Shopify Draft Orders for B2B Quotes: What They Cover

Can you quote B2B customers with Shopify draft orders?#

Yes. A B2B draft order picks up the buying company's prices and payment terms, accepts a negotiated custom price on any line, and locks pricing when you send the invoice. What it does not keep is the quote itself: the buyer's request, the rounds of negotiation, and a margin check before the price goes out.

That distinction matters because a lot of advice about "request a quote" on Shopify starts from the wrong premise. Many pages write as if Shopify has no way to quote a wholesale buyer at all. It does, and a distributor on any paid plan can use it today. The useful question is where the native tool ends, so you can decide what, if anything, you need on top.

This post is for the owner, GM or inside sales manager at an industrial or MRO distributor already selling on Shopify, whose wholesale quotes still start in an email.

What does a B2B draft order handle natively?#

Shopify's help article on B2B draft orders (help.shopify.com, fetched 2026-10-10) describes draft orders as the tool for orders "that your customers send directly to you by phone or email." That is exactly where most distributor quotes begin. Here is what the article says a draft order does for a B2B customer, in Shopify's own terms:

• Company pricing and terms apply automatically. When you assign the draft order to a company location, "the prices, payment terms, and checkout options automatically reflect the settings for that company."
• A negotiated price per line. If you need to quote a negotiated price that differs from the company's catalog pricing, you set a custom price on that line item.
• Price locking. Draft orders for company locations have their prices locked by default, and when you send an invoice or share a checkout link, "the pricing is set to lock by default." A lock keeps the prices on the order from changing. The same page notes that "Price locks aren't supported for product bundles."
• PO numbers. You can add the buyer's purchase order number to the draft order.
• Payment terms. "Payment terms let you set the date that payment is due on an order," and once terms are set you can send an invoice or accept payment.
• Review before you accept. A company location can be set to "Submit all orders as drafts for review," which shows that location's buyers a Submit for approval button at checkout, so their orders arrive as drafts for your team to check.
• Deposits, on Plus only. Per the same article, "Deposit requirements for draft orders are available only on the Shopify Plus plan."

Two plan facts frame all of this. Shopify's B2B features page (help.shopify.com, fetched 2026-10-10) says "Shopify B2B is available on all plans." Below Plus, a store can have up to three active catalogs across its B2B markets; assigning catalogs directly to company locations is a Plus feature. So on Basic, Grow or Advanced, the custom line price on a draft order is often where a one-off negotiated price lives, because a dedicated catalog per customer is not available. Our breakdown of Shopify B2B catalog limits by plan goes deeper on that.

That is a real quoting tool. A rep can build the order at the agreed price, attach the PO, send an invoice on the company's terms, and know the price will not drift between send and payment.

A worked example: one bearing quote, four emails, one draft order#

Here is how a typical quote moves at a bearing and power transmission distributor. The prices below are illustrative.

1. The ask. A maintenance buyer at a contractor emails: price on 200 units of 6205-2RS and 50 units of 6206-2RS, needed in two weeks.
2. The first price. The rep checks the company's contract price, sees the volume, and replies with $3.10 and $4.25 a unit.
3. The counter. The buyer writes back: a competitor offered $2.80 on the 6205-2RS. Can you match?
4. The check. The rep asks purchasing for current landed cost, works out that $2.90 still clears the margin the branch manager wants, and replies with $2.90, holding the 6206-2RS where it was.
5. The accept. The buyer says yes and sends a PO number.
6. The order. The rep builds a draft order for the buyer's company location, sets custom prices on both lines, adds the PO, and sends the invoice. Pricing locks.

Now sort those six steps into two piles.

What lives in Shopify: step 6. The final prices, the PO, the payment terms and the locked invoice. Clean, auditable, correct.

What lives in the inbox: steps 1 through 5. The original request, the first price, the competitor counter, the cost check, the reason the price moved from $3.10 to $2.90, and the buyer's acceptance. None of it is attached to the draft order.

If the buyer reorders in three months and asks for "the price you gave us," the draft order shows $2.90. It does not show that $2.90 was a one-time match against a competitor quote, that the rep took it to the edge of the margin, or that landed cost has since moved. That context sits in someone's sent folder. When the cost moves, the history is exactly what you need; our post on quote versioning walks through what happens when it is missing.

What does a draft order not keep?#

A draft order is the end of a negotiation, not a record of it. Measured against what an inside sales team actually needs to manage quotes, four things are missing:

• No request object. There is nowhere for the buyer's ask to land as a structured request. It arrives as an email, a phone call or a form submission, and someone retypes it.
• One current price per line, not a history of rounds. A draft order holds the price you set. Earlier offers and counters are not versions of the same document.
• No margin check before the price goes out. Nothing in the draft order stops a rep from sending a price below the margin your branch requires. If you rely on rules about who can discount how far, those rules live outside the order; a discount authority ladder is one way distributors write them down.
• Nothing that says why. The reason a price was agreed, such as a competitive match, a project price or a one-time volume buy, is not part of the record.

Validity is the other gap worth naming. Shopify's draft order article does not describe a quote expiry date, so how long a quoted price holds is your practice to define and enforce. Write it into the quote you send and into the rep's notes, and decide in advance what happens when a buyer comes back after it lapses.

Notice what is not on this list. Shopify does let you negotiate a price, and it does give you a review step through "Submit all orders as drafts for review." That review is your team checking an order before you accept it. It is not an approval chain inside the buyer's company, and it is not a quote history. Being precise about which is which saves you from buying a tool to solve a problem Shopify already handles.

When are draft orders enough, and when do you need a quote record?#

Draft orders are enough when:

• Quote volume is low, a handful a week.
• One or two reps handle every negotiated price and remember the context.
• Prices are rarely countered; most quotes are the contract price plus a volume break.
• Cost is stable, so last quarter's quote is still a good price this quarter.

You probably need a real quote record on top when:

• Several reps quote the same accounts and need to see each other's history.
• Buyers counter regularly, and the rounds matter when they reorder.
• Margins are tight enough that a single unchecked price hurts.
• Landed cost swings, so old quotes go stale and need to be repriced; see price breaks when landed cost changes for how that ripples through a price list.
• Someone, an owner, an auditor or a new rep, regularly needs to know who agreed to what price and why.

If you are in the first group, use draft orders well. Set custom prices on the line, add the PO, keep the price lock on, and put the reason for any non-contract price in the order's notes. That last habit alone closes much of the gap.

If you are in the second group, the fix is a record that holds the request, every round and a margin check together, and still ends in a Shopify draft order so Shopify keeps taking the money.

Where Copiara fits#

That second case is what the quoting desk in Copiara on top of Shopify B2B is being built for. A buyer's request comes in as a quote rather than an email. Each negotiation round stays on one record, with every version kept. A margin floor is enforced by the server before a price can go out. Quotes follow the quantity rules you already set in Shopify. When the buyer accepts, the quote becomes a Shopify draft order with the agreed prices locked, so the native tool described above is still where the order lives. Copiara does not set or enforce quote expiry; that stays your practice.

Copiara is a Shopify app in early access. It is not yet on the Shopify App Store, and nobody can install it or subscribe yet. For the full module list, see what Copiara adds to Shopify.

FAQ#

Do B2B draft orders work below Shopify Plus? Yes. Shopify says B2B is available on all plans. Deposit requirements on draft orders are the Plus-only piece called out on the draft orders page.

Can a customer request a quote on native Shopify? Shopify's draft order article describes draft orders for orders customers send by phone or email, plus a review setting that turns a location's checkout into Submit for approval. It does not describe a separate request-a-quote flow.

Do price locks cover product bundles? No. Shopify's article states that price locks are not supported for product bundles.

Does a draft order quote expire? The draft order article does not describe a quote expiry. Decide how long your quoted prices hold and say so on every quote.

If you run a wholesale distributor on Shopify and your negotiated prices still start in an inbox, get early access.