Not every sale starts at your online checkout. Phone orders, wholesale quotes and custom jobs all need an order that you build yourself. In Shopify that is a draft order, and this guide explains what it is, what you can put in one, and what happens when it gets paid.
What a draft order is
A draft order is an order you create on a customer's behalf in your Shopify admin. You can send an invoice for it, accept payment, set payment terms, or save it and finish later. It is not a real order until payment is accepted.
- Where: Orders, then Drafts, then Create order
- Typical uses: Phone or email orders, wholesale quotes, custom work, pre-arranged pricing
- Housekeeping: Shopify automatically deletes draft orders created on or after April 1, 2025 after one year of inactivity, and any edit resets that timer
What you can put in one
A draft order holds more than a list of products. You can adjust almost every part of it before the customer sees a total.
- Products: Any product or variant in your catalog
- Custom items: A name, price and quantity for something that isn't a product. These aren't tracked as inventory and don't appear in product sales reports
- Line prices: Edit the unit price on a line to match a quoted price
- Discounts: A discount code, eligible automatic discounts, or a custom discount on the order or on a line item
- Shipping and tax: Add a shipping or delivery method, and choose whether to charge taxes
- Customer and tags: Attach a customer, and add tags to keep drafts organized
Holding stock and prices
A draft does not hold inventory by default. Until you reserve it, the stock stays available and can sell to someone else while your buyer decides.
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Reserve inventory | Moves the units to the Committed state until an expiry you choose, so other customers can't buy them. The product must have inventory tracking on |
| Lock product pricing | Keeps the draft's prices from changing if catalog prices go up or down |
Getting paid
There are two common routes. You can send an invoice by email, which by default contains a link to a checkout where the customer pays. Or you can set payment terms and collect later.
- Send an invoice: The customer pays through the checkout link
- Payment due later: Choose payment terms in the Payment section of the draft
- After payment: An order is created on the Orders page, and you fulfill it as usual
Common mistakes
Most problems with draft orders come from treating them like finished orders.
- ❌ Quoting stock you have not reserved
- ❌ Using custom items for products that exist in your catalog, which skips inventory tracking
- ❌ Leaving old drafts open with out-of-date prices
- ✅ Tag each draft with its status, such as quoted or awaiting payment
For the full walkthrough from buyer email to paid order, see turning a wholesale quote into a draft order.
Doing this at scale
QuoteWeaver reads a buyer's free-text quote request, parses it into line items, matches each one to a real catalog SKU with a confidence score, and prices it against your B2B list. It then builds the Shopify draft order and a drafted reply, and flags low-confidence lines for you to check. See QuoteWeaver.