Fulfillment
Everything after an order is accepted that gets the box to the door: pick, pack, label, ship, track.
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What it is
Fulfillment is everything between 'order accepted' and 'box at the door': release the order, pick the items off the shelf, pack them, buy and print a label, hand it to a carrier, push the tracking number back to the customer. Shipping is only the carrier leg. Fulfillment is the whole chain around it. Note that it does not start at payment capture: authorize-now-capture-on-ship orders, cash on delivery, and B2B accounts on 30-day terms all get picked and packed before any money lands.
Who does it defines the business model: you at your kitchen table, a 3PL warehouse, the supplier direct (dropshipping), a printer per order (print-on-demand), or the customer collecting in store (BOPIS). Orders also split: two items in two warehouses become two fulfillments, two labels, and two 'your order shipped' emails for one order.
Gotcha: fulfillment status is a separate lifecycle from payment status, and people conflate them constantly. An order can be paid and unfulfilled, partially fulfilled, fulfilled and refunded. Customer emails and tracking hang off fulfillment events, not the charge, so wire your notifications to the right one or shoppers get 'it shipped' the second they pay.
Ask AI for it
Build a fulfillment workflow for this store. When an order is accepted, create fulfillment records against it: allocate line items to a location by stock and proximity, then support pick, pack, and ship actions that move each record through unfulfilled, in progress, fulfilled, and delivered. Handle partial and split fulfillment as first class, so one order can carry several records with different locations and carriers. Put carrier label buying and tracking behind an adapter interface with a mock implementation, and make shipment events idempotent on an external event ID so a replayed webhook never ships or emails twice. Then derive the customer-facing view from those records: a vertical stepper with a timestamp and a short plain-language line per step ('Packed at our Leeds warehouse'), line items grouped under each fulfillment with its own tracking number and estimated delivery window, and future steps greyed out rather than hidden.