Processing draft orders

When you're ready to complete a wholesale draft order, you need to send an invoice to your customer, accept their payment, and then fulfill the order.

When you receive a draft order from a wholesale customer, you can process it as you would any draft order. For example, you can:

  • review the amounts ordered and reserve inventory so that there is product available when you fulfill the order (learn more about inventory)
  • add special discounts
  • review the shipping rate
  • send an invoice that directs your customer to pay using the payment provider that you've set up in your Shopify admin or to contact you to pay using a different option (learn more about the invoice and its contents)

Before you begin

After you email your customers an invoice, they'll receive a notification whenever a change is made to their invoice. You can change the frequency of notifications sent to your customers from the Notification page in the wholesale channel.

Step 1: Review the draft order, add shipping costs, and reserve inventory

When you receive a wholesale draft order, review the quantities of the products ordered to make sure that you have enough inventory to fulfill the order. If you don't have enough inventory, you can edit the quantities in the draft order and contact your customer.

If you track your inventory using Shopify, you can click Reserve Inventory to make sure that the products are available when your customer is ready to make the actual purchase.

To review an order:

  1. Go to Drafts in your Shopify admin.
  2. Open and review the draft order. All draft orders created by the wholesale channel are tagged with the wholesale tag.
  3. Reserve the requested items in your inventory. Click Reserve items to temporarily place a hold on the items listed in the draft order:
    Screenshot of the Reserve inventory window
  4. Review the shipping amount. Learn more about wholesale shipping rates.
  5. Optional: Add taxes and discounts.
  6. Click Save.

If you made any changes to the draft order, then by default a notification is automatically sent. You can deactivate this notification from the Notifications page in the wholesale channel. You can also contact your customer directly to make sure that your customer approves of the changes before you send an invoice and start the payment process.

Step 2: Send an invoice to your customer

After you've agreed on the order and payment terms with your wholesale customer, send them an invoice email to confirm the sale of the products. Learn more about this invoice email and its contents.

To send an invoice:

  1. From the relevant draft order, click Send invoice.
  2. On the Send invoice dialog, click Review invoice.
  3. Click Send invoice.

Your customer receives an invoice with instructions about how to pay for their order.

Step 3: Accept payment

When your customer pays using one of the following automatic payment methods, then the draft order converts automatically to an order:

If your customer pays for the order using a manual payment method, then you need to open the relevant draft order, click Mark as paid to record the payment, and convert it to a draft order.

If your customer makes a partial payment, then click Mark as pending to record the payment. The draft order converts to an order that is tagged with the wholesale tag.

Step 4: Fulfill the order

After your draft order is converted to an order, it can be fulfilled. If you have automatic fulfillment enabled, then the order is sent to your fulfillment service or app. Otherwise, you fulfill the order as you would any other order. Learn more about managing orders and fulfilling orders.

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