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.
47

I’m sorry, that is not a valid solution to this problem. Using x2 draft orders means the subsequent orders are not at all connected to the original one, fake items need to be created for the instalment payments.

This is totally unacceptable with Shopify Plus. The reality is that Shopify at it’s core is really a very basic, low end ecommerce platform that is perfect for entry level stores. The ‘promise’ of Shopify Plus is that it’s better suited to larger stores, but it’s really just the same basic system with a much higher price tag. The only real benefit is lower merchant fees, the so called better reporting and other features are a joke.

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