Remove from On Hold

Pre-order orders are often kept on a fulfillment hold so they do not ship before your stock arrives. When you are ready to ship, you release the hold. This is done in Shopify, on the order, and it is the step that lets a held pre-order become fulfillable.

What "on hold" means

On the order in Shopify, the unfulfilled items show an On hold status. A hold is a deliberate block that stops the items from being fulfilled, put there by you, or by an app or automation, so a pre-order does not go out early. While an order or fulfillment is on hold, you cannot fulfill it or change its status. You have to release the hold first.

How an order gets put on hold (for reference)

If you ever need to place one on hold yourself:

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Orders and open the order.
2. In the unfulfilled items section, click the three-dot menu, then Hold fulfillment.
3. Choose a reason and apply it.

Release the hold

For a single order:

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Orders and open the order you want to release.
2. In the On hold section, click Release hold.
3. If the fulfillment has more than one hold, select the ones you want to release, then click Release.

When the hold is released, the order's fulfillment status returns to its previous state, usually Unfulfilled. It is now fulfillable.

You can also do this from the Shopify mobile app: open the order, and in the on-hold section tap Release (selecting specific holds first if there are several).

Printing a packing slip for a pre-order

If you try to print a packing slip for a pre-order before it is released, Shopify leaves it off the slip: an order with only pre-order items can return an error, and a mixed order prints only its in-stock lines. That is expected, Shopify only adds an item to a packing slip once it is fulfillable, and a pre-order that is On hold or Scheduled is held back until its ship date.

To print the slip now, make the item fulfillable first:

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Orders and open the order.
2. If the item shows On hold, click Release hold (the step above).
3. If it instead shows Scheduled (it has a ship date but no hold), open the three-dot menu on that line and choose Fulfill early. The line moves to Unfulfilled.
4. Click Print packing slip. The item now appears on the slip.

Do this only when you are actually ready to pick and pack, because releasing or fulfilling early makes the order shippable. If you would rather pre-orders stay Unfulfilled from the start, so slips always print without this step, set the shipping date to Not set in the customer experience template (Feature settings → Shipping). The trade-off is that the order then will not carry a Scheduled or On hold status.

Releasing holds at scale

If you have many pre-orders to release at once, use Shopify Flow's "Release fulfillment order holds" action to release them automatically, for example triggered on your ship date. That saves opening every order by hand when a drop lands.

Good to know

• Releasing the hold does not fulfill the order. It only makes it fulfillable, you still fulfill it as the next step.
• Only release when you are actually ready to ship. Releasing holds before stock is in hand means those orders can then be fulfilled and shipped early.
• You cannot mark an order or fulfillment as fulfilled while any hold is still on it, release all holds first.

Related

• Why pre-orders are held and how the shipping date works: Shipping dates

Updated on: 07/06/2026