How to Replace Shopify Draft Orders with Checkout Links

You get a DM from a wholesale customer: "Can you send me the usual order with our 20% discount?" You open Shopify admin, click Orders, click Create Order, search for each product, add them one by one, set quantities, apply the discount manually, enter the customer's email, and hit Send Invoice. The customer gets an email with a link to review the order, then completes checkout.

That's a draft order. It works. It's also six steps where there should be one.

What Draft Orders Are Good At

Draft orders exist for a reason. They give you admin-side control over exactly what goes into an order before the customer pays. That's useful when:

• You're creating a one-off custom order with line items that don't exist as products
• You need to apply a manual discount that doesn't follow any rule
• You're invoicing a client for services, not products
• You want to mark an order as paid without the customer going through checkout (cash, wire transfer, trade)

For these cases, draft orders are the right tool. They're essentially a manual invoice system built into Shopify.

Where Draft Orders Break Down

The problems start when merchants use draft orders for things they weren't designed for: recurring wholesale orders, promotional links, reorder flows, VIP offers, and anything that happens more than once.

They're manual every time. There's no way to save a draft order as a template. Your wholesale customer orders the same 12 products every month? You're rebuilding that draft order from scratch each time. Search for the product, set the quantity, repeat. Twelve times.

They require back-and-forth. Draft orders generate invoices that the customer must open, review, and then complete at checkout. For a returning customer who already knows what they want, the review step adds friction. They didn't ask to review an invoice — they asked you to send them a link to buy.

No tracking or attribution. Draft orders don't carry UTM parameters. You can't see which wholesale customers came from which outreach. You can't connect the order back to a campaign, an email, or a sales rep. It's a black box between "invoice sent" and "order placed."

No pre-checkout experience. The customer gets an invoice email, clicks a link, and lands on a checkout page with items pre-filled. That's it. No branded landing page, no product images with descriptions, no upsell opportunities. Just a cart and a pay button.

They don't scale. Sending draft orders to 5 wholesale accounts is manageable. Sending personalized offers to 50 VIP customers, or reorder reminders to 200 repeat buyers, means creating 50 or 200 individual draft orders by hand. Or exporting to a spreadsheet and using a third-party tool. Neither is a real solution.

What Checkout Links Do Instead

A checkout link is a URL that pre-fills a Shopify cart with specific products, quantities, variants, and discounts. The customer clicks it and lands directly at checkout — or on a pre-checkout page you've built — with everything already set up.

The key difference: you create the link once and send it as many times as you want.

Reorder Links

Your wholesale customer's usual order: 12 products, specific quantities, 20% discount. Create one checkout link with all of it configured. Save it. Send the same link every month. The customer clicks, confirms at checkout, pays. Done.

No rebuilding the order. No invoice review step. No back-and-forth. The link doesn't expire (unless you want it to), and the products and discount are locked in.

Personalized Offers

You want to send your top 50 customers a VIP offer: 15% off a new product, pre-loaded in their cart. With draft orders, that's 50 manual orders. With a checkout link, it's one link. Send it via email, SMS, DM, or a Shopify Flow automation that targets the right customer segment.

The link can include a pre-checkout page with the customer's name, a personalized message, and the product with full images and descriptions — not just an invoice.

Wholesale Ordering

Create a checkout link for each of your wholesale product bundles. Share the links with your wholesale customers. They bookmark them and reorder whenever they need to. You're not involved at all — no DM, no invoice, no admin time.

Add a passcode to restrict access to verified wholesale accounts. Set quantity minimums. Apply their negotiated discount automatically. The link handles everything that a draft order requires you to do manually.

Side-by-Side Comparison

When to Use Which

Keep using draft orders when:

• You're creating a truly one-off order with custom line items
• The customer is paying by cash, check, or wire transfer (mark as paid)
• You need to manually adjust prices outside of any discount logic
• You're invoicing for services, not products

Switch to checkout links when:

• You're sending the same or similar orders to customers repeatedly
• You want customers to self-serve (click a link, buy, done)
• You need UTM tracking or campaign attribution
• You want a branded pre-checkout experience
• You're sending offers to more than a handful of customers
• You want to automate the whole thing with Shopify Flow

Making the Switch

Step 1: Identify Your Repeating Draft Orders

Look at your last 30 days of draft orders. How many were truly one-off? How many were variations of the same order — same products, same discount, different customer? Those repeating patterns are your checkout links.

Step 2: Create Your Links

For each pattern, create a checkout link in the app. Add the products and quantities. Set the discount. If you want a branded experience, build a quick pre-checkout page — even a simple one with your logo and a product list outperforms a plain invoice.

Step 3: Replace the Workflow

Next time that wholesale customer DMs you, send them the link instead of opening a draft order. Next time you want to offer VIP customers a deal, send one checkout link to all of them instead of creating 50 invoices.

Step 4: Automate with Flow

For recurring orders, set up a Shopify Flow workflow. Use the Get Customers action to pull your wholesale segment, then the Send Checkout Link action to email them the link automatically. Monthly wholesale reorders, handled without you touching Shopify admin.

The Real Cost Comparison

Draft orders are free — they're built into Shopify. Checkout Links is $25/month. That's the surface comparison.

But draft orders cost time. If you're spending 10 minutes creating each draft order and you send 20 per month, that's over three hours of admin work. For a store owner, three hours has a real dollar value.

The $25 buys you those hours back, plus tracking, pre-checkout pages, automation, and a better experience for your customers. For stores that send more than a few manual orders per month, it's not close.