Overview
The hold orders feature is a great way to prevent problematic orders from being fulfilled by your 3PL or warehouse. This feature is exclusively for Shopify and Shopify Plus stores.
When this feature is enabled, if Address Guard detects a deliverability issue with the entered shipping address or if an address rule is triggered then the order will be changed to “On-Hold” within your Shopify orders page.
The hold will then be automatically removed once the customer updates their address, resulting in the order set to the default “open” status for fulfillment.
We recommend to watch our tutorial which guides you through each option and how On-Hold appears within your Shopify orders page
Get Started
Within your Address Guard account, please go to: Order Automations > Order Fulfillment
Once on this page, you'll two main sections:
Order Fulfillment
Cancel Order Automation
For the purpose of this guide, we will be covering only the Order Fulfillment section. If you'd like to learn more about the Cancel Order Automation feature, please see our support guide.
Configuring Order Fulfillment Holds
Within the Order Fulfillment section, you have the option of selecting the reason for the order to be placed on hold. Today, we support three unique options:
Update order fulfillment to On Hold for PO Box only - this option will only trigger if the customer enters a PO Box for their shipping address. All other issues will be ignored and not placed on-hold.
Update order fulfillment to On Hold for any address issue - this option is recommended if you want to ensure all deliverability issues and all address rules that are enabled are checked.
Update order fulfillment to On Hold for any of the selected reasons - this option is helpful if you only want to place orders on-hold if specific reasons are detected such as a missing apt or unit number in the address.
Note: We recommend to select the timeframe in the dropdown to "Indefinite" for Options 1 or 2. This gives your customers plenty of time to resolve their shipping address issues.
Advanced Options
Beyond our standard On-Hold functionality, we also have a few optional features to assist your brand with customer updates mismatches in the address. There are 3 options to select from:
Release hold when a customer clicks to confirm or update their address.
We recommend to keep this checkbox unselected to prevent potential delivery fees. When unchecked, the hold is only removed after we verify the address's accuracy, preventing incorrect address confirmations by the customer.
Place order on-hold and trigger email notification if zip / postal code incorrect.
Addresses are placed on-hold for multiple validation reasons, such as missing apartment numbers, city and state discrepancies, or triggered address rules. While minor zip code errors usually don't cause carrier delivery issues, this feature allows you to hold orders when postal code inconsistencies are detected.
Skip hold if order contains specific tag
If an order is created on your store and it contains X tag that you specify in settings, then we will not place the order on-hold regardless if the address is undeliverable. We will still push our order tags to Shopify so your team has the knowledge to not ship out the order due to deliverability concerns.