Shopify B2B & the wholesale channel
A draft order is an order you build in the admin rather than one a buyer places at checkout. You add the products, set the trade prices, add freight, attach it to the account, and send a link the buyer can review and pay. For a brand below the plan with native trade tooling, that is the whole wholesale system, and it is a better one than most brands expect.
It scales badly and it teaches well. Most first-year wholesale channels should run on draft orders precisely because every order passes through your hands, which is how you learn what your case packs, prices and lead times should be.
The workflow, end to end
A shop emails a list. You open a new draft order and add the items, then set each line to the trade price, either by editing the price directly or by applying the agreed structure you keep on the account.
You add freight as a line, quoted from what it will actually cost to pack and send this order rather than from a consumer shipping rule that was written for one candle in a mailer.
You attach the customer, which matters for two reasons: it records the order against the right account, and it is how you will later answer what this shop buys and how often.
Then you either take payment immediately, by sending a link for a card, or you mark it as payable later and send an invoice with a due date. The second is how terms work below the native tooling, and the routine for collecting on them is in net terms in practice.
When the order is paid or accepted, it becomes a real order, fulfils like any other, and the buyer gets ordinary tracking.
What draft orders do well
Any price, on any line. No price list required, no app, no plan change. That is genuinely powerful for a brand still working out its wholesale pricing, and it is why the early months of a trade channel run fine on this alone.
Custom items. A pallet charge, a display unit, a sample set, a shipping surcharge for a remote address, a one-off product made for a particular shop. All of these are a line you type, and none of them require a product record you will never use again.
Freight quoted properly. Trade freight varies with weight, destination and whether the shop has its own courier account. A draft order lets you quote the real number after packing rather than guessing at checkout.
A buyer who never logs in. The buyer clicks a link and pays. No account, no password reset, no portal to learn. For a shop owner who orders three times a year, that is the lowest-friction path that exists.
A record that looks like an order. Unlike a spreadsheet or an emailed invoice, a draft order becomes a real order in the same system as everything else, so inventory, fulfilment and reporting all behave normally.
Where it starts to hurt
Three limits, and they arrive in a predictable order.
Your time. Each order takes ten to twenty minutes when done carefully. Forty orders a year is a nuisance. Two hundred is a part-time job, and the second hundred is where mistakes creep in.
Price drift. Prices typed by hand are prices typed from memory. The eleventh time you build an order for the same shop, you will type last year's number, and neither of you will notice for a quarter. The defence is a written price list you actually open each time, structured as in how to build the wholesale price.
No self-serve. A buyer cannot log in at eleven at night and place an order. Every order waits for you, and orders that wait sometimes do not happen. When accounts start asking to order on their own, the draft order workflow has become the bottleneck rather than the solution.
There is a fourth, quieter cost: nothing enforces your minimum or your case pack. A draft order will happily contain three units of a six-pack, because you typed it.
Making the manual route efficient
Five habits cut the time per order roughly in half.
Duplicate the last order. Most trade orders are variations of the previous one. Starting from a copy and editing quantities is far faster than starting empty, and it also surfaces products the shop has stopped taking.
Keep a price sheet open. One document, current, with trade price, case pack and suggested retail per product. Open it every time. Trust your memory for nothing.
Standardise freight. Three or four freight bands by order size, written down, rather than a fresh calculation each time. It is slightly less accurate and much faster, and it makes your quotes consistent between accounts.
Tag every draft order. One trade tag, applied without exception. This is how you will separate channels in reporting later, and it cannot be reconstructed afterwards.
Send it the same day. An order built within hours of the request is the single strongest signal a small brand can send a buyer, and it costs nothing but sequence.
A worked order, start to finish
A homeware shop emails asking for eight candles in two scents, four mugs and whatever the new soap is.
You open a draft order and add three products. Candles go on at fifteen dollars in cases of six, so the eight becomes twelve, which you note in the reply rather than silently shipping. Mugs go on at sixteen dollars in cases of four. The soap goes on at four dollars in a case of twelve, and you add a line note saying it is a first order of that product so the shop can try it.
That is one hundred and eighty plus sixty-four plus forty-eight, so two hundred and ninety-two dollars, comfortably over a two hundred dollar minimum. Freight is a fourteen dollar line from your middle band. The account is prepay because it is their second order and the first one was paid on a card.
You attach the customer, tag it as trade, and send the link. Elapsed time, maybe twelve minutes, most of it spent writing a reply that explains the case packs. The next order from this shop starts as a copy of this one and takes four.
When to move on, and to what
The signal is not a number of accounts but a pattern of behaviour: buyers emailing lists instead of questions, reorders arriving on a predictable cycle, and you building the same order from the same shop for the fourth time.
At that point there are two directions. One is a structured order form the buyer fills in, which keeps you in the loop but removes the transcription, as described in the wholesale order form. The other is a proper self-serve trade area with per-account prices, which means either an app or the plan that includes native B2B. The full comparison of those routes is in three ways to sell to stores, and the workarounds below the top plan are in wholesale without the upgrade.
Do not move early. A brand with eight accounts that spends a month building self-serve ordering has automated something that took four hours a month, and has not added a single stockist.
The thing worth spending that month on instead is accounts. If you do not yet have a list of shops that plausibly stock your category, paste a product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors that carry comparable products, then work through it one shop at a time while the draft orders keep flowing.
Questions brands ask about draft orders for wholesale
Can a draft order use different prices from the storefront? Yes. Every line price is editable, which is exactly why this works as a trade tool without any other configuration.
Does the buyer need an account? No. They can pay from a link, which is why this route suits infrequent buyers so well.
How do taxes work on a trade order? Set the customer's tax status on their record rather than adjusting it per order, so the exemption applies consistently and you are not relying on remembering it.
Can you take a deposit? Not as a partial payment on one draft order in most setups. The common workaround is two orders, a deposit and a balance, referencing each other in the notes.
Is it worth using draft orders even after upgrading? Yes, for the awkward cases: trade show orders, custom items, one-off pallet charges and anything a buyer agreed by phone.