Create and Manage Draft Orders

The Draft Orders feature on ShopBase allows users to create an order and share the checkout link with customers. It's especially beneficial for B2B sellers, whose sales agents typically handle the sales process with customers and then send them the link to complete the checkout and payment. Draft orders are valuable when you need to perform the following tasks:

Create an order that allows for receiving payment at a later time for orders made through phone calls, in-person interactions, or emails, etc.
Send invoices to customers to pay with a secure checkout link.
Manually create new orders from any of your active sales channels.
Sell products at discounted or wholesale rates

This guide will walk you through the process of creating and managing draft orders in your ShopBase admin.

A. Access and create a draft order

From the admin dashboard, go to Order > Draft. On the top of the page, click on Create order button to create a new draft order.

A draft order includes the following information:

Products: you must add at least one productto the order. Products that are out of stock or unavailable cannot be added to the draft order.

You have the flexibility to modify the product quantity. The subtotal of the item is calculated and displayed accordingly.

Payment: This section displays how much customers need to pay for the order. It includes subtotals of the added items, discounts, shipping fee and taxes.

Add discount: Click Add discount to add a discount code to your draft order. The discount will be applied automatically to the draft order when customers proceed to checkout. In cases where two discount codes cannot be used together, one will be removed automatically.

You can select from three types of discounts:

◆ Discount code: This can be set in the Discounts section. Navigate to Marketing & Sales > Discounts > Codes to do so. To learn more, please visit this article: Create a Discount Code.
◆ Automatic discount: This can also be set in the Discounts section. Go to Marketing & Sales > Discounts > Automatic for this option. For additional information, please visit the following article: Create an Automatic Discount.
◆ Custom discount code: Create a new code that can only be applied to this order. This code will NOT be saved in the Discounts section and cannot be reused in other orders.

Shipping: Click Add shipping to add a shipping method (including the shipping fee) to your draft order.

You can select the shipping method for this order once the customer location is filled.

Tax: tax is calculated based on the customer location. You can adjust this in the Tax settings by accessing to Settings > Tax. Please refer to this article for a detailed guide. If no customer address is filled, the tax will be calculated at checkout when customers provide their address to make the payment.

Notes: The 'Note' section on the checkout page is where customers can specify requirements for their order. In the draft order, you can pre-fill this note by clicking Edtit and entering the content.

Its visibility to customers depends on your settings. You can set up the visibility (visible or hidden) in the Website Builder settings. Please refer to this article for more detailed information.

Custom checkouts notes: this text will be shown to customers on the checkout page, in the order summary section

'Custom checkouts notes' appear to customers on checkout page.

Customer: Here you can search for an existing customer or create a new one. Adding an existing customer will automatically fill in their default information, such as name, phone number, shipping and billing address,etc.

You can change these information by clicking on the Edit button.

New customers will be added to your contact list once a draft order under their email has been paid.

After entering the necessary information, click Save to create a new draft order. Now you can Duplicate this draft to create a new, similar draft order.

After a draft is created, a checkout link is automatically generated for that draft. You can share this link with your customer in two ways:

Click the Share button at the top of the page and copy the link from the pop-up window. You can use the Copy link button to copy the link easily.

Alternatively, you can send this link along with the order information to the customer's email. In the payment section, click Send invoice. After sending the invoice through email, the draft's status will automatically update from Open to Invoice Sent.

C. Mark an order as paid

Once customers have received the checkout link and proceeded to pay for the order, the draft is marked as complete and you will no longer be able to edit it.

You can navigate to the order that has been created due to the successful checkout, and this order can then be fulfilled as usual. For more information on how to fulfill orders, you can visit this article.

Additionally, you have the option to manually mark an order as paid without requiring the customer to go through the checkout process via the invoice link. You can do this by navigating to the Payment section of the draft and clicking on the Mark as paid button.

D. Manage draft orders

The dashboard provides a list of all draft orders you have created, along with their current status. Draft orders can fall into one of the three following statuses:

Open: This is the default status when a new draft is created.
Invoice Sent: This status is set when the draft is shared with the customer by sending the checkout link via email.
Complete: A draft is marked as complete when the customer has paid through the checkout link, or the order was manually marked as paid.