What Is the Shopify Orders Pending Fulfilment Report?
The Shopify Orders Pending Fulfilment report lists active Shopify orders that still need to be shipped. It removes two groups that would otherwise clutter the view: cancelled orders and orders already marked fulfilled. What remains is a clean action list of what your team actually has to pack and send.
Each row pairs an order with its product line and the complete shipping destination, so the report doubles as a dispatch worksheet rather than just a status count.
It is easy to confuse this with the Unfulfilled Orders report. The practical difference is scope: Unfulfilled Orders shows everything not yet fulfilled, while Orders Pending Fulfilment strips out fulfilled orders as well so you are left only with work that is genuinely outstanding. Reach for this report when the question is "what is still waiting to go out right now," not "how did we ship last month."
Which Fields Are Included in the Shopify Orders Pending Fulfilment Report?
These fields help you identify each outstanding order, what it contains, and exactly where it needs to be delivered.
You can customize the pre-made report by adding, removing, or rearranging fields so it matches how your fulfillment team works.
Important Insights You Can Find in This Report
How long have your oldest pending orders been waiting?
Sort by Date, oldest first, and look at the top of the list. Because fulfilled and cancelled orders are already removed, anything old sitting here is a genuine stuck order, not noise. A cluster of old dates points to a bottleneck worth tracing back to stock, a specific product, or a specific destination before those customers start chasing you.
Are pending orders concentrated in one destination?
Group the rows by Shipping City, State, or Country. If a large share of what is waiting ships to the same region, you can batch those into a single dispatch run or one carrier pickup instead of processing them one by one. Concentration in a distant country also flags where delays are most likely and where proactive customer messaging pays off.
Which products keep showing up on the pending list?
Scan Product Title and Product Name against Net Quantity. If the same item repeatedly appears with units still waiting, the holdup is usually upstream: low stock, a slow supplier, or a fulfillment step that item always trips on. That is a supply signal, not just a shipping one.
THE ANALYST'S READ: The Signal Most Merchants Miss
Most teams treat this report as a to-do list and clear it top to bottom. The more useful read is the shape of the Date column over repeated checks. A pending list that always contains the same few old dates is telling you something a daily count never will: certain orders are not being skipped by accident, they are structurally hard to fulfill.
Compare the age of what is pending against which products those rows carry. If aging orders keep tying back to the same Product Title, the constraint lives in your inventory or supplier flow, not in your packing speed. If aging orders instead cluster by Shipping Country or State, the constraint is your shipping setup for that region. Same symptom, very different fix. Watching which pattern repeats tells you whether to reorder stock or rework a shipping lane.
How Can You Automate the Shopify Orders Pending Fulfilment Report?
Open the pre-made Orders Pending Fulfilment report in Report Pundit. The columns are already set, so you can save it and use it right away. To rebuild it manually, go to Custom Reports, add the fields listed above, set your date range, and apply a filter if you want to narrow to one product or destination.
Once saved, schedule it to email automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly cadence so your dispatch queue lands in your inbox without being rebuilt by hand. You can also route it to your team, a VA, or a 3PL on the same schedule, and export it to Excel, CSV, or PDF, or send it to Google Sheets or Google Drive.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between the Shopify Orders Pending Fulfilment report and the Shopify Unfulfilled Orders report?
Both show active orders that have not shipped and both exclude cancelled orders. Orders Pending Fulfilment goes one step further by also filtering out orders already marked fulfilled, so it is the cleaner "still outstanding right now" action list.
Does this report include cancelled orders?
No. Cancelled orders are excluded so they never inflate your pending queue. Every row is a live order that still needs to ship.
Why do some orders show as pending even though the customer has paid?
Payment and fulfillment are tracked separately in Shopify. An order can be fully paid but still sit here until it is packed and marked fulfilled. If you specifically want the paid-but-unshipped subset, use the Orders Paid But Not Fulfilled report instead.
What does Net Quantity represent on a pending order?
Net Quantity is the number of units on that line after any returned or adjusted quantity is accounted for, so it reflects what actually needs to be shipped rather than the original ordered amount.
Can I filter the report to a single product or shipping region?
Yes. You can filter by fields such as Product Title, Shipping City, Shipping State, or Shipping Country to focus on one item or destination, which is useful for planning batch dispatch runs.