We build one of them, so read this accordingly. What follows is the set of questions that actually separate these apps, including the three things none of us can do.
Every app in this category puts a calendar on your product page, and on a demo store they all look the same. The differences turn up later, usually on your busiest week, and they are not the things the listings compare.
So this is not a scorecard. It is eight questions you can put to any app in ten minutes, plus an honest note about what the whole category cannot do.
Two things worth knowing before you compare, because they make the choice look wider than it is:
The one that matters most, and the one nobody advertises. A date stored only as a cart attribute can be discarded when Shopify issues a new cart token, and it does not appear against the item in your admin. Stored as a line item property, it travels with the product through add to cart and through express checkout.
How to check in thirty seconds: place a test order, open it in your admin, and look at the line item, not the order notes. If the date is only in the notes or the additional details, you have found the answer.
Express checkout skips the cart. If a date is required, the requirement has to cover those buttons too.
There are three approaches in the wild, and they are not equivalent: block the button and explain why, hide the button, or tell you to edit your cart Liquid to remove the express block. The second costs you conversions on every ordinary day. The third breaks the next time you change theme.
How to check: set a date as required, then try to buy something with Buy it now without touching the calendar.
Two products, different lead times, one cart. Nearly every app sells per product lead times and almost none document this.
The three answers on offer are: push the whole order out to the longest lead time, tell the customer to place two orders, or let each line keep its own date. For most food and made to order businesses only the third matches reality.
How to check: ask support directly, before installing. It is a question about behaviour, not opinion, and a vague answer is itself an answer.
It is the most requested missing feature in this category and it is commonly placed near the top of the pricing ladder. Prices and tier contents change often enough that quoting them here would be out of date by the time you read it, so check the listing itself. What to look for is which tier the phrase appears in, not what the tier costs.
Some apps in this category return real delivery rates at checkout, which requires Shopify's Carrier-Calculated Shipping API. That is available only on the higher Shopify plans or as a paid add on to an annual plan. It is a genuine capability, not a trick, but merchants discover the requirement after install more often than they should.
How to check: search the app's own help docs for "carrier" before you install anything.
Drawer first themes are now the norm and some apps in this category still assume a full cart page, or handle drawers only via a separate add on. Related: a picker that renders once on page load will miss anything that appears afterwards, which is most of a modern theme.
How to check: test on your actual theme with the drawer open, not on their demo store.
An app built as a theme app block is removed when you remove it. An app that injects snippets into your theme files can leave code behind that you then have to find and delete by hand, and residual code is a recurring complaint in older reviews across this category.
How to check: the listing states whether it works with theme app blocks. If setup instructions ask you to paste code into a Liquid file, you know what you are getting.
Lead times, cutoffs, closed days and caps interact in ways that are not obvious. A 48 hour lead time with Sundays closed and a five day window offers three dates, which is correct and completely opaque.
The question is whether the app will show you what a shopper sees right now, from the same logic the storefront uses. Without that, "I changed the setting and nothing happened" is unfalsifiable, and it is one of the most common complaints in the category.
If any listing implies otherwise, that is the thing to check hardest.
Shopify does not expose local delivery zones, postal codes, radius or pricing through its Admin API. Any delivery fee shown next to a date picker is a number typed into that app, and it will silently disagree with checkout if you change one and not the other. The only route to genuinely calculated rates is the Carrier-Calculated Shipping API in question five.
Two customers can select the last remaining Saturday slot at the same moment and both get it, because the count moves when the order is created rather than when checkout begins. This is true of every app in this category, ours included, and is a consequence of how Shopify checkout works. One vendor documents it plainly, which is to their credit.
Shopify's default packing slip template renders neither order note attributes nor line item properties. A date captured perfectly can be entirely absent from the paper your team works from. This needs a template edit whichever app you choose, so plan for it rather than discovering it.
Average star ratings in this category are not very informative. The negative reviews skew heavily toward merchants who have been on an app for a year or more, and a noticeable number of one star reviews are edits of earlier five star ones written months later.
Reading the recent one and two star reviews, and sorting for the ones that describe a mechanism rather than a mood, will tell you more in five minutes than the headline number.
Ours is Readyby. On the eight questions above: line item properties first, express checkout blocked with an explanation rather than hidden, each line in a mixed basket keeps its own date, per product lead times on the free plan, no Carrier-Calculated Shipping dependency, drawer carts supported through a re-scan, theme app block so uninstall leaves nothing, and a panel in the admin that lists what shoppers see right now from the same logic the storefront runs. On the three impossible things it is in the same position as everyone else, and the admin says so next to the delivery fee field. It is also supported by one person, which is the honest weakness against the larger vendors here.
Related: Click and collect on Shopify · Shopify local delivery: zones, fees and dates · All guides