The challenge
Mail order is a relentless operation. Every day brings fresh Shopify orders across multiple cookie flavours, individual units, curated gift boxes, and - on the busiest days - subscription renewals all landing at once. For a small team with hard despatch deadlines, production planning had become the most stressful part of the day.
Before Baking List, the morning routine meant exporting Shopify orders to a spreadsheet, manually cross-referencing each variant, and building a tally of what needed to be baked before the courier arrived. On a big order day, that process could take the best part of three hours - and still left room for error when orders placed overnight were overlooked or miscounted.
Missing a despatch window is costly for any mail order business. A batch of cookies missed one day means refunds and frustrated customers the next. The manual process was an unnecessary risk that grew with every new product added to the range.
The solution
Integrating Baking List with the Shopify store took a matter of minutes. Each cookie variant and gift box configuration was mapped once, and from that point on the platform did the rest - pulling in orders in as they arrived and generating a consolidated production list ready for the team at the start of each day. Any non-Shopify orders could also be entered manually and included in the same consolidated totals.
The list expands units inside each gift box, so if a box contains three flavours the system adds each to the relevant bake totals. This reduces manual unpacking before calculating how much dough to mix.
The results
- Three or more hours of manual tallying reduced on most working days.
- Same-day orders placed overnight now automatically roll into the next morning’s list.
- Gift box contents are automatically unpacked into individual bake totals - no manual calculation needed.
- Despatch planning is more reliable, with fewer fulfilment issues reported since onboarding.