Accept Partial payments on Draft orders or Manual orders

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment

Topic summary

Merchants are requesting the ability to accept partial payments (deposits/down payments) on draft orders and manual orders, similar to functionality available in Shopify POS, Square Invoice, and PayPal Invoice.

Core Need:

  • Accept initial deposits (e.g., 50%) when sending draft order invoices to customers
  • Collect remaining balance later via email link or follow-up invoice
  • Properly track partial payments within a single transaction for accounting purposes

Current Limitations:

  • Partial payments work in Shopify POS but not in admin/draft orders
  • Shopify support suggests creating multiple separate draft orders for each payment installment
  • This workaround creates accounting reconciliation issues and inflates transaction counts

Workarounds Mentioned:

  • Opening draft orders through POS on iPad to process partial payments
  • Third-party apps: Wholster, Downapy, Manual Partial Payments
  • Processing deposits outside Shopify (QuickBooks, PayPal) and marking orders as “paid outside of Shopify”

Status:
This remains unresolved despite years of merchant requests. Multiple users express frustration that this “foundational” e-commerce feature hasn’t been prioritized, with some considering switching platforms. The discussion reflects ongoing dissatisfaction with Shopify’s response to what merchants view as basic B2B functionality.

Summarized with AI on November 1. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
2

Hey, there.

This is Dallas from Shopify’s Social Care Team.

Ok, so there isn’t a way to do that now, but I do have some options that might be useful for you when it comes to initiating partial payments.

For manual orders online, the best way would be to create incremented draft orders. Nothing would trigger anything automatically, but you could go to Settings > Orders > Drafts and send out an invoice or a percentage of the payment (1st installment) and then you could create an order for the remaining balance (or following payments) that need to be paid. In order to make sure that all of the payments are organized you can refer to the initial order (number and amount) in a new draft order.

It would look something like this:

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The other option that you might not have thought of would be to create incremented payments for your customers online so that you don’t have to make a draft order for partial payments. I’m not sure how your business structure is set up, so if you take a lot of phone orders (aka make all the incremented payment orders manually) then this wouldn’t work. However, if that isn’t the case and you have customers that visit your online storefront then you could get an app like

This would allow you to predetermine how your customer will need to pay. It will also allow you to guarantee that you get the money for the order rather than relying on the honor system.

Have you thought of an option like that or does that seem like something that would work for you?

Please let me know if you need more assistance!

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