
Shopify is an all-inclusive e-commerce platform. In most cases, it will handle all the billing and payment collection for your services. Yet, sometimes you may take orders over the phone or in person. For these orders, you’ll need to send your customers an invoice.
Using invoices can sound intimidating at first, but there’s nothing to it.
An invoice is simply a bill for your labor, services, or product. Shopify allows you to both create and send invoices to your clients. It’s yet another feature that makes Shopify so convenient for merchants.
Read on if you want to learn how to send invoices on Shopify. Along the way, we’ll let you know which apps are best for invoice creation.
Creating Draft Orders on Shopify
Shopify has its own version of invoices called draft orders. Draft orders are invoices for your products, services, and labor. The order will appear just like your regular customer orders.
The only difference between draft orders and regular orders is the draft has no payment info yet. Once your customer fills out the draft order, it becomes a normal order.
Since the draft order has no payment yet, it’s a type of invoice. Shopify allows you to create draft orders with ease. They come in handy for:
- Billing customers for orders you took over the phone or in-person
- Selling customized items that aren’t listed on your page
- Sending invoices to customers so they can pay through a secure checkout
- Re-creating manual orders from varying sales channels
- Taking pre-orders for products coming out soon
- Selling products at special rates or discounted prices
These are just a few of the uses you’ll find for draft orders. If you regularly gain clients through word of mouth, you’ll be creating draft orders left and right.
Your draft orders will have the following statuses to keep things organized on your Shopify page:
- Pending payment
- Received payment
That will help you know which invoices you’ve collected and which you need to follow up with the most. Now let’s learn how to send invoices on Shopify through draft orders.
Creating a New Draft Order on Shopify
You’ll create a draft order on behalf of your customer. From there, you’ll send them the invoice. That invoice will contain a link to a secure checkout page. That’s where you will collect payment.
You can include the following information on your draft orders:
- Multiple products and their prices
- Discounts on certain items or the entire thing
- Specific shipping rates
- Applicable taxes for your area
- Customer’s name and information
- Specific product tags
As you can see, you can include all the info that you would on a regular invoice. Here’s how you can create a new draft order in Shopify:
- Start at the Shopify admin page. From there, go to Orders
- Select Create Order
- Add your products to the invoice
- Customize the order with discounts, taxes, names, and more
- Send the invoice to the customer with the secure checkout link
- Accept customer payment
- Save the invoice as a draft for later use
It’s imperative not to skip that last step, mainly if you use a lot of invoices. Having a draft invoice for each client will make things easy. That way, you can use it as a starting template for your next order. You won’t need to fill in their name, address, taxes, and other information more than once. You’ll simply need to tweak the products, and that’s all.
Adding Products to Your Shopify Invoice

In order to add products to your draft order, you should follow these steps:
- Go to the Drafts page in your Shopify admin
- Under Order Details, enter the name of the product that you want
- You can also click browse products to select the items you need from a complete list
- Add any product variants that you want to include with the order
- Select Add to Order
- Double-check the number of products that you have listed to ensure they are correct
That’s how to add individual products to your Shopify draft orders. It’s essential to double-check yourself to make sure that you aren’t overcharging your customer.
Adding Discounts to Invoices
Let’s say that you’re selling some of your handmade jewelry at a special one-time rate. Since you don’t have the discounted rates in your Shopify store, you’ll need to use a draft order. From there, you’ll have to add the discount to the total price. Here’s how you do it:
- Select the order from the Drafts page in the Shopify admin
- Under Order Details, select the price beside the product name
- Set your desired discount in your preferred currency
- You can also enter in a percentage of the original price, and Shopify will calculate the discount
- Select Apply
It’s as easy as that to add special rates and discounts to your orders. That way, you can take advantage of promotional events, sales, and more.
Sufio: Professional Invoices On Shopify
The best way to learn how to send invoices on Shopify is through Sufio. It’s an app that you can download on the Shopify App Store. Automating invoices is its specialty, and it does it better than any other app.
The app also allows you to incorporate branded designs into your invoices. You can include your company logo, fonts, color schemes, and more. The more professional your invoices look, the more it will impress your customers.
Sufio only uses invoices that certified accountants validate. They meet all compliance regulations for B2C and B2B sales. The invoices that you generate from Sufio are high-quality, certified, and professional.
The automation features will allow you to create dozens of invoices quickly. You can create a custom workflow that suits the needs of your business. With Sufio taking care of your invoices, you’ll be able to focus on more critical tasks. Sufio takes the stress and hassles out of invoicing customers, and it integrates seamlessly with Shopify. To start your free trial of Sufio follow this link here.
How To Send Invoices On Shopify ( quick video )
In Conclusion
So now you know how to send invoices on Shopify. You can either create draft orders through the platform or use Sufio to automate everything. Either way, making, emailing, and filing invoices are all straightforward with Shopify and Sufio. We hope that you can use a combination of both to master the art of invoicing customers.
For more great content to help you develop your Shopify strategies, check out the rest of the merchant posts on the site. If you want to see a list of our top recommended Shopify apps visit this link here.