Lead time dates Pro

"Ships in 3-5 working days" makes a customer do the arithmetic, and they do it wrong — they count Saturday. This turns the same promise into a date: Ships by 18 September 2026.

Writing one

Open a delivery promise as usual, and write the message with a placeholder in it:

Ships by {date}

Then fill in Working days underneath. That is all: the placeholder is replaced wherever the message appears — the shop listing, the product page, the basket, checkout, the order and the order emails.

{days} works too, for wording like "Ships in {days} working days" where you would rather keep the number in one place than repeat it in the text.

Working days, or calendar days

Counting decides which. Working days skip the days you are closed; calendar days count everything, which is what you want for something that ships from a warehouse that runs at weekends.

Telling Praetor when you are closed

Praetor → Settings → Lead time dates.

• Days you are closed — the weekdays you never dispatch on. Saturday and Sunday to begin with.
• Dates you are closed — bank holidays, the Christmas shutdown, a stocktake week.

A promise never lands on one of these, and a promise made on one counts from the next day you are open. An order placed on a Sunday afternoon with a one-working-day promise says Tuesday, not Monday — because Monday is the day it is picked.

Dates are read in your shop’s timezone, the one set in Settings → General, and the arithmetic is done in calendar days rather than in hours. Neither the clocks changing nor a customer ordering from another continent moves the date.

This is not the same thing as opening hours

Two settings screens can both say "we are shut", and they answer different questions:

• Lead time dates is about dispatch — the days your warehouse picks and packs. It moves a delivery date.
• Opening hours is about trading — when customers can order at all, and what happens when they cannot.

A shop can take orders every day and dispatch on weekdays only, which is why the two lists are separate. If both are set, opening hours adds its own note to the message after the date has been worked out.

What it does not do

There is no arithmetic in the message itself — {date} and {days} are the two placeholders, and that is the whole language. A date range ("ships 16-18 September") is two sentences you write yourself, not something Praetor works out.

If a rule has no working-day count, a message asking for a date simply prints without it. You will see the sentence, not a stray {date} — and Diagnostics tells you how many published messages that applies to, so a promise that stopped being filled in does not go unnoticed.

The count has to be a whole number of days. "3-5" is refused rather than read as 3, because that would promise the optimistic end of a range you meant as a spread.