Gift Notes & Delivery Instructions

Multi Ship lets customers add personal messages and delivery preferences to each shipment in a split order. This is especially useful for gift purchases where different items go to different recipients.

Gift notes

Enable gift notes in Settings > Orders & Checkout to let customers write a personal message for each shipment. During the review step of the split shipping modal, a text field appears for each address where customers can type their gift message.

Delivery instructions

Enable delivery instructions to let customers provide specific directions for each shipment, such as "Leave at the back door" or "Ring doorbell on arrival." This field appears alongside the gift note during the review step.

Delivery date

When enabled, customers pick a date for each shipment during the review step. This helps recipients plan for incoming packages, especially for time-sensitive gifts. The calendar only offers dates you can realistically meet: days that are too soon, weekends, and dates more than 60 days out are greyed out. If you use delivery date pricing, weekend days open when a rule prices them, days a rule closes are greyed out, and each day shows its shipping price under the date.

The earliest date a customer can choose is worked out from:

• Your processing time — the time you need to prepare an order, as set in your Shopify shipping settings
• The shipping option's transit time — when a shipping option's name states it (for example "Standard (3-5 days)"), the longer figure is used; otherwise the Default transit days you set in the app applies
• Your order cut-off time — orders placed after this time count as next-day orders, so processing starts the following business day

All of these settings live in Settings > Orders & Checkout, in the delivery date section:

• What the customer picks — choose between a preferred delivery date (the day the package should arrive) and a ship date (the day it should leave your warehouse). Ship date is the better fit when you can't promise delivery times, and it only needs your processing time.
• Order cut-off time — optional; leave it off if you don't have one.
• Default transit days — the transit time assumed for shipping options that don't state one.
• Require a delivery date - optional. When on, customers must choose a date for every shipment before they can check out.
• Set the order's fulfillment deadline from the chosen date — optional. When on, each shipment's order gets a Fulfill by date in Shopify. In delivery date mode that is the last day it can ship and still arrive on time; in ship date mode it is the chosen date itself. Orders past their deadline show as overdue in your Shopify orders list, so nothing slips.

The chosen date is saved on the shipment's order as Delivery Date or Ship Date, depending on the mode.

Recipient notifications

When Collect recipient email is on, customers can enter an email address for each shipping address. What happens with it depends on Add recipients as customers and send them shipping updates:

• On - The recipient is saved as a customer in your store (tagged multiship-recipient) and their shipment's order is assigned to them, so Shopify sends the shipping confirmation and tracking updates directly to the recipient. The recipient email becomes required.
• Off - The email is stored on that shipment's order as a Recipient Email order attribute, alongside gift notes and delivery dates, for your own reference.

Both settings live in Settings > Order Information > Recipient notifications. Turning notifications on for the first time asks you to approve an additional customer permission for the app.

Where notes appear

Gift notes, delivery instructions, and delivery or ship dates are attached to the corresponding child order in Shopify. You can see them on the order detail page in both the Multi Ship dashboard and your Shopify admin. This information is also visible when you prepare the shipment for fulfillment.

By default, each child order's note holds the split details and the customer's delivery instructions, and the gift message is stored as a Gift Note order attribute. Some shipping apps, such as ShippingEasy, print the order note on the packing slip as the gift message. If you use one, turn on Use the gift note as the order note in Settings > Orders & Checkout, under Order splitting. The note then contains only the customer's gift message, and the split details and delivery instructions are kept as order attributes, where you can still see them on the order.

Enabling these features

All of these options are off by default. Toggle each one individually in Settings > Orders & Checkout. You can enable any combination depending on what makes sense for your store.