Shopify draft orders let staff create orders for customers who buy by phone, email, or purchase order. That pattern is common in B2B, and it is also how custom retail orders get in. The Help Center path is manual entry. When the source is a PDF or emailed PO, an app like POinbox can populate a draft for review so you fix flagged mismatches instead of typing every line.
If you already know what a draft order is, you are here for the workflow. This one starts from the customer purchase order, not from a blank draft.
What Shopify draft orders are for
A draft is an order that is not finished. You can add a customer, lines, discounts, shipping, and taxes, then save it. Payment and fulfilment come later: an invoice, a checkout link, or a conversion in admin. Phone orders, emailed orders, and wholesale orders that never touch the cart belong here. So do quotes you do not want to charge yet.
Why B2B teams live in drafts
Wholesale buyers do not always check out. They have companies, payment terms, and prices that are not the public PDP. The PO arrives as a document. Shopify B2B companies and locations, a Plus-oriented setup, exist so the draft can sit on the right account and ship-to. You can still use draft orders for wholesale without Plus. Do not treat POinbox as a Plus-only app. Company and location matching matters most when those records exist in the store.
The deeper page on that match is B2B draft orders, companies, and locations.
The manual PO → draft workflow
Today it looks like this. Someone opens the email. They create a draft. They search for the company. They add products one variant at a time. They paste the PO number into the field Shopify gives you. They save. Later someone converts it.
The click-path is in how to create a draft order in Shopify. The reason teams outgrow it is time and error, not because drafts are the wrong idea. Manual wholesale order entry is the cost side of the same story.
Attach the customer PO file to that workflow
Keep the draft. Change who types the lines. The file can propose them. You still check the ones that did not match.
- PDF: turn a PDF purchase order into a draft.
- Email attachment: process an emailed purchase order.
POinbox reads PDF, email, Excel, CSV, and Word purchase orders. It matches customers, B2B companies, and company locations, maps products and customer-specific SKUs, applies catalog pricing, and flags price differences and uncertain lines before the draft is created. You still approve.
Judge it on one of your own purchase orders. The full description is on the POinbox page.
After the draft
Three things wholesale accounting will ask about before you convert:
- The buyer’s PO number is on the draft. Add a PO number.
- Payment terms, the requested ship and delivery dates, and the ship-to and bill-to from the file are on the draft, plus a discount when the PO included one.
- Price flags are decided, not ignored. PO vs catalog price.
- You convert with Shopify, not with the file app. Convert a draft order to an order.
Draft orders vs CSV order import
CSV import is a bulk load of structured rows. A draft-from-PO flow is one buyer document, reviewed. If the partner already sends a clean order file, a CSV importer is the better tool. If they send a PDF, the draft path is the one that matches the file you actually received. Order import: PDF and email vs CSV.
Companies and locations belong on the draft
A wholesale draft that only has a customer email is half finished. The buyer’s accounts payable sits on a company. The warehouse sits on a location. Shopify Plus B2B models that as a company with company locations. The draft should name both before anyone converts it.
Staff miss this when they search the person’s name, find a contact, and stop. The contact can belong to the right company and the wrong dock. POinbox matches customers, B2B companies, and company locations from the purchase order. You still look. An ambiguous header, such as two locations that share a city, should stay a human choice. The longer write-up is companies, locations, and PO files.
You do not need Plus to use draft orders for wholesale. You do need Plus-style company records if you want the match to land on a location with its own terms. Do not read this page as “POinbox only works on Plus.”
A morning batch, not a single demo file
Picture twelve emails after a show. Three are short reorders from accounts you know. Two are Excel sheets with the buyer’s item numbers. One is a Word file a rep typed. The rest are PDFs with a logo, a PO number, a ship-to, and a line list. The manual path is the same twelve times: open the file, create a draft, hunt the company, type lines, paste the PO number, save.
The draft is still the right object for all twelve. What changes with a file app is which of those steps a person repeats. Confident lines can come from the file. Uncertain SKUs and price differences stay flagged. The lines that are ready can go on a draft while a held line stays on the PO. Then Shopify invoices and fulfils. POinbox does not convert the draft into a paid order for you.
A two-line phone order should stay manual. Installing software to avoid typing “2 × navy cap” is ceremony. The batch above is the case the app is for. If the volume is still the two-line kind, stay in the admin steps and skip the install.