Guide · August 2026
How to take a deposit with a Shopify draft order — free on any plan, manual on every order
Two draft orders and two emailed invoices are the free way to take a deposit on Shopify — no app, no Plus, no gateway requirement. This page is the honest expansion of that one line: the steps, what your customer actually receives, the traps Shopify documents, and the arithmetic of doing it by hand as the orders add up.
The short version
- The free way to take a deposit on Shopify is two draft orders: one invoiced now for the deposit, one invoiced for the balance when the work is done. No app, every plan — and any payment gateway.
- Nothing is saved to charge later. Each invoice is an ordinary checkout, and on my reading of the flow nothing is left stored to charge against — so the balance arrives only if the customer opens a second email and chooses to pay it.
- Two orders, not one. The deposit and the balance land as separate orders with separate numbers — separate rows in every export.
- Partial payments against a single draft order exist, but in Shopify’s words the feature “is available to stores on the Shopify Plus plan”.
- It is invisible on your storefront. Draft orders are for phone, email and in-person sales; a customer cannot choose a deposit themselves.
Why draft orders are the free method
A draft order is an order you build rather than one a customer places. Shopify’s help centre frames it exactly that way: you create draft orders on behalf of customers “when you need to process orders through phone, email, or in-person sales”. Deposits appear nowhere in that sentence — and that absence is the method. A draft order will invoice whatever amount you type into it, and half a price is an amount.
The whole technique is two of them. Draft order one is the deposit; draft order two, created when the work is done, is the balance. Each is emailed as an invoice, paid through your normal checkout, and each, once paid, becomes a separate order. Two invoices, two checkouts, two orders. That last clause is the price tag, and most of this page itemises it.
Three things make the method genuinely good at low volume, not merely tolerable. It is free — no app, no subscription. It works on every Shopify plan; nothing on this page needs Plus until the section that says so. And — the underrated one — it works on any payment gateway, because you are taking two ordinary full payments rather than storing a card. A store whose gateway can’t vault cards, where every automated deposit method is closed, can do this today.
Nothing is saved, so nothing can be automated. An invoice is paid at an ordinary checkout, and nothing in the draft-order flow creates the saved-card mandate an automatic balance charge needs. That is my reading of the flow, not a sentence I can quote: I have not found Shopify documenting it in one place, and I would rather say so than dress a conclusion up as a citation. On that reading, no app can bolt automatic collection onto this method, mine included. This page exists to expand method 1 of the four real ways to take a deposit on a custom order into its full mechanics, not to talk you out of it.
The two-invoice method, step by step
Five steps, and the fourth is the first three done over again. The admin screens change with Shopify’s releases; the decisions don’t.
- 1
Create a draft order for the deposit amount
In the admin, build a draft order whose line item is the deposit — named so you can reconcile it later: “50% deposit — walnut dining table” beats “Deposit”. Add the customer with an email address or phone number: Shopify's considerations for draft invoices say to add contact details before completing the draft order, or no order confirmation is sent.
- 2
Email the invoice and let the customer pay it
Send the invoice from the draft order. The email “contains a link to the checkout page” — Shopify's words — where your customer enters billing information, selects a shipping method, and submits payment. It is an ordinary checkout, and it needs no particular gateway — you are taking two ordinary full payments rather than storing a card.
- 3
The paid draft becomes the deposit order
In Shopify's words: “When you accept payment for a draft order, it becomes an order on the Orders page.” The deposit is now settled like any other sale — and that is everything that happens. No balance is scheduled and nothing is queued to remind anyone of anything.
- 4
When the work is done, repeat for the balance
A second draft order for the remaining amount, a second invoice, a second checkout. Nothing in Shopify connects it to the first order, so the connection is whatever you type — put the job name and the deposit order's number in the line item, or month-end will hurt.
- 5
Reconcile two orders into one job
The step Shopify doesn't do. Your records now hold two orders that are one sale; reporting, exports and your accountant see them separately, and stitching them back together is by hand. Budget real time for this — it is where the method's costs live, not in the clicks.
How big the deposit should be is a judgement about your lead time and what a cancellation costs you, not a Shopify setting. How to take a 50% deposit on Shopify works through the trade-offs between the common splits, and the deposit calculator does the arithmetic for any of them.
Write down what the deposit buys before the first invoice goes out — refundable or not, and what happens if the customer goes quiet. The invoice and the order confirmation are the only documents your customer gets, and Shopify adds nothing about a balance on your behalf. Wording that holds up is its own guide: a non-refundable deposit policy on Shopify.
The same $3,000 order, both sides
The four-methods guide runs a $3,000 commission through the automated method — one order, card saved, balance charged on schedule. Here is the same order taken the free way: a 50% deposit, $1,500.00 on each side of the job.
| Stage | What the customer sees | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Agreeing the order | A conversation. Draft orders exist, in Shopify's words, for “phone, email, or in-person sales” — there is no deposit option on your storefront for a customer to find at 11pm. | Take the details, agree the deposit, open the admin. The per-order work starts here, before any money moves. |
| The deposit invoice | An email from your store with a link to the checkout page. They enter billing details, pick shipping if it applies, and pay $1,500.00 — a full, ordinary checkout with your store's usual payment methods. | You built the draft order, added their email, pressed send. If the email sits unopened, nothing happens until you follow up. |
| Deposit paid | An order confirmation for $1,500.00 — order #1041. Nothing in it mentions a balance unless you wrote that into the line item or the invoice message. | One new order on the Orders page. No card saved, nothing scheduled, and no trace of the other $1,500.00 anywhere in Shopify. |
| The wait | Silence, unless you write to them. | If the draft held a real product rather than a custom item, its quantity is still in Available inventory unless you reserved it — another customer can buy it out from under the unpaid invoice. |
| The balance invoice | A second email, a second checkout, a second decision to pay $1,500.00. Ignoring it has no consequence except another email from you. | You created the second draft order by hand and sent it. If it isn't paid, your recourse is asking again — nothing is saved to charge, so no charge can fire on its own. |
| Balance paid | A second order confirmation — order #1042. | Two orders that are one job. $1,500.00 appears twice; $3,000.00 appears nowhere. |
The two-order shape is not an opinion about the method. It is in Shopify’s own documentation: “When you accept payment for a draft order, it becomes an order on the Orders page” — and here you accept payment twice. How a deposit and a balance should land in your books — one order or two, payouts, exports, QuickBooks and Xero — is the whole subject of Shopify deposit accounting.
The traps Shopify documents
Four ways this method bites. None of them are horror stories — every one is in Shopify’s own documentation, mostly as a warning you only meet after it has fired.
Marking it Paid early kills the checkout link
Shopify’s own warning: “Be careful not to mark the draft order as Paid before receiving the customer’s payment, or else the link in the invoice won’t work, and the customer won’t be able to complete the checkout process.” Mark as paid is for money you already received, or an order imported from another platform — and Shopify’s page on accepting payment for a draft order says what recording it does: “The received amount isn’t captured again by your payment provider, and the customer receives an order confirmation email.”
Inventory is not held while the invoice sits
By default a draft order reserves nothing: quantities “stay in the Available inventory state and can be purchased by other customers” unless you explicitly reserve items. And if stock runs out before the invoice is paid, the customer is told the item is out of stock and can’t complete the sale. A deposit invoice for a limited item is a race against your own storefront.
Draft orders are not forever
Shopify’s own wording: “To optimize performance, draft orders created on or after April 1, 2025, are automatically deleted after 1 year of inactivity. Any type of edit to the draft order resets the timer.” If your habit is raising the balance draft up front and leaving it open, a long build can outlive its draft. Creating the balance draft fresh when the work finishes sidesteps the timer entirely.
Local currency plus payment terms blocks the email
Shopify documents one situation where the invoice can’t be sent at all: a draft order priced in a local currency other than your store currency, with payment terms set. There you “can only collect payment by credit card or by marking the order as paid” — worth knowing before you promise an international customer an emailed deposit invoice.
One order instead of two, if you have Plus
The two-order shape is not fixable on a standard plan. Shopify has built the one-order version — and gated every variant of it behind Plus.
The version you can work by hand in the admin is partial payments. Shopify’s help centre describes the feature as letting you “collect deposits or upfront payments”, and scopes it in the same breath: “This feature is available to stores on the Shopify Plus plan.” It hangs off payment terms — “If you create a draft order with payment terms, then it’s eligible for partial payments” — and the terms give the balance a real due date: due on receipt, net terms of 7, 15, 30, 45, 60 or 90 days, or a fixed calendar date.
On Plus, then, the flow becomes one draft order with terms set and the deposit recorded against it — “select Fixed amount or Percentage, and then enter the amount” — with the payment method chosen at recording time rather than when the draft is created. The order’s status changes to Partially paid, visible to the customer in their account, and if the balance misses its due date the status becomes Overdue on its own.
The label is automatic. The money is not. Shopify’s payment-terms documentation — written for the B2B case, where terms live — says so directly: “Payments aren ’t automatically captured when the payment terms expire.” Overdue is a badge, not a charge. Collecting is still your job, on Plus as everywhere else on this page.
Wholesale is its own variant: B2B payment terms can carry a deposit requirement as a percentage of the order — Shopify’s example is 20% — due up front, with the balance following the terms. Also Plus: “Deposit requirements are available only on the Shopify Plus plan.” The full wholesale picture is in B2B deposits on Shopify, and the map of exactly which deposit features need Plus — and which never did — is in Shopify deposits without Shopify Plus.
What breaks at volume — and where the line is
First, the honest defence, because this page is not a teardown. If you speak to every custom buyer anyway and take a handful of deposits a month, the draft-order method is not a compromise — it is the right answer, and the four-methods guide says the same. Call the admin work ten minutes per job: two draft orders, two invoices, two payments to watch for. That is my estimate, not a measured figure — Shopify publishes no timings, and neither does anyone else.
The arithmetic is only arithmetic, but it moves fast. Ten minutes at five jobs a month is under an hour, and an app subscription buys you little you would notice. The same ten minutes at fifty jobs is more than a working day — every month — before a single unpaid balance has been chased.
And the minutes are the smallest of the costs that scale:
- The chasing is structural, not occasional. Every balance is a payment the customer must actively decide to make, prompted by an email they may not open. On the reading above, nothing is saved to charge, so a quiet customer is a conversation, not a retry.
- The two-order shape compounds. Every job doubles its own paperwork, and the mismatch between jobs and orders grows with the order count — reporting, exports and reconciliation all inherit it.
- The storefront stays closed. However many orders you take, a customer still cannot choose a deposit on a product page. The method has no self-serve version — that is a property of draft orders, not a volume problem you can hire your way out of.
Where the line sits is a judgement, and here is mine: the week you build a draft order for someone who would happily have checked out on their own is the week the method starts costing you sales rather than minutes.
If you have crossed it, 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, with a 14-day free trial, no per-transaction fee, no revenue share and no cap on order value. It puts a deposit option on your product page; Shopify saves the customer’s card at checkout, and when the balance comes due, DepositDesk tells Shopify to charge the saved card — retrying after 1, 3 and 7 days if it declines, emailing the customer each time a charge fails, and flagging the order for you when the ladder runs out. One order, two payments, no invoices to send.
Its real limits, in the same flat register as the rest of this page: Online Store channel only — not POS, not B2B, and not draft orders, which means it does not rescue the method this page describes; it replaces it. 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 — Shopify Payments, PayPal Express, Stripe, or Adyen. And it is one deposit plus one later balance, not an instalment plan.
Related: the comparison of Shopify deposit apps weighs the app route’s options under the same rules as this page, and when the second payment declines covers the failure mode you trade invoice-chasing for once the balance charges itself.
Questions merchants actually ask
Can I take a deposit on Shopify with a draft order and no app?
Yes. Create a draft order for the deposit amount and email the customer its invoice — the email contains a link to your checkout, where they pay like any other order. When the work is done, create a second draft order for the balance and send that invoice too. It is free, works on every Shopify plan and on any payment gateway. The cost is that it produces two separate orders and nothing is saved to charge later, so you chase the balance yourself.
Does a draft order save the customer's card for the balance?
No. A draft-order invoice is paid through an ordinary checkout, and nothing in that flow creates the saved-card mandate an automatic balance charge needs. That is my reading of the flow rather than a line I can quote from Shopify, and on that reading no deposit app can add automatic balance collection to this method. Automatic collection means taking the deposit at storefront checkout instead, where Shopify saves the card.
Is a draft-order deposit one order or two?
Two, on a standard plan: the paid deposit invoice becomes one order and the paid balance invoice becomes another, with nothing connecting them except what you typed into the line items. On Shopify Plus it can be one: a draft order with payment terms is eligible for partial payments, so a deposit is recorded against a single order and its status becomes Partially paid.
Do I need Shopify Plus to take a deposit with draft orders?
Not for the two-invoice method — that works on every plan. Plus is required for the one-order versions: partial payments against a draft order with payment terms, and deposit requirements on B2B payment terms.
Does a draft order reserve inventory while the customer decides?
Not by default. Unless you explicitly reserve items, quantities stay in the Available inventory state and can be purchased by other customers. And if stock runs out before the invoice is paid, the customer is told the item is out of stock and can't complete checkout — so a deposit invoice for a limited item is a race against your own storefront.
What happens if I mark a draft order as paid before the customer pays?
The checkout link in the invoice you already sent stops working, and the customer can't complete checkout — Shopify's documentation warns about exactly this. Mark as paid is for money you have already received, or for importing a past order from another platform. Recording it also sends the customer an order confirmation email, and a manual payment recorded this way isn't captured by Shopify — it is a record, not a charge.
Do draft orders expire?
Draft orders created on or after April 1, 2025 are automatically deleted after 1 year of inactivity, and any edit to the draft resets the timer. If your process leaves a balance draft open for months, touch it now and then — or create it fresh when the work is done, which is the safer habit anyway.
Can I send a draft-order invoice in the customer's local currency?
Shopify documents one situation where the invoice can't be sent: when the draft order is priced in a local currency other than your store currency and has payment terms, you can only collect payment by credit card or by marking the order as paid. If you sell internationally and want emailed deposit invoices, check that combination before you promise one.
Sources for this page: Shopify’s help-centre documentation on creating orders and draft orders, sending draft-order invoices, accepting payment for draft orders, partial payments, deferred payments and payment terms, and B2B payment terms — read August 2026 and quoted verbatim wherever a sentence decides something. Where Shopify publishes nothing, this page says so instead of estimating, and where a conclusion is mine rather than Shopify’s it is labelled as mine rather than given a citation that doesn’t cover it. If you find something here that is wrong, I would rather hear it: support@depositdesk.app.