Explore the main types of local delivery apps for Shopify—from time pickers to routing tools—and learn how to choose the right solution for your delivery workflow.
Fast delivery has become central to ecommerce success. As customer expectations continue to rise, the speed and reliability of your delivery experience can dramatically influence whether shoppers complete a purchase — or abandon their carts altogether.
In fact, many Shopify merchants now report that slow or uncertain delivery timelines are one of the leading causes of checkout drop-offs. On the other hand, brands that prioritize efficient local delivery, store pickup, or same-day fulfillment consistently see higher repeat purchases and stronger revenue growth.
But with Shopify’s ecosystem offering so many different delivery-related apps — each designed to solve a very specific problem — merchants often find themselves asking:
Which type of local delivery app does my business actually need?
Do I need multiple apps or just one?
How do these tools differ from each other?
To help make sense of it all, this guide breaks down the major categories of local delivery apps on Shopify. Each category serves a different purpose, comes with its own benefits and limitations, and is intended for a different type of merchant. Understanding these differences makes it much easier to design a delivery workflow that’s reliable, efficient, and scalable.
Some apps focus purely on the customer experience at checkout, allowing buyers to choose:
These tools are simple, lightweight, and extremely useful for merchants offering same-day or next-day fulfillment.
Why merchants use them:
Time selectors help reduce missed deliveries and give customers more control, making delivery feel predictable and convenient.
Their limitation:
They do not manage any logistics behind the scenes.
Drivers, routing, order batching, dispatching — all of that still needs to be done manually or through another system.
Best suited for:
Businesses with steady order volume and a well-organized delivery team.
Another group of apps focuses on where you deliver and how much you charge based on location.
These tools help merchants:
They’re particularly useful for merchants serving multiple neighborhoods, suburbs, or city zones.
Their limitation:
These tools don’t help merchants with delivery timing, routing, or customer communication. They solve the “eligibility” and “pricing” part — not the operational part.
Best suited for:
Merchants who deliver within defined geographic boundaries and want clear, consistent rules at checkout.
Routing apps specialize in the operational side of delivery.
They help merchants:
These tools can significantly reduce delivery time and fuel costs and are ideal for merchants managing many orders per day.
Their limitation:
They typically don’t interact with the Shopify checkout experience.
They don’t provide customer-facing features like time slot selection, eligibility rules, or branded notifications.
Best suited for:
Merchants with their own fleet who need operational efficiency more than checkout customization.
Some Shopify apps connect merchants directly to courier networks.
These allow stores to:
While convenient, these apps often come with higher fees, variable service quality, and limited customization of the delivery experience.
Their limitation:
They rarely offer tools for merchant-side logistics management, pickup scheduling, routing, or customer communication workflows.
Best suited for:
Businesses that cannot operate delivery internally and are comfortable with outsourcing.
Finally, there are platforms that bring everything together — from checkout options to routing to customer notifications.
These systems aim to replace the patchwork of multiple apps with one unified solution.
A comprehensive platform typically supports:
This all-in-one model is becoming more popular as merchants look for scalable, simpler workflows that don’t require juggling 3–5 different apps.
Scrollengine’s Local Delivery + Pickup — SE fits into this category, offering a complete delivery and pickup management system inside Shopify.
Best suited for:
Merchants wanting full visibility, operational automation, and a smooth end-to-end customer experience.
It depends on your business model:
As customer expectations rise and local delivery becomes more central to ecommerce, having the right toolset can be the difference between meeting demand — or losing customers at checkout.
Make local delivery and pickup faster, smarter, and fully automated — all inside Shopify.
👉 Try Scrollengine’s Local Delivery + Pickup — SE today.