On Shopify, a purchase order usually means a supplier or inventory PO: you are buying stock. A customer purchase order is the opposite. A wholesale buyer sends you a PDF, Excel file, or email, and your team enters it as a Shopify draft order. POinbox helps with customer POs only. If you are restocking, use Shopify’s purchasing tools, not a PDF-to-draft app.
Two meanings, one search
| Inventory / supplier PO | Customer / buyer PO | |
|---|---|---|
| Who buys | You buy from a supplier | A buyer buys from you |
| What it becomes | Incoming stock | A sales draft order, then an order |
| Typical tools | Shopify purchasing, Stocky-class apps, PO templates | Draft orders, PDF and email-to-draft apps |
| POinbox? | No | Yes. A file or email becomes a reviewable draft. |
What most “Shopify purchase order” results mean
Search that phrase and you land on supplier replenishment: a PO you send a vendor, stock you receive, a record of what you ordered. Stocky, purchasing apps, and purchase-order templates live there. Those results are about buying inventory. This page is the fork, so a buyer’s PDF does not get answered with a restock app. The product itself is on the POinbox page.
“Create a purchase order in Shopify” is usually the same inventory job. Read this split before you install anything. If the next sentence in the app listing is about suppliers, receiving, or on-hand stock, it is not the tool for an emailed buyer PO.
What a customer purchase order is
A retailer, distributor, or B2B account sends you their purchasing document. It has their PO number, ship-to, quantities, and often their own item codes. Your job is to turn that document into a sale in Shopify.
Shopify’s B2B help describes the common path: orders arrive by email or phone, and staff create draft orders by hand. The draft is the right object. The retyping is the pain. Formats you will actually see: PDF attachments, Excel, CSV, Word, and the email itself.
That draft is a sales document. It is not a PO you send upstream to your own supplier.
Side by side
The mix-up is expensive because the apps look adjacent in the App Store and solve opposite directions of money.
- Inventory PO: you are the buyer. The output is stock you expect to receive.
- Customer PO: you are the seller. The output is a draft order your warehouse can fulfil after you convert it.
A useful test: who is the “vendor” on the document? If the vendor is you, it is a customer PO. If the vendor is someone you pay for goods, it is an inventory PO.
If you need inventory purchase orders
Stay with Shopify’s purchasing and inventory documentation, or a supplier-PO app built for receiving stock. POinbox does not replace those tools. It will not create a supplier PO, track inbound freight, or act like Stocky. Installing it for replenishment will disappoint you, and it should.
If buyers email you purchase orders
You want a draft sales order, reviewed before it is real. Three places to go next:
- The admin path, including when the source is a PO file: how to create a draft order in Shopify.
- Why B2B teams live in drafts: Shopify draft orders for emailed purchase orders.
- The file itself: PDF purchase order to draft order and email purchase order to Shopify.
POinbox reads those customer files, matches Shopify customers plus B2B companies and locations, applies catalog pricing, flags price differences and uncertain lines, and opens a draft after you review.
If you are shopping the phrase “purchase order app,” read what that phrase usually means so you do not buy the inventory category by accident.
“Purchase order app” is the same fork
App Store search for a purchase order app inherits this confusion. Inventory tools rank because more merchants are restocking than entering buyer PDFs. If an app’s listing talks about suppliers, receiving, and on-hand counts, it is the inventory fork. If it talks about draft orders, PDF, and email, it is the customer-PO fork. POinbox is the second one.
Read what “Shopify purchase order app” usually means before you install from that results page. POinbox belongs only on the customer side. Sending an inventory seeker there wastes their afternoon. Sending a wholesale ops lead to a Stocky-class app wastes theirs.