How to turn a purchase order into a Shopify draft order

A draft order is the right home for a wholesale purchase order: it holds products, quantities and a buyer without charging anybody, and it can be edited until both sides agree. This is how to create one from a PO, by hand and automatically, and what goes wrong either way.

Why a draft order, and not an order

An order in Shopify is a commitment: it affects inventory, triggers notifications, and expects payment. A purchase order from a wholesale buyer is a request, and it is usually still negotiable. Quantities get trimmed to what is in stock, a substitution is agreed, a delivery date moves.

A draft order holds all of that without deciding anything. It is also where Shopify applies B2B pricing: attach the draft to a company location and the catalog, price list and payment terms for that company apply automatically.

Method 1: by hand in the Shopify admin

Nothing to install, and the right answer while orders are occasional or small.

1
Open Orders, then Drafts, and press Create order.
2
Add each product from the purchase order with Browse or by searching a title or SKU, and set the quantity on every line.
3
Pick the customer. For a B2B buyer, choose the company location rather than the person, or Shopify prices the order at retail.
4
Check the prices Shopify filled in. They come from the catalog assigned to that company, and they are what the buyer will be charged.
5
Add the buyer’s PO number so the order can be reconciled later. The note or a tag both work; pick one and keep to it.
6
Send the invoice, or mark the order as pending and collect payment on the buyer’s terms.

Budget roughly a minute a line once you include finding the right variant. A twenty-line order most weeks is most of a day a month, and the error rate is whatever a person's is at line seventeen of a list they are copying.

Method 2: read the document and match it

The retyping is the part worth removing, because it is the part that carries the mistakes. An order-entry app reads the PO, matches each written line to a product in your catalog, and hands you the result to check before a draft order exists.

Fulfillmate Purchase Orders does this from pasted email text, PDFs with selectable text, spreadsheets and CSV files. It expands lines like “2 of each collection snowboard”, flags anything that would exceed stock, remembers a correction so the same buyer's wording matches next month, and never sends a price: Shopify prices the draft from your own B2B catalog.

Try it on your own catalog

Free for 7 days or 25 orders, whichever comes first, no card to start. Paste the last purchase order a buyer emailed you and see what comes back.

Install on the Shopify App Store What it does

Five things that go wrong, either way

Case quantities read as units: "6 cs" means six cases, not six bottles. Whoever types the order has to know the case size of every product, and a wrong guess ships the wrong quantity.
The buyer’s names are not your names: Buyers write "yuzu 12pk" for what your catalog calls "Sparkling Yuzu, 12 pack". The shorthand is stable per buyer, which is what makes it learnable.
"One of each" hides a list: A single written line can mean eight products. It is easy to miss one, and missing one is a short delivery.
Stock is checked too late: If you only find out at fulfilment that a line is short, the buyer has already been told the order is placed.
Retail prices on a B2B order: Attaching the order to a customer rather than their company location silently uses retail pricing. The total looks plausible, which is what makes it expensive.

Before you create the draft

Every line on the PO appears once. Duplicates usually come from a buyer amending an order in a reply further down the thread.
Quantities are in the unit you sell in, not the unit the buyer wrote.
The buyer is attached as a company location if they have B2B terms, so the prices are theirs.
Anything you cannot fulfil is settled before the draft goes out, not after.
The buyer's PO number is on the order.

After the draft order exists

Send the invoice from the draft and Shopify emails the buyer a payment link, or mark it pending if they are on terms. Completing the draft turns it into a normal order, which is the point where inventory moves and your fulfilment process takes over.