Shopify Draft Orders Explained: Samples, PR, Gifts

A Shopify draft order is an order a staff member creates by hand in the admin instead of a customer checking out on the storefront. It supports any price, including $0, which is why it's the standard mechanism behind phone orders, wholesale, and nearly every free sample, PR box, or gifted product a Shopify brand sends out. The catch is the word "by hand": Shopify's own admin gives you no way for the recipient to submit their own address into a draft order, so someone on your team is typing it in every time.

If you've ever shipped free product to an influencer, a press contact, or a VIP customer, you've touched a draft order whether you knew the name for it or not. Here's what it actually is, how to create one, and where the manual version falls apart once volume shows up.

What a draft order actually does

Every normal Shopify order starts on your storefront: a customer adds a product to their cart and pays at checkout. A draft order skips that path entirely. Staff build the order directly in the admin, under Orders, then Drafts, then Create draft order: pick the product and variant, set a price (including $0), add a shipping address, and send an invoice or mark it paid. Until someone completes it, a draft order sits in a separate Drafts list and doesn't count as a real order anywhere, not in reporting, not in fulfillment.

Once it's marked complete, it becomes a standard order: it gets an order number, shows up in your sales reports, and flows into fulfillment exactly like a storefront purchase. That's the whole appeal. A draft order isn't a separate, lesser system bolted onto Shopify; it becomes a first-class order the moment you complete it, which means your 3PL, your packing slips, and your existing automations don't need to know the difference.

Why $0 draft orders beat discount codes for gifting

Most brands that haven't found a better way still gift product through a 100%-off discount code at checkout. It works, but the code itself is the problem: once it exists, it can leak to a coupon aggregator site, get screenshotted into a group chat, or get reused by someone who was never supposed to have it. Every leaked code is free inventory walking out the door to a stranger.

A $0 draft order never generates a public code at all. Staff (or software acting on their behalf) set the line item price directly to zero, so there's nothing to type at checkout and nothing that can leak. The order either exists, approved and tagged, or it doesn't. That's the mechanical reason gifting-specific tools build on draft orders instead of discount codes once they're sending product at any real volume.

Where the manual version breaks

Creating one draft order by hand, picking the variant, typing an address, setting the price takes a few minutes. That's fine for one PR box a month. It stops being fine once a brand is actually running a program:

• Address collection has no self-serve path. Shopify's draft order screen has no way for the recipient to type their own address; staff type whatever the creator sent over DM, which means every transcription error becomes a reshipped package.
• Tagging is manual and inconsistent. Tracking which campaign, which creator tier, or which approval status an order belongs to depends on someone remembering to type the right tag every single time.
• There's no approval gate. Whoever has admin access can complete a draft order the moment they create it; there's no built-in step that holds an order until someone else signs off.
• It doesn't scale past a handful a week. Twenty-five hand-built draft orders is a lost afternoon, every week, forever, and that's before anyone answers "did this creator already get one?"

What a gifting tool adds on top of the raw mechanism

I built Seed for exactly this gap, because my own DTC store needed it. A creator opens a branded link, picks their product and variant, and types their own shipping address, the part Shopify's draft order screen has no answer for. That submission sits behind a human approval gate before anything is created in Shopify at all; nothing becomes a live draft order until someone on the brand's team approves it. Once approved, a real $0 draft order lands in the admin automatically, tagged with the campaign, with no discount code generated anywhere in the process. Dr Water ran 138 gifts this way in 46 days; Bri Beauty shipped 43 gift orders in its first week.

That's the difference between the raw Shopify feature and a tool built around it: the draft order mechanism is the same either way, $0 price, becomes a real order, flows into your existing fulfillment, but who types the address and who approves the order changes completely.

When the manual process is still fine

If you're sending free product to a handful of people a month, a press contact here, a VIP customer there, building draft orders by hand in the Shopify admin is genuinely fine. The tooling question only matters once volume or approval requirements show up: multiple people need to review orders before they go out, creators submit their own addresses, or the weekly count is high enough that a few minutes per order adds up to real hours. Below that line, don't add a tool to solve a problem you don't have yet.

What to do next

For the full mechanics of running gifting at volume rather than one order at a time, see what influencer seeding is and how to send free products to influencers on Shopify. If you'd rather skip typing addresses into draft orders by hand, see Seed's pricing or install it from the Shopify App Store, 5.0 stars, 3 reviews as of September 2026.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Shopify draft order?

A draft order is an order a staff member creates by hand in the Shopify admin, instead of a customer checking out on the storefront. It supports custom pricing, including $0, so it's the standard way Shopify stores record phone orders, wholesale orders, and free product sent to influencers, press, or employees.

Can a draft order be $0?

Yes. A draft order lets staff set any price on any line item, including zero. Setting a line item to $0, or applying a 100%-off discount, produces a real order with no payment collected, which is why $0 draft orders are the standard mechanism for sending free samples and PR product without a discount code.

Does a draft order show up as a real Shopify order?

Only once it's completed. A draft order sits in a separate "Drafts" list until someone marks it complete, at which point it becomes a normal order: it gets an order number, appears in reporting, and can be fulfilled, tagged, and tracked exactly like a storefront purchase.

What's the manual process for creating a draft order for a gift?

In the Shopify admin: Orders, then Drafts, then Create draft order. Pick the product and variant, set the price to $0 or apply a 100% discount, add the recipient's shipping address by hand, then mark it complete. At one or two a week this takes a few minutes each. At 25 a week it's most of an afternoon, and every typo in a hand-typed address becomes a reshipped package.

Why not just use a discount code instead of a draft order?

A 100%-off discount code works at checkout, but the code itself is a liability: once a creator has it, it can leak to a coupon site or get shared in a group chat, and anyone with the code can check out for free. A $0 draft order never generates a public code at all, so there's nothing to leak.