With our latest EZ Importer release, you can import Draft Orders into your Shopify store. This allows you to import orders that have yet to be paid or are incomplete. Many of our customers take orders from outside sources on behalf of customers, and importing them as draft orders gives you much more flexibility to make changes later.

Importing Draft Orders works similarly to Orders, but some key differences exist.  The import process itself is the same. However, there are fewer fields that you need to import, and some of the fields act a little differently.

Creating Data Mappings For Your Draft Order

Importing Draft Orders works the same as importing Orders. You need first to create a data mapping, which allows you to map the fields in your CSV file to the fields you want to create on the draft order. You can do this in one of two ways.

You can use the Data Mapping section to create your data mapping before uploading your file. Click the Create Data Mapping dropdown from the Data Mapping list page and click Draft Orders to create a new Draft Order Data Mapping.

The second way to create a data mapping is to upload the file and create the data mapping for it at the same time. To do this, select Add New Mapping from the upload file dialog box and then select Draft Order as the resource type.

Just like when importing orders, once the file is uploaded, you'll be brought to the data mapping section, where you can select the mapping based on the columns in your file.

Draft Order Field Differences

One of the critical field differences is the order number.  Draft Orders don't allow you to set the order number on import; however, EZ Importer still needs a way to associate your line items with your Draft Order.  Since Shopify doesn't support adding the Draft Order number, they will automatically generate it for you.

We have added a field called internal_draft_order_id. EZ Importer uses this field to associate the line items to your Draft Order. This ID is never sent to Shopify and is only used to build the Draft Order before sending it to Shopify.

A few other key differences are;

• You can add line item discounts to your draft order. The Draft Order API natively supports this, and we are looking to add it to Order importing in the near future.
• Using the customer's email address, you can associate the customer's default address in your Shopify admin with your draft order. This is not currently supported when working with Orders, but we are also looking into it.
• Shopify does not allow you to set the price on a product you associate with your Order when linking by SKU. If you need to set a custom price that is different from the price of the product in your Shopify store, you must disable the link by using the SKU option.

Deleting Draft Orders

Deleting Draft Orders works the same as deleting Orders.  You can delete any order within 90 days by clicking the delete button on the import dashboard or the Draft Order details page.  When deleting a draft order, your credits will be added back to your credit bank.

Advanced Configurations

Draft Orders support adding defaults to your imports, adding a prefix to a field in your file, and replacing values in your CSV file before uploading them to Shopify.  These features all work the same way they do when importing orders.

Creating Invoices

Currently, we don't support creating invoices when importing Draft Orders. However, we plan to look at this option for our next iteration of Draft Orders.

We're pretty excited that we now support importing Draft Orders into Shopify. It's been a long time coming, and we hope you find as much value in it as we think you will. We highly recommend you read our Draft Order documentation before using the new feature, and as always, feel free to reach out if you have further questions.