Shopify deposits · 11 August 2026
Six Shopify deposit features need Plus. The one at checkout doesn’t.
If you have just found Shopify’s deposit feature and hit a Plus wall, the wall is narrower than it looks. Admin partial payments, draft-order deposits, extended card authorizations, part-charging a balance, B2B deposits and POS split payments all require Plus. Deferred purchase options — a deposit the customer picks at your ordinary checkout — do not, and that is the mechanism every deposit app on a standard plan is built on. This page sets out exactly where the line falls, what the non-Plus route cannot do, and the two constraints that decide whether it will work in your store at all.
The short answers
- Shopify Plus is not required to take a deposit at checkout on Shopify.
- Shopify Plus is required for admin partial payments, for deposits on draft orders, for extended card authorizations, and for charging part of a remaining balance.
- Deposits on a standard Shopify plan are taken with deferred purchase options, which work at the storefront checkout only.
- Deferred purchase options cannot be used on draft orders, in Shopify POS, or with B2B.
- Shopify lists four payment gateways for pre-order and try before you buy: Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Adyen on Shopify, and Stripe.
- Apple Pay, Google Pay and Shop Pay Installments are not available to a customer who chooses a deposit.
- The no-app alternative is an authorization hold, and Shopify Payments provides an authorization period of 7 days.
What is actually Plus-only
“Deposits need Plus” is close enough to true to stop people looking, and wrong in the way that matters. Six separate features are gated. None of them is the storefront one.
Admin partial payments
Marking an order partially paid from the admin — a draft order with payment terms, a deposit collected now, the balance recorded against the same order later. Shopify states this requires Shopify Plus. Manual payments recorded this way are not captured by Shopify.
help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/partial-payments
Deposits on draft orders
Shopify shipped a deposit field for draft orders on 1 July 2026, in Admin API version 2026-07 (DraftOrderInput.deposit). It is Plus-only, and it takes a percentage between 1 and 99 — there is no fixed-amount option on this path.
shopify.dev Admin API 2026-07 — DraftOrderInput.deposit, DepositInput.percentage
Extended card authorizations
Longer authorization windows are limited to Shopify Plus with Shopify Payments: up to 30 days on Visa, Mastercard and American Express, 10 days on Discover and JCB. Diners Club and China Union Pay stay at 7 days regardless of plan.
help.shopify.com — Shopify Payments authorization periods
Charging part of a balance
The mutation that charges a saved payment mandate takes an optional amount argument, and that argument requires Plus (with the payment-terms scope). Without it an app can only ever collect the whole outstanding balance in one charge — which is why no deposit app on a standard plan offers a part-payment against a balance.
shopify.dev — orderCreateMandatePayment; verified against DepositDesk's own capture path
B2B deposits at checkout
Shopify added deposits to B2B checkout on 21 June 2024, set as a percentage of the subtotal per company location. B2B itself stopped being Plus-only on April 2, 2026 — Shopify's help centre now says B2B is available on all plans — but its plan-comparison table still marks company deposit requirements and partial payments as Plus, so the deposit is what stays gated, not B2B. Vaulted B2B cards are Shopify Payments only and are not charged automatically — the merchant charges them.
help.shopify.com — B2B payment terms and deposits
POS partial payments
Splitting a payment at the register and leaving the order partially paid is a POS feature, not a purchase option, and Shopify's storefront purchase options cannot be used through POS at all. Gift cards must be paid in full, merchants in France, Italy and Spain cannot mark a POS transaction partially paid, and any refund, exchange or order edit permanently blocks further payments on that order.
help.shopify.com — POS partial payments
Read those together and a shape appears. Everything Shopify gates is a deposit you take — on an order you built, a quote you sent, a register you are standing at, a wholesale account you manage. What Shopify leaves open on every plan is a deposit the customer takes, on your storefront, at checkout.
What isn’t: deferred purchase options
Shopify has a second, entirely separate deposit mechanism, and it is not plan-gated. It is called a deferred purchase option, it lives in the same family as subscriptions and pre-orders, and it is the only way a deposit reaches a standard Shopify plan.
A deposit option appears alongside pay in full on the product page. The customer picks it, checks out, and pays the deposit. Shopify stores the payment method. Later, an app tells Shopify to charge the rest against the same order. Shopify’s documentation puts the load-bearing part like this:
“Shopify will store a customer’s payment method so that merchants can collect the remaining balance amount without contacting the customer.”
Two details are worth having before you compare anything. First, the checkout charge can be a percentage or a fixed price, so a flat “$500 to start” deposit is possible here in a way it is not on the Plus draft-order path. Second, the balance is scheduled either a set number of days after checkout or at an exact time.
You cannot build this yourself in the admin
Purchase options sit behind protected access scopes, and a custom app created inside the Shopify admin cannot request them. The app has to exist in the Partner Dashboard. That is the honest reason there is no DIY version of this: it is not difficulty, it is access.
Shopify does none of the chasing
This is the part of the mechanism that surprises merchants after they have bought something. Shopify’s own documentation is blunt about it: “It’s your app’s responsibility to schedule the charge at the right time and automate any process around payment failures.”
Shopify also states that payment reminders are not sent for orders with purchase options such as subscriptions, pre-orders or try before you buy. Dunning — the retry-and-email machinery that recovers a failed charge — is a subscriptions feature and does not extend to this. So when a card fails four months later, whatever happens next is the app’s doing, not Shopify’s. That is the single most important thing to ask an app vendor about, and almost nobody does.
Plus deposits versus a $29 app, honestly
These two routes are not the same product at a different price. They are different mechanisms that happen to produce a similar outcome for one specific kind of sale. Here is the comparison with the losses in it.
| Native, on Plus | App, on any plan | |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify plan required | Plus | Any plan |
| Where the deposit is agreed | Admin, draft order, or B2B checkout | Your normal storefront checkout |
| Who starts it | You, on an order you prepared | The customer, on the product page |
| Percentage deposit | Yes (1–99) | Yes |
| Fixed-amount deposit | No, on the draft-order path | Yes |
| Balance collected automatically | No — recorded or charged by you | Yes, from the card saved at checkout |
| Works on draft and admin-created orders | Yes | No |
| Works in Shopify POS | Yes, as a POS partial payment | No |
| Works with B2B | Yes | No |
| Gateway restriction | Shopify Payments for vaulted B2B cards | One of four vaulting-capable gateways |
| Express wallets available to the deposit buyer | Not applicable — no storefront checkout | No |
| Payment reminders sent by Shopify | Yes, on payment terms | No — the app has to send them |
| Cost | Shopify Plus pricing | App subscription — DepositDesk is $29/month flat |
What the app route does not replicate
Three exclusions, all of them stated by Shopify in one place, and all of them absolute rather than a matter of app quality. Subscriptions, pre-orders and try before you buy cannot be used with B2B, cannot be used through Shopify POS, and cannot be used on draft orders.
- Draft orders and admin-created orders. If your workflow is “I quote, I send, they pay a deposit”, no storefront deposit app can help you. This is the single most common mismatch, and it is why merchants keep asking for draft orders to behave like an invoicing tool. On a standard plan that request has no answer today.
- Shopify POS. A deposit taken at the register is a POS partial payment, a different feature with its own rules. You cannot take a deposit in store and collect the balance through a storefront selling plan.
- B2B. Company-location pricing, payment terms and B2B deposits are their own system, and purchase options do not reach into it.
- Instalments and layaway. Not a limitation of any app — Shopify’s API terms prohibit using this infrastructure for instalments, layaways and crowdfunding campaigns. Doing it would breach the API licence. That is the real reason every deposit app offers exactly one later payment and no vendor explains why.
- “Buy X get Y” discounts. Shopify states that subscriptions, pre-orders and try before you buy do not support them.
One switching cost that belongs in any comparison and appears in none: Shopify deletes selling plans 48 hours after a merchant uninstalls the app that created them. Whatever you install, that is what leaving looks like — so ask any vendor what happens to orders with a balance still outstanding when you uninstall.
The gateway constraint
This decides whether any of it works, and it is the question the published guides get wrong most often. Charging a balance later means Shopify has to have vaulted something chargeable at checkout. Not every gateway can do that.
Shopify’s pre-order and try-before-you-buy documentation — which is the deposits case — lists four gateways, verbatim:
“To use pre-order and TBYB options, merchants need to use one of the following payment gateways: Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Adyen on Shopify, Stripe, which is only available to some merchants”
The Authorize.net distinction nobody writes down
Shopify publishes two gateway lists, and they differ by one entry. The subscriptions considerations page lists five: Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Authorize.net, Adyen and Stripe. The pre-order and TBYB page above lists four, and Authorize.net is not among them.
So a store on Authorize.net is documented as able to run subscriptions and is not documented as able to run a deferred-balance deposit. Shopify does not explain the difference anywhere I can find, and published app guides contradict each other on this exact point — one vendor’s help docs include Authorize.net “with certain systems”, the same vendor’s marketing guide omits it, and another vendor’s guide lists Authorize.net while leaving out Stripe and Adyen entirely. If you are on Authorize.net, treat deposits as unproven until you have tested a real balance charge, and do not take a guide’s word for it. Mine included.
There is a harder ceiling underneath the lists. The Admin API’s CustomerPaymentInstrument union has exactly four members: a bank account, a credit card, a PayPal billing agreement, and a Shop Pay agreement. A payment method that cannot be reduced to one of those cannot be charged later, whatever any list says.
What disappears for the deposit buyer
- Apple Pay, Google Pay and the other express wallets. They are offered only on the pay-in-full option for the same product. A customer who selects the deposit sees ordinary card fields. This is documented in a deposit app’s own help pages rather than in Shopify’s, and it is the caveat most likely to change your conversion arithmetic.
- Local payment methods. Shopify states that customers cannot use local payment methods for subscriptions, pre-orders and try before you buy. The named set includes Klarna, iDEAL and Wero, Bancontact, Sofort, MobilePay, Swish, TWINT, BLIK, EPS, Przelewy24, ACH Direct Debit, Multibanco, Meses sin intereses and USDC. If a meaningful share of your checkout runs through any of those, deposits will not reach those customers.
- Shop Pay Installments. Shopify states customers cannot buy subscription products with it.
- Gift cards, partly. A gift card used to pay for a subscription applies only to the first payment. A deposit paid entirely with a gift card leaves nothing to vault, so that order’s balance cannot be collected automatically at all.
- PayPal, if PayPal says no. Reference Transactions approval is requested on your behalf, and if PayPal declines it you have to appeal to PayPal directly. Shopify hides an ineligible method at checkout rather than creating an order it cannot collect on — which is the right behaviour, and also means you may never see the failure.
Two things I could not pin down
PayPal Express is unavailable to merchants in France and the United States. The US option is PayPal Wallet through Shopify Payments, and no document I can find confirms whether that supports vaulting for a later balance charge. For a US merchant that is a real hole in the four-gateway list.
Amazon Pay. Shopify makes no statement either way. It is absent from both gateway lists and from the payment-instrument union. Absence is not a documented “no”, so I am recording it as unknown rather than guessing.
The free route, and where it stops
There is a way to do something deposit-shaped for nothing, and it deserves a straight answer rather than being talked past. Set your payment capture to manual. The card is authorized at checkout and you capture when the goods are ready.
It has a hard ceiling, and the ceiling is a number: Shopify Payments provides an authorization period of 7 days. Shopify puts the general range at between 7 and 30 days depending on the payment service. Longer windows on Shopify Payments are Plus-only, as above.
- Capturing late costs more. A manual capture made later within the window carries an additional 1.75% fee.
- It holds the full order amount, not the deposit. An authorization reserves the whole price against the customer’s available credit. That is the opposite of what a deposit is for: the customer’s money is tied up rather than freed.
- Expiry is terminal. When an authorization lapses there is no re-authorization path — you go back to the customer and ask them to pay again. A partial capture is possible, but after one the authorization can no longer be voided by any means.
The honest verdict
If your lead time is under a week, the free route is genuinely fine and you should not pay anyone for this. If your lead time is a month, a season, or the eight months a furniture maker quotes, an authorization hold cannot reach the date you need to be paid on, and no configuration changes that.
The other free approach — selling the deposit as its own product at its own price — costs nothing and works, in the narrow sense that money arrives. What it does not do is link the two halves. The balance is a separate, unconnected order that you have to invoice and chase by hand, and because there was no purchase option at checkout, Shopify never vaulted a card to charge. That is a bookkeeping decision as much as a payments one, and it is where the deposit-versus-accounting problem starts.
Which route is yours
- Lead time under a week, any plan. Manual capture. Free. Budget for the extra 1.75% on a late capture.
- Customers buy from your storefront, lead time longer than a week, gateway is one of the four. Deferred purchase options through an app. This is the case the non-Plus route was made for.
- You quote first and send an order to be paid. Draft-order deposits, which means Plus — or an invoicing tool outside Shopify. No storefront app covers this, and any that claims to is describing something else.
- Deposit in store, balance later. POS partial payments, with the country and order-edit restrictions above. Not a purchase option, and not something a storefront app can join up.
- Wholesale or B2B deposits. B2B checkout deposits, which means Plus.
- Three or four payments over a year. Not available on Shopify through this infrastructure at all, on any plan, at any price. The API terms prohibit instalments and layaway.
Where my own app fits
I should say plainly that I build one of these, so read the page with that in mind — it is most of why the exclusions above are on it.
DepositDesk
A deposit option at checkout and automatic balance collection on a standard Shopify plan. $29 a month flat, with a 14-day free trial, no per-transaction fee, no revenue share and no order-value cap. The deposit can be a percentage from 1 to 99 or a fixed amount, and the balance is charged automatically a set number of days after checkout, on a date, or when you fulfil the order.
Its limits are the ones on this page, plus its own. It works on the Online Store channel only. It needs an Online Store 2.0 theme, because the deposit picker is a theme app block. It needs a vaulting-capable gateway — Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Stripe or Adyen — and it says so in the admin rather than finding out at the first balance charge. It handles one deposit and one later balance, and it collects that balance in full, because part-charging a balance needs the Plus-only amount argument. It is not an instalment plan and will not become one, for the licence reason above.
If your answer in the section above was draft orders, POS or B2B, it is not the right tool and I would rather say so here than after you have installed it.
Questions
Do you need Shopify Plus to take a deposit on Shopify?
No. Shopify Plus is required for admin partial payments, for deposits on draft orders, for extended card authorizations, and for charging part of a remaining balance rather than all of it. Shopify Plus is not required for deferred purchase options at storefront checkout, which is the mechanism deposit apps use on standard plans.
What is the difference between a Plus deposit and an app deposit?
A Plus deposit is created by the merchant on a draft order or in the admin, and can be a percentage of a quote you have prepared. An app deposit is chosen by the customer at your normal storefront checkout, and can be a percentage or a fixed amount. The Plus route covers draft orders, POS and B2B; the storefront route covers none of those three.
Which payment gateways support deposits on Shopify?
Shopify's pre-order and try-before-you-buy documentation lists four: Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Adyen on Shopify, and Stripe, which it says is only available to some merchants. Authorize.net appears on Shopify's separate subscriptions list but not on the pre-order list. Shopify does not explain the difference.
Can customers pay a deposit with Apple Pay or Google Pay?
No. Express wallets are not offered to a customer who selects a deposit option; they remain available on the pay-in-full option for the same product. Shop Pay Installments cannot be used with pre-orders or try before you buy either, and a gift card applies only to the first payment.
Can you take a deposit on Shopify for free, with no app?
Only if your lead time is under a week. The free route is to authorize the card at checkout and capture later, and Shopify Payments provides an authorization period of 7 days. Extended authorization windows require Shopify Plus with Shopify Payments. An authorization also holds the full order amount against the customer's credit, not the deposit, and once it expires there is no re-authorization path.
Can you build this yourself as a custom app in the Shopify admin?
No. Purchase options require protected access scopes that a custom app created in the Shopify admin cannot request. The app has to be created in the Partner Dashboard, which means a merchant cannot assemble this from admin-created credentials alone.