"Just send them a draft order."
Someone said that to me at a market two seasons ago, and I nodded like I knew what it meant. I did not. I went home, opened my Shopify admin, and stared at the Orders menu until I found it.
If you sell custom work on Shopify and have never touched draft orders, this is the plain-English guide I wish someone had handed me that night.
What a draft order actually is
A draft order is an order you build by hand, inside your Shopify admin, for a sale that did not start with "add to cart."
Think of it this way. A product page is the customer building the order: they pick, they click, they check out. A draft order is you building the order: you pick the items, you set the price, and then you send the customer a private checkout link to pay.
That is the whole concept. Everything else is details.
When to use one
Any time the price is not sitting on your website waiting to be clicked:
- Custom work quoted from a DM or email conversation
- Wholesale orders you negotiate by hand
- Phone orders
- Made-to-order pieces with per-customer pricing
- Anything where you need to say "let me put that together for you" first
If the order starts with a conversation instead of a cart, it probably wants a draft order.
How we learned this: 14 draft orders in one week
Last season, every single one of our farm's custom orders went out as a Shopify draft order. Fourteen orders, $4,366.50, across 12 customers. Wedding garlands, festival marigolds, sympathy bunches, the lot. It was a busy week!
It worked. Customers paid through normal Shopify checkout, money landed in our account, and nobody had to learn a new system. It also taught us exactly where draft orders end and the real work begins. Both halves are in this post.
Building a draft order from a DM (steal this)
Here is the exact sequence. Do it once and it becomes muscle memory.
1. Read the thread one more time. Before you touch Shopify, write down the four things: what they want, how many, when they need it, and any special notes. If anything is missing, ask now. A draft order built on guesses gets revised, and revisions are where the awkwardness lives.
2. Open your Shopify admin. Go to Orders, then Drafts, and create a new draft order.
3. Add the customer. Name and email. The email matters: that is where the invoice goes. No email, no invoice.
4. Add the products. Search your catalog and add the real products with quantities. This is the part makers love: the price comes from your actual store, so you are not maintaining a second price list in your head. If the thing does not exist as a product (a custom garland, a made-to-order cake in a flavor you do not list), add a custom item instead: you type the title and the price yourself.
5. Adjust. Add a discount, set the taxes, add shipping if it is delivering. Leave it clean if it is pickup.
6. Send it. You have two options. Email the invoice straight from Shopify, or copy the payment link and paste it directly into the DM thread. We paste it into the thread. The customer is already there, the conversation is already there, and one fewer email means one fewer thing to lose.
7. The customer pays. From their side, this is completely ordinary: a checkout page that looks like your store, they pay like any online order, no account needed, no new app to learn. That ordinariness is the beauty of it.
8. Done. When payment completes, Shopify converts the draft into a regular paid order. It shows up in your Orders list like everything else. Fulfill it like anything else.
That is the whole machine. Conversation in, draft order built, link sent, money in.
The honest limits (where draft orders fall short)
Draft orders solve payment. They do not solve everything around payment. Here is what we ran into, in order of how much it stung:
1. The link never expires.
This one surprised us. A draft order's payment link does not go stale on its own. A customer could come back months later and pay a year-old price, and Shopify will happily let them. Deadlines are entirely on you to enforce: write the expiry into your message, then actually delete or update the draft when it passes. (Separately, Shopify now auto-deletes draft orders that sit untouched for a year, so an old quote can also vanish without telling anyone. Neither extreme is what you want.)
2. The draft knows nothing about the conversation.
You build every draft by retyping what the customer told you in the DM: the items, the quantities, the date, the "no marigolds" note. Retyping is where mistakes are born. The draft and the thread are two separate universes, and you are the bridge between them, carrying details across in your head.
3. It is manual, one by one.
Five drafts a week is fine. Thirty festival orders in one week is a data-entry job. Every draft is opened, built, and sent by a human, which means custom-order season scales exactly as fast as your evenings do.
4. There is no pickup date on a draft.
Nothing in a draft order locks "Saturday at 10am" to the order. Pickup lives on a separate calendar, in a separate message, as a separate thing to forget. We learned to confirm pickup only after payment cleared, but the draft itself gives you no place to put that commitment.
5. Prices are snapshots.
A draft order freezes the prices at the moment you build it. If your catalog price changes afterward, the draft keeps the old number, and the customer pays what the draft says. Fine when you catch it. Expensive when you do not.
None of this makes draft orders bad. They are the right tool, and they are already in your Shopify admin, free, today. They are just an incomplete tool for anyone whose orders start as conversations.
What IntoPaid adds on top
We built IntoPaid as the layer draft orders are missing.
Create draft order in a click
The conversation becomes a ticket first, so the details are captured where they were said, not retyped from memory.
The draft invoice is built from your live Shopify catalog right from the ticket, so prices are never copy-pasted and never stale. The invoice goes out, the customer pays through normal Shopify checkout, and when payment clears, the ticket is marked paid automatically. Then pickup gets locked to the order, which is the part the draft could never do.
It is the same checkout your customers already trust. The difference is everything before the checkout stops living in your head.
Your customers can receive quote and revised quotes by email or Instagram DM. You pick.
We are opening soon. If you are already sending draft orders by hand and feeling every one of the five limits above, join the waitlist and let the ticket do the carrying when we open. No card required.