Workbench

For made-to-order work

Tell customers where their order is, from deposit to delivery.

Shopify has one word for the eight weeks between paid and shipped: “unfulfilled”. Workbench lets you name the stages your work actually moves through, and lets customers check their own order without emailing you. Draft orders included.

$15 a month, 14 days free. Installs in about a minute — four stages are already there and every order is listed.

A customer status page showing an order at Ready to deliver, with a dated timeline and a note reading Delayed three days — the walnut arrives Thursday.
What the customer sees, on your storefront, at your address.

The email you answer every day

“Any update on my order?” It is a fair question. The customer paid six weeks ago, the order still says unfulfilled, and nothing on your store can tell them the difference between not started yet and drying in the finishing room.

So they email, and you write the same reply you wrote yesterday to somebody else. Workbench is the answer to that email, written once.

How it works

  1. Name your stages

    “In the kiln”, “Awaiting proof”, “Back from powder coating”. Four are there when you install so the app works immediately; rename them to whatever your work actually goes through. Customers see these words.

  2. Move orders as the work moves

    Tick the orders that finished a stage and move them together — forty in one click when a batch comes out of the shop. Add a note and the customer sees that too.

  3. Customers check for themselves

    A status page on your own storefront. They enter their order number and the email on the order, and see the timeline. No account, no third-party tracking site, no email to you.

The Workbench orders board with two orders ticked and a bar along the bottom set to move both to In the workshop with a note.
Two orders selected, one stage, one note, one click.

Draft orders count

Take a deposit on a draft, build for six weeks, invoice at the end. Most order-status apps only start once an order is invoiced, which is exactly the wrong end of a made-to-order job. Workbench tracks the draft from the day the deposit lands — and when it becomes a real order with a new number, both numbers still find the same timeline.

Read-only, by design

Workbench reads your orders in order to show them. It cannot edit an order, change fulfilment, or write anything at all to your shop. That is a property of the permissions it asks for, not a promise — you can see the scopes on the install screen before you agree.

Your domain, not ours

The status page is served from your storefront, in your theme, at your address. Customers never get handed off to a tracking site with somebody else’s branding on it.

Almost nothing kept

We store the order number and the stage. No customer name, email, address or phone is stored against an order — those are read from Shopify when a page is shown and discarded when the request ends. The privacy policy spells out the one exception.

Pricing

$15per month

Free for 14 days.

  • Unlimited orders and draft orders
  • As many stages as your work has
  • Customer status page on your storefront
  • Optional email when an order changes stage
  • Cancel from your Shopify admin, any time

Questions before you install? Email support@workbenchorders.com and you will get a reply within one business day, from the person who wrote the app.