Hi all! I’m running a birthday sale event this Saturday for my business and want customers to be able to keep adding items to their order throughout the day without paying multiple lots of shipping. I’d ideally like to do different offers throughout the day on different products.
Essentially I want an open/held order mechanic — they browse the offers, keep adding and either pay as they go then we cut off checkout at the end. I’ve got mergify apps but they are a bit confusing/not clean….?
I wanted to see if anyone has experience with this or knows a better solution? Ideally something self-serve for the customer rather than me managing it manually on the backend.
Honest answer, Shopify’s checkout doesn’t have a native open-order mechanic. Every checkout creates a new order with its own shipping line.
For a one-day event I’d stop fighting the platform. Two options that actually work:
Run free shipping for Saturday only with a code. Cleanest UX, and customers don’t care that each checkout is technically separate as long as they’re not paying extra
Use draft orders. You build the order manually as they tell you what they want throughout the day, then send one invoice at the end. Backend heavy like you said, but zero friction on the customer side
Order-merge apps (Mergify and similar) run after the fact and refund excess shipping. It always looks messy on receipts and tends to confuse customers expecting one clean transaction.
How many customers are you expecting Saturday? If it’s under 20, the draft orders route is less painful than it sounds.
I’ve actually been on the customer side of something like this before and it’s such a great experience when it works smoothly!
Honestly the cleanest self-serve approach I’ve seen for this is using a Draft Orders setup where customers can keep adding throughout the day and only get invoiced at the end, but that does require some manual handling on your end.
For a more automated route, Bold Custom Pricing or ReCharge can handle held cart logic but might be overkill for a one-day event.
The most practical quick solution for Saturday might actually be:
Free shipping discount code that applies automatically at checkout, customers can place multiple orders without worrying about shipping costs
Combine with a cart note or bundle app so repeat buyers feel taken care of
It’s not a perfect open-order mechanic but it’s clean, self-serve and won’t confuse customers on a busy sale day!
What’s your store built on theme-wise? It could aid out in me telling you the best and less stressful workaround
Hi @whitedaisyuk
This is a very niche ask, it hypothetically can be done but your likely not gonna get it by tomorrow as this seems like a fully custom build, unless you got money to burn (in which case reach out immediately ).
So with the cart-to-draft & needing it tommorow, you’d probably be better to try and skip any order-editing(post checkout) and instead have some behavior where they submit the items creates/updates a draft order and for presentation purposes “clears” or “reserves” what was in the cart (so the cart is empty and $0) Then somewhere let them be able to view whats in this draft-order.
And when they add more things to cart the can update the “order”
Then at some point finalize it to finally go through checkout.
At best you’d need to seriously dig around and maaaaybe find a post-order-upsell(AND post purchase) app?? that somehow injects what’s in the cart into the upsell and into an existing order.
Notice how many moving parts that is making a unicorn unlikely to found on the shelf ready to go.
Maybe there’s some group-buy service/app out there where you have a single customer act as a group, but good luck going that route.
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