- Short answer
- Not automatically — you send it from a draft or a payment-pending order; Shopify's free invoice generator is standalone and never sees your orders.
- What the generator can't do
- Needs no Shopify account, so there is no store behind it and no order for it to read
- Plan boundary
- Net terms, payment reminders and draft order to invoice: Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. Deposit requirements stay Plus-only
- Automation has a condition
- Payment reminders need payment terms on the order; the Flow action Send order invoice needs them for the customer
- Contact comes first
- Add the customer's email or phone before you complete a draft order, or no order confirmation goes out
- Drafts don't wait forever
- A draft order you create today is deleted automatically after a year of inactivity
Where is the Send invoice button?
It exists — but only on orders nobody has paid for yet. On a draft order you click Send invoice — in the Payments section on desktop, under Invoice on mobile. On an order sitting in Payment pending status you reach the same action through Collect payment. In both cases the customer receives an email with a link to the checkout page, and uses it to enter billing information, select a shipping method and submit payment.
Both are actions you take, not settings you switch on. And once an order is paid, that button has nothing left to do: the job changes from collecting money to producing a document, which is a different tool entirely.
The bills Shopify sends you. Shopify's billing pages call your own subscription charges bills, not invoices: Shopify emails each bill to the store owner and to staff who have the View billing and receive billing emails permission. Those are covered in our guide to Shopify billing and plans.
The bills your suppliers send you. Shopify Bill Pay handles money moving the other way — paying vendors, freelancers or any service that invoices your business — and it is available only to merchants in the United States. It sits among the wider features built into Shopify.
What each invoice tool actually does
Merchants use one word for two different documents: the one you send in order to get paid, and the one you produce as the paperwork for an order that already exists. Shopify built a separate tool for each, plus a third that has nothing to do with your store at all. Sorting a request into the right column takes seconds once they sit side by side.
Which invoice tool does what
| Mechanism | What it actually does | When it is the right choice |
|---|---|---|
| Draft order | Builds an order in your admin and emails the customer a link to the checkout page, where they pay. | Before payment — quotes, phone orders and wholesale deals you want paid online. |
| Shopify Order Printer | Prints or saves invoices, packing slips and pick lists for orders that already exist. | After the order exists — someone asks for a document, not for a payment link. |
| Invoice generator on shopify.com | Gives you a blank invoice form to fill in, then emails you the finished invoice as a PDF. | One-off invoices, and work that never went through your store at all. |
| Third-party apps | Add invoicing behavior Shopify's own tools do not cover. | When none of the three above matches what you have to send. |
Draft orders — how Shopify sends an invoice before payment
A draft order is an order you build in the admin yourself. Shopify's own description of the feature is that draft orders let you add products, apply discounts, and then send invoices with secure checkout links for customers to complete payment online.
One step comes earlier than merchants expect. Add the customer's email address or phone number before you complete the draft order: Shopify's page states that without contact information the order confirmation is not sent, and that it cannot be sent afterwards. Drafts also do not wait forever — a draft order you create today is deleted automatically after a year of inactivity, so an unpaid invoice link is not a permanent record of anything.
Order Printer — a document for an order you already have
Shopify Order Printer is Shopify's own free app, and its job is one line long: customize and print pick lists, packing slips, invoices, and custom documents for your orders. It changes nothing about payment. The order already exists; the app gives you the paperwork for it.
One naming trap is worth knowing before you search. The old order-printer listing is gone from the App Store, and Shopify's migration page states that the legacy app has been deprecated and is no longer supported or maintained. The current app lives at the shopify-order-printer handle, and Shopify describes it as offering the same functionality at no additional cost.
What a legally valid invoice must contain is set by your jurisdiction, not by Shopify, and is outside the scope of this page.
The free invoice generator — and what it cannot see
Shopify also publishes a free invoice generator on shopify.com, and it is the piece that sends most people down the wrong path. It is a standalone form rather than a feature of your store, and Shopify says so on the page itself:
The invoice generator can be used by everyone and anyone. We created it to give businesses a simple tool to generate invoice from, without having to sign up for anything.
Read that as the boundary it is. The tool needs no Shopify account at all, so there is no store behind it and no order for it to read — its own FAQ answers the question of whether you have to be a Shopify customer with a flat no. Nothing is pulled out of your admin: you type the customer, the line items and the total in yourself. That makes it genuinely useful for a one-off bill, and no use at all for the request that brings most merchants here, which is invoicing an order the store already has.
When none of the three built-in paths covers what you have to send, the requirement has moved past what Shopify does on its own.
What changes for B2B and net terms
Some invoices are not meant to be paid today, and Shopify has a name for that: payment terms. It is not a B2B-only idea — an order in Payment pending status can be invoiced the same way. What B2B adds is structure around it: terms attached to a company location, and net periods of net 7, net 15, net 30, net 45, net 60 and net 90.
The plan boundary is newer than most write-ups admit. Shopify's B2B plan-features page lists net terms, payment reminders and draft order to invoice on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. What stays restricted to Plus is narrower than the reputation: on the payments side it is deposit requirements, partial payments and payment requests per fulfillment. If you were told that invoicing business customers means Shopify Plus, that stopped being true in April 2026.
One thing B2B does not add is a customer-facing invoice archive. Shopify describes the self-serve portal as a place where buyers view order history and account information, not a stack of invoices. Our guide to B2B on Shopify Plus works through companies, catalogs and terms in full.
Can any of this be automatic?
Partly — and both routes carry the same condition. Payment reminders send a scheduled reminder email automatically, but only for an order that has payment terms assigned. The Shopify Flow action Send order invoice emails an invoice for the order that triggers the workflow, and Shopify states that to send invoices you must be using payment terms for the customer. Automation is therefore open to orders you have already set up to be paid later — it is not a switch that turns an ordinary checkout into an invoiced one.
For a normal order paid at checkout, no invoice goes out by itself. That is a reading rather than a Shopify statement: the official pages we read on 1 August 2026 — draft orders, sending a draft order invoice, deferred payments and the Flow action reference — describe only a merchant clicking Send invoice or a workflow that needs payment terms. If you want invoices to go out on their own, the condition to set is payment terms, because that is what both features are built on.
This article was written entirely by AI under human editorial direction. The editor sets the topic and structure, runs multi-stage validation on facts, links, and interactive elements, and verifies the output is useful from a business perspective. All claims are checked against official Shopify sources. Details may change — always confirm critical data at shopify.com.
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