Shopify Draft Orders: When You Build the Order

Some orders never touch your checkout. They arrive as a phone call, a direct message, a photograph of a handwritten list from a trade-show stand, or an email from a wholesale buyer who wants a document before he raises a purchase order. Somebody still has to build that order, and on Shopify that somebody is you — which is what a draft order is for.

The question merchants search for is “how do I create one”, and it is not the question that costs them anything. Shopify's own documentation answers it in a few clicks. The expensive questions are the ones after it: which of the three routes to payment is actually open to this order, and what the draft does to your stock, your tax and your reports while it sits there unpaid. That is what this page is about, read off Shopify's own pages as of August 2026 — and if you do want to see the click path first, Shopify Academy's own walkthrough is embedded a section below.

The Quick Verdict

Three ways the money reaches you — you take the payment in the admin, Shopify emails an invoice, or you share the checkout link yourself — and one timing layer on top of whichever you pick. Find the sale you are actually making in column one.

What a Draft Order Actually Is

Strip away the interface and a draft order is a single idea: the order exists before the payment does. Everything a normal checkout collects from the buyer — what they are buying, at what price, with which shipping, to which address — you enter yourself, and only then do you decide how the money is going to arrive. That inversion is the whole feature, and it is also the source of every trap further down this page.

What you can put in one

Shopify states that draft orders can contain the following information, and it is worth reading as a checklist of what you are allowed to decide on the customer's behalf. Two entries on it matter more than they look. A customer is not decoration — attaching one changes how tax is calculated and, when that customer is a B2B customer with a company location assigned, what prices and terms appear. And the first entry, one or more products, quietly includes custom items for things that are not in your catalogue at all — untracked as inventory, and addable to an order that already exists.

Three things it is not

It is not an invoicing system. Shopify can email the customer a checkout link, and that email does the job of an invoice in the sense that it asks for money. Whether it is the formal document your accountant or your buyer's procurement team expects is a separate question with its own answer, and this page treats the invoice as a route to payment rather than as paperwork.

It is not a hold on stock. This is the single most common misunderstanding of the feature: a draft order sitting in your admin does nothing to your inventory unless you explicitly reserve it. What that costs you when you assume otherwise is set out below.

It is not a subscription tool. Shopify's REST Admin API documentation for the DraftOrder resource states plainly that draft orders don't currently support subscriptions. If the thing you are building is a recurring arrangement rather than a one-off order, you are in the wrong place, and no amount of configuration on the draft will change that.

Can you do this on your plan?

This is the first of two gates, and merchants routinely confuse it with the second. The first gate asks whether the feature exists for you at all. Shopify's features-on-all-plans page answers it directly: it lists manual order creation among the features included on every plan on the Pricing and Plans page, and describes it as creating new orders and entering payment details right from your Shopify admin. That row links to the Help Center page titled Draft orders and invoices, which is how you know the feature named on the plan page is the one described on this one.

Starter deserves its own sentence, because it drops out of official feature lists often enough to be worth checking. The Starter plan page frames its own feature set as the features available on all plans, except for staffing your Shopify store, grouping products into collections, and the POS Pro subscription. Creating orders is not among those three exclusions, which is a conclusion drawn from two pages read together rather than a single sentence naming both things — worth knowing if you are checking this against Shopify's live pages yourself. The Starter plan page also carries a separate list of features unavailable on Starter, and creating orders is not on that list either.

Three Routes to Getting the Order Paid

The routes are not ranked, and the right one changes from order to order. What does not change is that each one needs something to be true before you pick it, so the useful way to read the table below is column two first.

There are three routes because there are three ways the money physically reaches you, and the table below is the whole list. The first of them — taking the card yourself in the admin — is fully described by its own row and needs no section of its own; the other two do, and they follow. Payment terms are not a fourth route but a layer of time on top of whichever one you pick: they answer when the money is due rather than how it arrives, which is why they get a section and not a row.

Conditions read off Shopify's Help Center pages on creating and sending draft orders, August 2026.

Shopify emails the invoice

This is the route most merchants picture when they think of a draft order: the customer gets an email, clicks through, and pays on a normal Shopify checkout. It suits a buyer who wants a record before paying, and it moves the work of entering card details from you to them, which is often the point.

It also carries the only genuinely irreversible condition on this page, and it is easy to trip over precisely because it looks like something you can fix later.

Whether that email is the same thing as an invoice in the accounting sense — a numbered document, a PDF, a record your buyer's finance team will accept — is a different question with a different answer, and it has its own page: our FAQ on whether Shopify can send an invoice to a customer sets out which mechanism produces which document. This page stays on the routing question.

You send the checkout link yourself

Plenty of orders begin somewhere email cannot follow. A customer comments under a post, sends a photo in a direct message, or messages your phone about the thing they saw in the shop window. Emailing an invoice into that relationship asks them to change channel and check an inbox they may not use — which is exactly where the sale goes quiet.

Sharing the link keeps the conversation where it started. Shopify's own documentation treats invoices and links as the two forms the same draft can take, describing the pair as orders created as draft order invoices or links, so this is not a workaround — it is the second supported shape of the same route.

One thing does not change with the delivery method: the customer still lands on a real checkout. Anything that depends on the buyer typing something into that checkout — a discount code, in particular — is governed by a per-draft setting rather than by your storefront defaults, and that setting is one of the traps covered further down.

They pay later, on terms

Wholesale buyers, agencies and anyone with a purchase-order process do not pay on the spot, and asking them to is often the reason the deal stalls. Payment terms are how a draft order says “the money is due, but not today” — and if the language is new to you, it comes from ordinary business invoicing rather than from Shopify.

Shopify publishes four types, and the difference between them is what starts the clock — the day you send the invoice, the day you ship, a date you name, or a count of days from issue.

Shopify Help Center — creating a draft order, read August 5, 2026.

If your buyer is a B2B customer, much of this is decided before you open the draft. Shopify states that when a draft order has a B2B customer and a company location assigned, the prices, payment terms and checkout options automatically reflect the settings for that company, and that where a company location already has payment terms set, the payment term is applied automatically. Your job there is to check what was filled in, not to fill it in. The wider machinery — company accounts, catalogs, price lists — belongs to our guide to B2B and wholesale on Shopify.

Which route is actually open to you?

A perfect wholesale profile still loses the invoice route if you set payment terms on a draft in a currency other than your store's.

The table at the top answers by the kind of sale. This one works the other way round: six things can each decide this order's route on their own, you rarely know in advance which one applies to this order, and the five questions below find the one that hits you first.

What Happens to Stock and Tax While It Sits

Between building the order and getting paid there is a gap, and two things behave differently inside it than merchants assume. Both are recoverable if you know about them in advance and expensive if you find out afterwards.

Does a draft order hold the stock?

Reserving is a deliberate act, not a side effect of building the order. Shopify states that when you reserve inventory in a draft order, those units go to the Unavailable state and can't be purchased by other customers, because the items you reserve are dedicated to that particular draft order. Reservation depends on inventory tracking being switched on for the product, so an untracked product has nothing to reserve. When you reserve, Shopify asks you to select the date and time when the reserve will expire.

One boundary is worth stating plainly rather than guessing at. We found no Shopify page describing what happens to reserved inventory when the draft order carrying the reservation is deleted — whether those units return to Available immediately or stay held. As of August 6, 2026 we read the Help Center page on creating draft orders (including its own sections on reserving inventory and on deleting a draft), the inventory-states reference, the page on adjusting inventory quantities, the inventory section index, and the Admin GraphQL reference for the draft-order delete mutation. Shopify's silence is not a rule in either direction; if this matters to your process, release the reservation deliberately rather than assuming deletion does it for you.

How tax is worked out on a draft

Shopify states that by default, draft orders include taxes based on your store's tax settings and the customer's shipping address, and that where no shipping address is on file, taxes are based on the billing address instead. A Charge taxes control on the draft lets you change it.

What surprises people is the order of precedence once a customer is attached. The Admin API documentation spells it out, and it runs from the draft down to the customer, with the customer winning:

1. The draft order's own tax-exempt setting comes first. Where it is not set, Shopify moves to the next level rather than simply charging tax.
2. Then each line item's own taxable field. This is why one line can behave differently from its neighbour on the same order.
3. But if a customer is applied to the draft order, Shopify uses the customer's tax-exempt field instead. A customer profile can be set to collect tax, not collect tax, or collect tax unless exemptions apply, and Shopify states that customer tax exemptions always take precedence over tax overrides.

Whether any of this becomes revenue in your reports is a question the draft cannot answer on its own — the accounting fate of these amounts is decided at the moment the order is paid, and the section on whether it counts as a sale below picks that thread up.

Where Draft Orders Catch People Out

None of what follows is hidden — all of it is documented. It catches people because it differs from how the same thing behaves on a normal storefront order, and nobody reads documentation for the parts they assume they already know.

Custom prices and the price lock

Shopify allows a custom price on any line item in a draft order, to charge more or less than the listed price — matching a competitor, adding a surcharge for a rush order, or quoting a negotiated wholesale price. The important half of that sentence is the boundary: a custom price applies only to the line item on this draft order, and the product's price isn't changed. Custom prices use the draft order's currency, so the amount you type is the amount the customer pays.

The second mechanic is the one that moves without being asked. A price lock ensures the prices of products in the order don't change even if you update the product's price later in the admin. By default a draft order's prices are unlocked until you choose to lock them — but when you send an invoice or share a checkout link, the pricing is set to lock by default unless you manually set it to be unlocked. So the state you left it in while building is not the state it ships in.

Two boundaries travel with the lock, and both cut against the intuition that locking is the safe option. It prevents prices from being raised, but it also prevents prices from being automatically lowered when you permanently reduce a product's price — a locked quote will not follow your own sale down. And price locks aren't supported for product bundles: include a bundle in a draft order and its price can't be locked. This same custom-price mechanic is what configurator apps use to add a surcharge at checkout, with consequences of its own that our guide to a Shopify product configurator works through in full.

Discount codes behave differently here

Every row below is a place where the draft behaves unlike your storefront, and where a customer's expectation — formed by shopping on your site — quietly diverges from what the order will actually do.

Shopify Help Center — applying discounts to draft orders, read August 5, 2026.

The second row is the one that generates support tickets. Because the option to let customers apply their own codes is per draft order, switching it on once does not switch it on for the next order — you make that decision every single time, and a buyer who used a code on your storefront last week will assume otherwise. Shopify adds one hard condition to that switch: when you share a direct checkout link, you must use a desktop device to activate the option — it cannot be activated from a mobile device.

How many lines can one draft hold?

For most orders this never comes up. For a wholesale list or a season's worth of variants it decides whether the order can exist at all — and here Shopify's own sources do not agree with each other. Rather than pick a winner or split the difference, here is what each source actually publishes.

Each figure is quoted from the page linked in column one, on the date shown in column three.

Neither number is an error to be corrected into the other, and averaging them would produce a figure no Shopify page states. They also describe different doors into the same object: one is documented in a B2B context in the Help Center, the other is validation on the API input used to create or update any draft order. What you can act on is the lower one — building to 200 lines keeps you inside every ceiling Shopify publishes. If your list is longer, split it across several drafts, and note that the order it eventually becomes carries its own published maximum of 500 line items on that same B2B requirements page.

The draft you forget about disappears

Merchants who use draft orders as quotes tend to accumulate them, and the pile is not permanent. Shopify introduced a retention rule for performance reasons, and the wording of it matters more than the headline: it is about inactivity, and it is scoped to when the draft was created.

In practice this is rarely a problem and occasionally a disaster — the drafts most likely to be deleted are the ones you built for a customer who went quiet, which are also the ones you would want as a record if they came back eighteen months later. If a quote genuinely needs to outlive that window, keep the record somewhere that is not a draft order.

When a Draft Order Is the Wrong Tool

Part now, part later. Shopify scopes it explicitly: the percentage deposit option on payment terms “is available only on the Shopify Plus plan.” Below Plus, collecting a deposit is not something you configure on the draft at all, and treating it as a missing setting sends merchants hunting through an admin that was never going to have it. Our guide to partial payments and deposits on Shopify lays out which mechanism fits which plan and which kind of order.

Real B2B volume. Building every wholesale order by hand works until it doesn't. Once the same buyers order repeatedly at negotiated prices, the machinery that exists for exactly that — company accounts, locations, catalogs and terms attached to the account rather than typed into each order — stops being overhead and starts being the thing that saves you. A draft order is the manual version of that, and manual has a ceiling measured in your own hours.

The order that should just go through checkout. This one is worth saying out loud, because draft orders are habit-forming. If the customer can buy the thing on your storefront, letting them do it costs you nothing, keeps the discount and shipping logic you already built, and produces the same result without a single click from you.

Anything that recurs. Subscriptions are the clean case, and the reason is quoted earlier on this page — a draft is the wrong object, not a starting point you can extend.

Does it count as a sale?

The worry behind this question is usually that manually built orders live in a parallel universe your reporting cannot see. They don't. Shopify states that sales reports include sales and reversals from open, archived, pending and canceled orders, as well as draft orders that have been converted into orders, and that they exclude sales from deleted or test orders. A quote nobody accepted therefore never counts.

What you also get is attribution. For sales that originated as draft orders, the report displays Draft Orders in the Sales channel column — so you can tell at a glance how much of your revenue the store built by hand rather than earned through the storefront, which is a genuinely useful number if you are deciding whether to invest in a proper wholesale setup. When that money actually reaches your bank is a separate schedule, covered in our guide to how Shopify pays you.

The Bottom Line

Draft orders are one of the few Shopify features where the hard part is not the setup. Building the order takes minutes; the cost lands later, in the quote that lost its stock, the invoice that could never be sent, or the bulk order that failed on submission. Every one of those is decided before you press anything.

Frequently Asked Questions