Shopify Draft Orders: Invoices, Price Locks and the Traps in Between

A shopify draft order is an order you build yourself in the admin, on behalf of a customer, and then collect payment for. You find it under Orders > Drafts, and it exists because plenty of real selling never passes through a storefront checkout.

The common jobs it does:

• Phone and email orders — someone tells you what they want and you build it.
• Wholesale and B2B — negotiated pricing, payment terms, an invoice rather than a card.
• Quotes — send a priced basket with a checkout link and let the customer decide.
• Deposits and staged payment — on Shopify Plus you can require a percentage up front.
• Fixing something that cannot be undone. A refund in Shopify is irreversible, and Shopify's own documented correction is to create a new draft order and collect payment again.
• In-store carts — Shopify POS Pro can save a cart as a draft to finish later.

A draft can carry products, subscriptions, discounts, shipping, taxes, a customer, tags and a market. You can build one from scratch, duplicate an existing order or draft, or ask Sidekick to create one — though nothing is stored until you click Save.

The mental model that gets people into trouble is treating it as a quote. A quote is inert. A draft order reaches into inventory, pricing and currency, and it does so before anyone has paid you.

You can choose whether a draft holds stock, and the choice matters more than it looks.

Reserve the items and the units move into the Committed state, so nobody else can buy them. You set a date and time for the reservation when you create it. Shopify does not publish a maximum duration, so the practical limit is whatever discipline you apply — and committed stock that nobody paid for is indistinguishable, in your available-to-sell numbers, from stock that is genuinely gone.

Leave them unreserved and they stay Available. If they sell out before the customer pays, a warning appears on the draft, and anyone opening the invoice is told the item is out of stock and cannot complete the sale. At that point you either add inventory and reserve it, or take payment in the admin instead.

Two conditions worth knowing before you rely on either behavior:

• Reservations only work on products with inventory tracking turned on. Untracked products cannot be committed.
• You can add a product with zero stock if overselling is enabled — Shopify's wording is "You can still add the product to the draft order to oversell the item." That is useful for backorders and dangerous for everything else.

If drafts are a regular part of how you sell, the reservation setting is a stock-accuracy decision, not an admin convenience. Shopify operations experts usually set a house rule on it rather than leaving it per-order.

Three ways to get paid, and one way to break the whole thing.

• Send an invoice. An email containing a link to a real checkout. The customer enters billing details, picks a shipping method and pays; the draft becomes an order marked Paid automatically.
• Accept payment in the admin, by card.
• Mark as paid, when money arrived some other way — bank transfer, cash, an existing account.

Payment terms are set on the draft: Due on receipt, Due on fulfillment, a Net term (7, 15, 30, 45, 60 or 90 days), or a Fixed term date. Shopify Plus stores can additionally require a percentage deposit.

Now the trap, and it is the single most common way draft orders go wrong: do not mark a draft as Paid before the money has actually arrived. Shopify is explicit that if you do, the invoice link stops working and the customer's checkout fails. You have told the system the order is settled, so there is nothing left to pay — and the customer is staring at a broken link with no way to give you money.

A second one, less dramatic but permanent: add the customer's email or phone number before you complete the draft. Without contact details the order confirmation is never sent, and you cannot send it afterwards. There is no retro-fix.

Two smaller edges. If you add a product after sending the invoice, shipping rates calculated earlier do not update to include it. And if the draft is in a currency other than your store currency and you are setting payment terms, you cannot send an invoice at all — Shopify's wording is that "you can only collect payment by credit card or by marking the order as paid."

When you send an invoice or share a checkout link, product prices are locked by default. The lock holds the prices as they were, including against automatic reductions, so the customer pays what you quoted. That is almost always what you want.

What to watch:

• Turning the lock off unlocks every price on the order, not just the one you were thinking about. Unlocking updates the draft to current pricing.
• Price locks do not apply to product bundles. If your draft contains a bundle, that part of the order is not protected.

Then the one that quietly costs money on international orders. Foreign exchange rates are fixed when the draft is created — but saving and later editing a draft re-rates the entire order to the rate in effect at the moment of that edit. Build a quote in a customer's currency on Monday, tweak a line item on Friday, and the whole order has silently moved to Friday's rate. On a large order in a volatile pair, that is a real margin event, and nothing in the interface announces it.

Adding a customer can also change the market, pricing and currency to that customer's local market, which in turn can change whether taxes are shown inclusive or exclusive. Taxes and duties still follow the shipping address. Shopify also warns that switching markets and using an alternative price might breach MSRP obligations — worth knowing if you sell brands that hold you to one.

Custom items are the escape hatch: a one-off product or fee that is not in your catalog. Type a name, type a price, done. They are genuinely useful for bespoke work, surcharges and one-time fees, and Shopify's own documentation cautions that "relying on custom items can complicate shipping and inventory management."

Here is precisely what you give up, because each of these surfaces weeks later in a report that does not add up:

• Not tracked as inventory. Nothing is decremented, nothing is committed.
• Absent from product sales reports. Revenue that exists in your payouts and not in your product reporting.
• No automated fulfillment, and no shipping apps. Anything downstream that keys off a product will not see it.
• No subscriptions. Custom items cannot carry one.

A custom price is the better tool when the product does exist and only the number is different — and note that "a custom price applies only to the line item on this draft order," so it changes nothing about your catalog. Subscription products are the exception: they cannot take a custom price or a locked price.

If you are reaching for custom items more than occasionally, the real answer is usually a catalog or variant change rather than a per-order workaround. That is the point at which Shopify order management experts tend to get involved, and our guide to Shopify expert costs sets out the going rates.

The limits that are not obvious from the interface.

• Drafts expire. Draft orders created on or after April 1, 2025 "are automatically deleted after 1 year of inactivity." Any edit resets the timer. If you keep long-lived quotes or standing wholesale baskets as drafts, they are on a clock.
• Deleting a completed draft does not delete the order. Once a draft has converted, the order on the Orders page is its own record and survives.
• Duplicating copies less than you expect. Line items, custom items, customer details, addresses, notes, tags and the market carry over. Discounts and shipping rates do not. Products no longer in the catalog are dropped silently.
• Subscriptions have their own rules. They cannot be added to bundles, custom items, or B2B company drafts — and adding a company to a draft removes subscriptions already on it. You cannot duplicate an existing order containing a subscription; only drafts can be duplicated that way.
• Pre-orders and try-before-you-buy are not available in drafts at all.
• Tags cap at 55 characters per tag.

One last behavior worth understanding, because it blocks orders. Checkout validation rules and overselling settings can stop a draft from being created, and you get a business-rules banner with the option to Ignore and create order. If you send an invoice while checkout rules are unresolved, the customer cannot complete checkout unless you activated the option to ignore all checkout rules before sending. Deciding that after the invoice has gone out is too late.

For stores running wholesale through drafts rather than through the B2B features, our guide to Shopify B2B and wholesale covers when that stops scaling.