Stop managing your warehouse manually. StoreFeeder's Scheduled Pickwaves do it for you.
June 22, 2026
Think about how picking work is organised in most warehouses. Someone, usually the manager or a team leader, watches the order queue. They decide what goes out first, when to release the next batch, who picks what and which courier cut-off is closest. Then they do it again an hour later, again after lunch and again when a rush of orders lands.
At StoreFeeder Sessions 2026, Ian Dade made a point that landed with many people in the room: that constant decision-making is itself an inefficiency. It feels like managing, but it is really just the warehouse running on one person's attention, and the moment that person is off sick, distracted or simply stretched to capacity, the whole operation slows down.
Scheduled Pickwaves, one of the features we launched at Sessions, hands that planning to the system, meaning waves are built consistently and released on schedule without anyone having to watch the queue. Here is how they work and why they matter as you grow.
What are Scheduled Pickwaves?
A pickwave is a batch of orders released to the warehouse to be picked together rather than one at a time. Grouping work this way cuts walking, balances the floor and keeps couriers on schedule.
Scheduled Pickwaves take it a step further. Instead of a manager triggering each wave by hand, StoreFeeder monitors your incoming orders continuously and generates waves automatically, at the times and against the rules you set. The work organises itself in the background, so your team picks up a ready-made, prioritised wave instead of waiting for someone to build it.
You set the rules, and the system does the rest
The point of Scheduled Pickwaves is not to take control away from you. It is to capture how you already make these decisions and then run them automatically and consistently, every time.
You define the criteria and StoreFeeder applies them. Common examples include:
- Courier cut-off times: build and release a wave so everything is picked, packed and ready before the van arrives.
- Prime and priority orders: push Seller Fulfilled Prime or service-level-sensitive orders to the front automatically.
- Minimum thresholds and order counts: hold until there are enough orders to make a wave efficient or release on a fixed schedule, whichever suits the shift.
- Warehouse zone, aisle and packaging type: split waves so pickers work a defined area or so similarly sized orders are packed together.
When customers saw this at Sessions, the questions came fast. Can waves be scheduled per user? Can they be zone-specific, and can it work for orders flowing in from Shopify through a 3PL? The interest was practical because this is the kind of feature that changes how a shift actually runs.
Why this matters when you are scaling
A manual approach to wave management works at low volume, but it quietly breaks as you grow.
At 100 orders a day, one person can keep track of the priorities in their head. At 500, they simply cannot, and the cost shows up as missed cut-offs, uneven workloads, pickers waiting for instructions and a manager who spends the day reacting instead of improving the operation. Throughput caps out; the team isn’t slow, but the coordination becomes a bottleneck.
Scheduled Pickwaves lift that ceiling without adding any headcount. The system handles the planning, your team handles the picking and the manager gets their time back for the work that actually needs a human. That is the whole idea behind it: to organise the work so people can focus on doing it, not deciding it.
Despatch straight from the handheld
The second half of this story is what happens once an order is picked. At Sessions, Jared Meakin demonstrated two despatch upgrades that follow the same logic.
The first is App Scan Despatch, which lets your team complete the full product-led despatch process from a handheld device. No full PC at every packing bench: a picker can scan and despatch on the move, which removes a fixed bottleneck and frees up floor space. It also means you can add a packing point with a scanner rather than a workstation, and for a growing warehouse, that flexibility matters at peak times when you want to add capacity quickly and cheaply.
A smarter scan despatch page
The second upgrade is Enhanced Scan Despatch, a reworked despatch screen built to take more guesswork out of packing. It includes suggested packaging sizes so staff are not left to judge which box to use, and clearer multi-box visibility for orders that ship in more than one parcel.
These are small details on their own. However, across thousands of orders, they add up to fewer mistakes, less hesitation at the bench and more consistent despatch – the same job done the same way, whoever is on shift.
When can you use these?
Scheduled Pickwaves and App Scan Despatch are already rolling out through our Early Access Programme (EAP) and are included as standard. Enhanced Scan Despatch is following close behind. For the full breakdown of what is live now, what is in Early Access and which package each feature sits in, see our post on when the new StoreFeeder features will be available.
The common thread across all three is the one Ian made at Sessions: the best operations do not run on one person constantly deciding what happens next. They run on clear rules, validated steps and a system that organises the work so the team can get on with the part only they can do.
If you want to see Scheduled Pickwaves and the new despatch tools running against your own workflow, book a demo and we will walk you through it.
