turn on Use Metafield Processing Time.
How the value is chosen
Waterfall: PDQ checks the variant metafield first → falls back to the product metafield → then to your manual value on the method.
Highest wins: across a mixed cart, PDQ uses the highest processing value among the items, so the promise is never too optimistic.
Counted in business days. Feeds both the checkout promise and the product-page promise.
Good to know
This is the permanent processing setting. For a temporary, store-wide bump during a backlog, use Extra processing time instead - see Adding extra processing (handling) days
Checkout groups can't be segmented by the metafield value — if you need different groups for different products, target them with a product tag.