Ottolenghi sends hampers, weekly bakes and pantry goods across the UK and overseas, and most of those orders depend on a delivery date. Studio Graft replaced the third-party delivery platform that managed those dates with an app built inside Shopify's own checkout, saving around £15,000 a year in running costs.
Ottolenghi's delivery rules are not simple. Weekly bakes are made to order and leave on set days. Hampers ship Monday to Friday and cost more to send to remote postcodes. Some products cannot share a delivery date with others. All of this ran through a separate platform on an annual contract, and the team wanted the rules back in their own hands before that contract renewed at the end of May 2026. Off-the-shelf date pickers were reviewed first, then set aside in favour of a build Ottolenghi would own.
We built a private app that sits inside Ottolenghi's Shopify Plus checkout. Customers buying a hamper or a bake choose a delivery date from a calendar at the shipping step. The date is saved to the order and repeated in the confirmation email. Shopify's own shipping rates do the pricing, and the app decides which rate applies by product, weight and postcode.
The rules are managed with product tags, so the team can run them without us. One tag puts a product on the date picker. Another blocks a date, or a range of dates, for that product alone. A third marks a pre-order and tells the customer when it will ship. If two products in a basket have no delivery date in common, checkout stops the order and says why. Lead times and holiday closures are set once, for everything.
The new checkout went live on 27 May 2026, two days before the renewal date, and the old platform was switched off the same day. Running costs for delivery scheduling have fallen by around £15,000 a year.
The app has taken on more since launch: blackout dates for a cookbook pre-order in June, then a longer lead time, product clash rules and holiday closures for Christmas 2026. December brings several times Ottolenghi's usual order volume. This year those orders go through a checkout the team controls.
