Deposits for custom cabinetry and millwork on Shopify — where the only published numbers are caps, not customs

Why this trade eats a cancellation whole

Most retail risk is inventory risk: the thing exists, and the question is whether it sells. Custom cabinetry inverts that. The thing does not exist until you have spent the money — the hardwood and the sheet goods land in the first week, the shop schedule is committed, the finish is sprayed to match the door sample the customer approved — and the sale only completes weeks later, when a run of casework sized to one alcove in one house either goes in or it doesn’t. Nobody else has those walls.

A cancelled sofa can be discounted and floor-modelled. A cancelled run of site-measured uppers is component parts. The carcasses are cut to their openings, the face frames are bored for their hinges, the finish matches a sample that lives in their kitchen — the resale market for someone else’s cabinets is approximately nobody. That is why the deposit matters more here than in trades where a cancellation returns sellable stock: the cost curve is front-loaded, and without a deposit, you are the one funding it.

The second, quieter risk is drift. Installed work sits at the end of someone else’s schedule — the site isn’t ready, the contractor pushes a week, and the balance you planned to collect at delivery slides a month right while finished cabinets sit crated in your shop, occupying the space the next job needs. A deposit that funds materials, plus a balance that charges on a date or on fulfillment rather than on an event you don’t control, takes both risks off your book. That structure is what the rest of this page is about.

The only published numbers are caps, not customs

Is there a standard cabinetry deposit? No published one. The Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association — the industry’s main trade body — publishes no recommended deposit percentage on its public site, and we found no government source that sets a customary figure either. The 50% number you will see quoted around the web traces back to vendors and blog posts, not to anything with authority behind it. If someone tells you 50% is “the industry standard”, ask them whose standard.

What does exist is stranger: cabinetry is a trade where the deposit numbers actually on the record are legal ceilings. When custom cabinetry is sold installed, it can fall under state home-improvement law, and at least two states put hard numbers on the deposit: the two we checked, California and Maryland.

California’s Business and Professions Code § 7159.5 says of a home-improvement contract that “the downpayment shall not exceed one thousand dollars ($1,000) or 10 percent of the contract amount, whichever amount is less”. Whichever is less — not more. On any contract over $10,000, the ceiling is $1,000 flat. There is a statutory exemption for contractors who furnish a performance and payment bond or an approved joint control, but the default rule is a four-figure deposit on a five-figure job.

Maryland’s rule is looser, but it is still a cap: “A person may not receive a deposit of more than one-third of the home improvement contract price before or at the time of execution of the home improvement contract” — Business Regulation § 8-617.

Two states, because two states are what we checked — not because they are the only two. This is not a fifty-state survey, and you should not read it as one. Home improvement is licensed and regulated state by state, and it would be a surprise to us if California and Maryland were the only legislatures to have put a ceiling on what a contractor may take up front — that is our expectation, not a sourced finding, which is exactly why the instruction here is to look yours up rather than to trust this page’s two examples. If you sell installed work, your own state’s home-improvement statute is the one that binds you.

Both statutes govern home-improvement contracts — a contractor improving someone’s home. A Shopify store that builds crated casework and ships it for the customer, or their contractor, to install is running a different-looking transaction, and whether the caps reach it depends on facts about your business that a marketing page cannot know. This is general information, not legal advice: before you publish a deposit policy on installed work, put the question to a lawyer licensed in your state. It is a short conversation, and a cheap one next to unwinding a deposit you weren’t allowed to take.

Outside those situations, the split is a policy call — yours. The reasoning for 50/50 against 30/70, what each protects and when each backfires, is worked through properly in how to take a 50% deposit on Shopify. The short version: the longer the lead time, the more the deposit needs to cover — and the longer the saved card has to survive.

Taking the deposit on Shopify itself

The mechanics are not cabinetry-specific, so this section is short and points at the page that covers them in full. The one constraint to check first, because everything else hangs on it: your payment gateway has to be able to store a card for a later charge. Shopify names four that can — Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Adyen on Shopify, and Stripe. If yours isn’t one of them, no app can collect a balance automatically.

A deposit taken at checkout is a selling plan: the customer pays part of the price, Shopify saves the card, and the deposit and the balance are two payments against one order — not the two-invoice, two-order pile-up merchants describe as an accounting nightmare. Shopify does not charge the balance. An app does. Shopify also sends no payment reminder on these orders, so retries and customer emails come from the app too. The four real methods — including the free one, which needs no app and no particular gateway — are ranked by cost in taking a deposit on a Shopify custom order. Start there if you haven’t chosen a method.

What is worth saying for this trade specifically is which method maps onto which side of a cabinet business:

• Quote-driven, site-measured work — the fitted kitchen, the built-in library — starts with a measure and a written quote, not an add-to-cart. That workflow fits the draft-order method: raise the deposit invoice against your quote, then the balance when the work is done. It is free and manual, and the trade-offs are covered in the draft order deposit guide.
• Semi-custom lines with published prices — vanities, standard-depth base runs, made-to-order doors in stock sizes — are the storefront case: a customer picks the deposit option on the product page at 11pm, and the balance schedules itself. This is the only version where the customer serves themselves.
• Builder and contractor accounts on terms are B2B, and deferred purchase options — the mechanism behind every checkout deposit app — cannot be used with B2B at all. What is possible on that channel is covered in the B2B deposits guide.

Refunds, cancellations and tax, before you write the policy

Two Shopify facts should shape your cancellation policy before you write a word of it. First, Shopify’s own documentation states that it cannot refund only a deposit or only a future payment — the partial-refund flow you might assume exists, doesn’t. Second, cancelling the order removes the saved card, so once you cancel, the balance can never be charged. A “deposit non-refundable on custom work” policy is legitimate and common sense in a trade where a cancellation leaves you holding someone else’s kitchen — but it has to be written around those two mechanics, and around the state caps above if your work is installed. The wording, and where to surface it so it holds up, is the whole subject of the non-refundable deposit policy guide.

On tax, the honest statement is that Shopify’s documentation is silent on how a deposit and a balance split for tax purposes — nothing on the time of supply for VAT, nothing on a rate change between the two charges. What is and isn’t knowable is written up in the deposit sales tax and VAT guide, and the load-bearing sentence in it is: confirm with your accountant. Same disclaimer as above — general information, not tax advice.

What the scan can and can’t say about cabinetry

In August 2026 we scanned 120 made-to-order storefronts for a visible deposit or partial-payment option. Six of them were cabinetry stores. That sentence is nearly the whole cabinetry finding, and here is why.

The scan’s published rules refuse to print a percentage for any segment with fewer than 20 determinate stores — a floor that exists so a small segment can never leak an individual store’s answer. Six is not 20. So there is no cabinetry-only percentage, in the published summary or anywhere else, and any page that quotes you one from a six-store sample is making it up. The published summary folded every vertical in the frame into a single combined bucket for exactly this reason.

What the scan can say, honestly framed: the frame was a convenience sample assembled by hand — not a random sample of Shopify, so nothing here generalises beyond it. Of the 54 Shopify stores in that frame where a deposit option could be determined either way, 52 offered no deposit or partial-payment option on the products sampled — 96.3%, with 2 stores offering one. And that 96.3% is an upper bound, not a point estimate: a control store known to take deposits was classified as no-deposit by the method, so the true share can only be lower, never higher.

One segment did clear the 20-store floor, and it was price, not trade: among stores whose sampled median price sat between 1,000 and 4,999 in each storefront’s own currency — not dollars, because the product feed the scan reads states no currency at all, so the band is in each store’s own units and only approximately comparable — 19 of its 20 determinate stores showed no deposit option, and that 95% is an upper bound too, not a point estimate, for the same reason the 96.3% is. Same frame, same method. The full method, every control, and every row excluded from those denominators are itemised on the research page.

If the storefront method is yours

If the semi-custom side of your catalogue is where a deposit option belongs, this is the part where I tell you what I build. DepositDesk is a $29-a-month flat-rate deposits app for standard Shopify plans — 14-day free trial, no per-transaction fee, no revenue share and no cap on order value, which matters when a single order is a five-figure run of casework. Deposits can be a percentage or a fixed amount, and the balance can come due a set number of days after checkout, on a date, or when you fulfill the order — that last one is the natural fit here, if “balance due when it ships” is how you already phrase it. If a balance charge declines, DepositDesk retries after 1, 3 and 7 days, emails the customer each time a charge fails, and flags the order for you when the ladder runs out. Cancel an order in Shopify as usual and DepositDesk sees the cancellation and stops the scheduled balance charge automatically. Every feature is free for 14 days — install it from the Shopify App Store and you’re only billed if you keep it.

Its real limits, in the same breath, because in this trade they bite in specific places: Online Store channel only — not POS, not B2B, so your builder accounts stay on invoices, and not draft orders, so your quote-driven fitted work keeps the manual method above. It needs an Online Store 2.0 theme, because the deposit option is a theme app block you add in the theme editor. It needs one of the four vaulting-capable gateways. And it is one deposit plus one later balance, not an instalment plan — if your installed work bills in three stages, say 40/40/20 across measure, delivery and install, that is an instalment structure, Shopify’s API terms prohibit purchase options being used for instalments, and no app in this category can do it. You would invoice those.

Related: the four methods ranked by cost are on taking a deposit on a Shopify custom order; choosing the split is on the 50% deposit guide; and if you build freestanding furniture rather than fitted casework, the custom furniture deposits page covers that trade — including a New York furniture-delivery statute with refund rules of its own.

Questions cabinet makers actually ask

Sources for this page: California Business and Professions Code § 7159.5 and Maryland Business Regulation § 8-617, both read August 2026; the Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association’s public site, checked August 2026 for a published deposit standard (there is none); Shopify’s developer documentation on deferred purchase options and its help-centre pages on partial payments; and our August 2026 scan of 120 made-to-order storefronts, whose full method and every excluded row are on the research page. Where nothing is published, this page says so instead of estimating. If you find something here that is wrong, I would rather hear it: support@depositdesk.app.