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.
6

I see! If you’re looking for partial payments online then you’re going to be limited to one of the options that were listed above.

I completely understand what you’re saying, however, about this being a feature that wouldn’t work for your store. In that case I think you might be right, an Expert would be the way to go about this right now.

However, I think this is a good note that I want to bring to my merchant frustration teams.

In your most ideal set up can you list all of the features that you would like this to have? I will then make a ticket for them to review. If you could share the store myshopify.com URL as well that would be great.

I look forward to hearing back from you.

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