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.
31

Hey guys! Chiming in to say the same thing. This is not solved. We’re wanting the same functionality to allow multiple cards to pay per order or partial payments. We can do it via the POS hack, but it is just that a hack.

We sell high-dollar value orders with our greenhouse kits. Often we’ll have customers need to split this over multiple credit cards. Please fix this partial payment issue. This seems like a very basic and HIGHLY requested feature.

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