The Ship Date field in ShipStation represents the day on which you plan on handing over the package to the carrier to begin its journey to your customer. This field displays in ShipStation, can appear on packing slips and email templates, and is important when you create shipment manifests or schedule carrier pickup requests.
By default, ShipStation sets the day the label is created as the Ship Date, or the next business day if the selected carrier does not consider that day a business day.
To change the Ship Date when creating a label, open Order Details, click Ship Today and select the date from the calendar.
When processing a batch, you can also set the Ship Date in the batch summary screen for all the shipments in the batch.
Ship Date Cannot Be Changed After Printing Label
Once a label has been created, the Ship Date can not be changed.
You can void the existing shipping label and create a new label with the desired Ship Date, but depending on your settings, your customer and selling channel may have already been notified of the original shipment.
If notifications have already been sent, it's often easier to use the label with the incorrect Ship Date. Carriers will usually still accept a package even if the ship date printed on the label is not correct.
ShipStation offers a feature to automatically push the ship date forward after a certain time. To access this feature, go to Settings > Printing > Printing Setup and click the Document Option link for Labels. Scroll down through the settings and you can enable and define a Shipping Cutoff time.
If this feature is enabled, ShipStation will automatically set the Ship Date to the next business day after the time set in the Document Option settings.
In most cases, no. Some selling channels do not allow for us to submit a specific ship date when we notify of a shipment, and will instead treat whenever they received the shipment notification as the ship date.
If you want ShipStation to delay notifying your selling channel until the Ship Date, consider using the Delay Notifications feature in the store settings.