A PO price mismatch happens when the unit price on a customer’s purchase order differs from your Shopify catalog or contracted price. Best practice: build the draft with store catalog pricing, flag the difference, and only accept the PO price as an intentional exception. Never silently trust the PDF. POinbox does that: catalog pricing, and a flag when the PO and the store price differ.
Why PO prices drift
The buyer’s item master is old. A promo ended and their PDF did not. Someone converted a case price into a unit price, or the other way around. Currency got copied from a sister company. None of that is malicious. All of it changes your margin if the draft uses their number.
What trusting the PDF costs
You invoice what they typed, then argue later. “But the PO said” is a real sentence in wholesale finance. The leak is small per line and large across a season. It also trains the team to treat the attachment as the price list, which means the next person copies it faster.
The rule: catalog is the source of truth
Wholesale teams that stay sane price from their own system. LevelOps also prices from Shopify. That part is common. POinbox names the flag: it shows the difference between the PO and the store price so a person decides. Checking a price is not unique to POinbox. Stopping on that difference, before the draft exists, is.
POinbox does not select Shopify Plus B2B price lists by name. It uses catalog pricing. If you need a named Plus price list, compare that on POinbox vs LevelOps and on LevelOps’ own listing.
What to do with a flag
- See the mismatch before the draft exists.
- Keep the catalog price, or accept the PO price as an exception you can explain.
- Create the draft only after that choice.
The file path is PDF purchase order to draft order. SKU match is a separate flag: match SKUs. Company context, without assuming Plus price lists: companies and locations.
Install from the App Store and watch the price flag on a real purchase order. The rest of the product is on the POinbox page.
Three mismatches that are not the same decision
The PO says $18 and the catalog says $21. Last year’s spreadsheet is still in their ERP. You keep $21 unless sales already approved $18 in writing. The flag exists so that approval is a choice, not a copy-paste.
The PO says $42 for a case and you sell the each at $3.50. POinbox converts case, pack, carton, and dozen from a saved mapping, or from the pack size or the variant title. Set that once under Mappings, then the flag you see is a price gap rather than a unit mix-up. Read the quantity before you clear it.
The PO says $21 and the catalog says $21. No flag, or a flag that is noise. If every line flags, people will click through and you have trained them to ignore the one that mattered. Look at a real file and see whether flags are exceptions or wallpaper.
The draft shows your catalog price, and the difference stays visible. Run one real order so the team sees it. LevelOps also prices from Shopify. POinbox flags the difference by name. Other apps can show a difference too.
Who is allowed to accept the PO price
Ops can see the flag. Sales should own the exception. A one-dollar gap on a reorder is often an old catalog in the buyer’s system, and the right answer is your price. A gap on a quoted job might be a price sales already promised. Those are different approvals. If everyone who can open the draft can also accept the PDF price, the flag becomes a button people hit to clear the queue.
Write the rule in one line and put it where the review happens: catalog wins unless the exception is named. Do not add a second rule for “small” differences. Small differences are how a season of margin disappears. The related match, when the item itself is wrong, is SKU matching. A correct price on the wrong variant is still the wrong line.