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
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.
Since the system identifies you as “Shopify Staff”, would you please inform
us when will this feature become available to all the rest of us that are
not on the Shopify Plus plan?
Exacly. Accepting partial payment is ESPECIALLY important for Draft Orders,
as mechants use this feature ofter for custom products. Customers expect
partial payments on custom products, for example in furniture.
If anyone from Shopify follows this thread, it may be worth asking a
Shopify marketing manager
to initiate a survey of Shopify merchants to find out what % merchants sell
customized products/services
as a significant part of their business–perhaps more than 10% (or 20%)
of sales.
Willing to bet that this number of merchants justifies opening this feature
to the “rest of us.”
Don’t know about others but, it is so important to our business, that I
would be willing to pay a small
monthly surcharge for it!
Any solutions for this yet? It’s causing us to reconsider other solutions providers. To the point above, reporting is used to determine Goals & Bonuses based on sales — and our bookkeeper reconciles sales against deposits. Neither of these will work properly with the way partially paid orders record sales.
The problem is that the reporting shows the full payment at the time of the first payment… so if you happen to use sales reports for things like goals or commissions, then… well, it’s not really usable at all and Shopify’s answer is to pay for a custom reporting app.
So this can be done…but you have to be on the expensive Shoipfy Plus plan. Once again a common feature on competitive platforms that they only allow for Shopify Plus stores.
While it looks like it might be one of the only solutions, the cost for large ticket items is prohibitive — I’m not discounting the cost of credit card processing, I’m just saying even 1/2 a percent on a 20k purchase is a lot to pay for basic functionality that shopify lacks. This seems like a very viable solution for lower-cost / higher-margin transactions.
How do you handle reporting? We pay sales commissions — the full order amount shows in sales, while you have to use a 3rd party app (or export and manually run reports) to see what net sales collected are?
It doesn’t process payments, but it allows you to mark orders as partially paid when you take payments in other ways (including cash and bank deposits, for example). You could capture (but not process) the initial 50% deposit this way, marking the order as partially paid. And then when it’s time to collect the remaining payment, send the invoice to the client.
I would love to hear if that solves some of your problems here and/or what else you would need.
This does not work for us.
We need to split payments a few times a year.
I am reluctant to pay $5 for the privilege.
Shopify should do it as a standard feature.
