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Metrics type: Supporting Metrics • Category: Ecommerce Platform

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At a glance

Order distribution by displayFulfillmentStatus. The operational health view: how many orders are fulfilled, in progress, partially fulfilled, restocked, or unfulfilled?

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Calculation

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Worked example

A US apparel brand on Shopify Plus. Period: 12 Apr 26 to 11 May 26. Five things to notice:
  1. 2.7% OPEN is the backlog alarm. 184 orders that have not started picking. Sort the OPEN list by age; anything aged >24h needs ops triage. The combined OPEN + IN_PROGRESS + PARTIALLY_FULFILLED is your real-time work-in-progress; here that is 11.9%, healthy for a busy DTC brand.
  2. Partials at 3.2% mean SKU stockouts. 218 orders where some items shipped but at least one is backordered. Each is a customer-promise issue. Pair with Line Item Fulfillment for the SKU-level diagnosis; a single OOS hero SKU often dominates.
  3. SCHEDULED at 1.5% is mostly B2B. Wholesale orders with future ship-dates sit here. If you’re a DTC-only brand and SCHEDULED is non-zero, you’re likely running pre-orders or back-orders; check inventory policy.
  4. RESTOCKED + VOIDED together = cancellation events. 1.5% combined; cross-reference with Cancellation Rate. RESTOCKED is the customer-friendly path (inventory recovered); VOIDED suggests test orders or fraud cancellations without inventory return.
  5. POS dominates the FULFILLED bucket disproportionately. A retail-brick brand with strong POS sees 90%+ FULFILLED because POS auto-fulfills at the till. To assess true e-commerce ops health, filter to online-store orders only.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

The status breakdown is the diagnostic. Pair with these:

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Shopify Admin: Orders → filter by Fulfillment status. Counts per filter should align with this card’s bucket counts. Other Shopify Admin views:
  • Reports → Sales by fulfillment status: a £-revenue split by status; complementary to this count split.
  • Settings → Locations: relevant for multi-location stores; affects how partial fulfillment surfaces.
  • Apps like ShipStation, ShipBob: 3PL-side fulfillment tracking; should align with the FULFILLED count per their lag.
Why our number may legitimately differ from Shopify Admin: Cross-connector reconciliation:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why is my OPEN bucket high? Three usual causes:
  1. Stockout on a high-velocity SKU. Orders pile up waiting for inventory.
  2. 3PL or warehouse capacity issue. Pick-and-pack cannot keep up.
  3. Order volume spike. Sale week or viral moment outpaces fulfillment throughput.
Why is my PARTIALLY_FULFILLED bucket non-zero? Almost always one or more SKUs are out of stock and the rest of the order shipped. Cross-reference Products with Zero/Negative Stock to find the bottleneck SKU. What’s the difference between OPEN and IN_PROGRESS? OPEN / UNFULFILLED = no fulfillment record exists yet. IN_PROGRESS = fulfillment record created (label printed, picking started) but not marked complete. The progression is OPEN → IN_PROGRESS → FULFILLED. Why does SCHEDULED appear? Either pre-orders, back-orders, or B2B orders with future ship dates. If your store doesn’t run those, audit; this can indicate misuse of the SCHEDULED status. Multi-location, how does this affect the breakdown? Multi-location orders may appear PARTIALLY_FULFILLED if one location ships first. Once both locations ship, the order flips to FULFILLED. Multi-currency, any impact? None on the count distribution. Shopify Plus vs basic? Plus stores can use Flow automations to manage SCHEDULED orders, B2B-specific fulfillment workflows, and multi-location routing. The card behaves identically; the population mix differs. Refresh cadence? 5 to 15 minute index lag. Status transitions propagate quickly. B2B vs DTC? B2B has more SCHEDULED. DTC is dominated by FULFILLED. Mixed stores benefit from filtering by tag. The card shows a rising OPEN bucket, what should I do?
  1. Open Shopify Admin → Orders → filter Unfulfilled. Sort by age.
  2. Identify SKUs holding up the oldest orders. Cross-reference with Inventory Alerts.
  3. For aged-OPEN with no inventory issue, escalate to 3PL ops.
  4. For volume-spike, accept temporary degradation; protect customer comms with extended SLA messaging.
  5. Email customers proactively for orders aged >5 days; the brand-trust hit of silence is worse than the operational delay.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Fulfillment Status is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Shopify and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.