Draft order

You build the basket, Shopify emails an invoice, and the customer pays the link.

What it is good for

• Wholesale and trade, at agreed prices
• A phone or email order
• Quoting a custom price without a discount code
• Taking payment later, on terms

It is the closest thing the core admin has to a sales order, which is why small wholesale operations lean on it.

Watch what it reserves

A draft can hold stock before anyone has paid. That is useful for a genuine order and expensive for a speculative quote, because it takes units out of available inventory that a paying customer could have had.

Check the setting before you start quoting from drafts.

Where it goes wrong

Drafts pile up. Quotes that went nowhere sit there for months holding stock, and unlike an unfulfilled order nothing on the orders screen nags anyone about them.

Read the list monthly and delete the dead ones. The other fault is using drafts as a wholesale system for a real trade business. Once you are managing prices per customer and orders in the hundreds, this is a workaround, and Shopify Plus or a proper B2B app is the tool.