Dropship purchase orders

A dropship purchase order ships directly from your supplier to a customer’s address instead of to one of your own locations. Use it whenever a supplier fulfills a customer order on your behalf. The order runs through the same statuses as any other PO, but it never adds stock to your warehouse. Shopify inventory changes only if you choose Compensate Inventory to offset stock deducted when the customer’s order was fulfilled.

What makes a PO a dropship PO

Every purchase order has a destination: one of your Shopify locations, Dropship (customer address), or (on the Elevate plan) another supplier who holds the goods for you. You choose between them on the same picker you’d use to pick a location; Dropship is always offered as an extra option alongside your real locations.

A dropship PO carries a customer shipping address instead of a location. Its line items are never counted as warehouse stock, so it behaves like a normal order for tracking and paying a supplier, but like a pass-through for inventory purposes.

Creating a dropship PO

The destination picker is available everywhere you can create or edit a PO:

Create Empty PO, Create from Forecast, Create from Min/Max, and Create from Sales History all let you pick Dropship instead of a location. When you pick it in one of the replenishment flows, thresholds and quantities fall back to shop-wide values. Per-location min/max overrides don’t apply to a dropship order, since there’s no location to read them from.
Create from Customer Orders (the sales-orders wizard, and its shortcut from the Orders list) creates one dropship PO per customer order, carrying that order’s items. Choose Dropship (customer’s order address) in the destination picker. The PO doesn’t copy the customer’s address: it reads the name and delivery address from the Shopify order whenever its PDF is generated (see Delivery details from a Shopify order), so the review step lists order names only. Each order gets its own PO; there’s no option to combine several orders into one dropship PO. Orders mirrored from a connected store can’t be used here: the wizard names them and asks you to remove them or pick a location instead (create the dropship PO in the store that owns the order). Dropship destinations here always create brand-new POs; adding items to an existing PO isn’t offered for them.
Import from CSV/XLSX and Import from Stocky auto-detect a dropship shipment when the file’s row carries a deliverable customer address and no location resolves for it. Each detected group is counted as a dropship PO that “will ship to the imported customer address” in the preview, with a per-PO override if you’d rather assign it to a location (or vice versa).

Delivery details from a Shopify order

A dropship PO created from a Shopify customer order keeps no copy of the customer’s details. Instead, the Supplier & Location card shows:

Delivery address from Shopify order #1001 with a Dropship badge,
Read from Shopify when the PDF is generated.,
a View order in Shopify link, and
an Enter address manually instead button.

No customer name or address is shown anywhere in Logistified. Each time you download the PDF or email it to the supplier, Logistified reads the customer’s name and delivery address (never their email or phone number) from the order in Shopify at that moment, so the PDF always carries the order’s current address. The PDF preview in the export dialog shows a placeholder (Delivery address from Shopify order #1001. Read from Shopify when the PDF is generated.) instead of the address.

Enter address manually instead replaces the Shopify order with an address you type, in the usual address dialog (titled Enter Delivery Address Manually). From then on the PO is an ordinary dropship PO with a stored address; later changes to the order in Shopify no longer apply. The button is available in every status except Completed and Cancelled, so you can still switch if the order’s address can’t be read after the PO was sent. While the PO reads from the order, that order stays linked: Manage linked orders shows it locked with Delivery address source: enter the address manually to unlink this order.

If the customer’s address can’t be read

Logistified now has Shopify’s approval to read customer names and delivery addresses for these PDFs. No setting needs to be enabled in Logistified. If an address still can’t be read, the PDF isn’t generated and the email isn’t sent. The message explains whether the order was deleted, has no shipping address, or your Shopify staff account lacks access to its customer details.

If Shopify denies the app access to the protected address fields, you may see:

Shopify has not yet approved this app’s access to customer delivery addresses. Enter the address manually instead, or try again after approval.

Use Enter address manually instead to send the order with an address you type, or resolve the access problem and try again.

Sending, documents, and exports

Sending: Send via Logistified and Re-Send Email always attach a PDF (spreadsheet attachments aren’t offered), built at send time with the current address from Shopify. Logistified doesn’t keep a copy: the file exists only until the email is delivered, and Use existing attachment isn’t offered on Re-Send. Every resend builds a fresh PDF. If the address can’t be read, the email isn’t sent. A first send leaves the order in Draft; a failed resend leaves its status unchanged. See Sending the PO.
Documents: Attach printout to my documents is unavailable in the export dialog for these POs, because the printout carries the customer’s address.
Spreadsheet exports: the eight Delivery columns export blank.

Protected data access in the Log

Every PDF download and every email send of such a PO adds an entry to the Protected data access section of the PO’s Log card (on the Progress and All tabs): who it was, when, and Downloaded the PDF with the customer’s delivery address or Read the customer’s delivery address to email the PDF. The entries never show the customer’s details, and they can’t be edited or deleted.

The customer delivery address

This section is about dropship POs whose address is stored on the PO (typed in, imported, or entered with Enter address manually instead). The address is editable while the PO is in Draft. On the detail page, the location card shows the customer’s address and a Dropship badge in place of a location. If the address is missing, the card’s empty state reads No customer delivery address with an Add the customer’s delivery address so this order can be sent prompt, and an Add customer delivery address task tile appears right there in the Delivery Location column.

Where dropship POs show up

PO list: a Dropship badge appears next to the order, and the location filter gains a pinned Dropship entry alongside your real locations.
Detail page: the location card shows the customer address and the Dropship badge instead of a Shopify location, and inventory columns show an explicit “not applicable” hint instead of blank cells, since there’s no location to read stock from.
Reporting and the supply-orders dashboard: wherever purchase orders are grouped by location, dropship orders get their own Dropship group, separate from deliver-to-supplier orders and from orders that simply have no location assigned yet.

Sending and marking delivered

Sending a dropship PO requires a deliverable customer address instead of a location; the Send to Supplier action is disabled with an Add the customer’s delivery address before sending message until one is set. A PO that reads its address from a Shopify order needs nothing more: the order is its destination.

Once a dropship PO reaches In Progress, receiving is relabelled to match what’s actually happening. The supplier is shipping to your customer, not to you:

Receive Quantities becomes Mark Delivered, and Receive Manually becomes Mark Delivered Manually.
Quick Complete reads Mark every remaining quantity as delivered, with a note that marking delivered doesn’t update Shopify inventory.
The status stepper’s “Received” description reads All items have been delivered to the customer.

Marking a dropship PO delivered works exactly like receiving any other PO (full or partial, one pass or several). It’s the same action with different labels and no Shopify inventory push.

What never touches inventory

Sending, confirming, marking delivered, and Quick Complete don’t change Shopify on-hand stock. Dropship POs are also excluded from:

Shopify incoming counts.
Forecast’s incoming-on-order figures.
Min/max reorder-point coverage (an open dropship PO is never counted as “already covers this shortfall”).
Incoming reconciliation.

Converting a custom item on a dropship PO into a real Shopify product stays blocked, since that action would activate inventory at a warehouse location rather than record a direct delivery to the customer.

Compensating Shopify inventory

Shopify may deduct stock at a location when you fulfill the customer’s order, even though your supplier shipped the goods directly. Use Compensate Inventory on the dropship PO to add the delivered quantities back at that location and offset the deduction.

Mark the quantities delivered on the PO.
Choose Compensate Inventory.
Choose the Shopify location whose stock was reduced. If the linked orders were fulfilled from a single location, it is suggested for you; otherwise, choose the location yourself.
Review the items and quantities, then confirm the compensation.

Compensation is optional and always manual. Marking delivered and completing the PO never run it automatically. Only delivered quantities that haven’t already been compensated are available. The action changes on-hand stock, never Shopify incoming or forecast incoming-on-order figures.

The compensation location is locked once any quantities have been compensated. Block sync to Shopify in Settings → Purchase Orders → Preferences also blocks compensation. You can compensate a Completed dropship PO, but you must reopen it to unreceive and reverse the compensation in Logistified; otherwise, correct it in Shopify. On a PO that still allows unreceiving, unreceiving compensated quantities reverses the corresponding inventory adjustment.

Exports

Bulk CSV/XLSX exports gain eight ship-to columns for the customer address: Delivery Company Name, Delivery Address 1, Delivery Address 2, Delivery City, Delivery Province, Delivery ZIP, Delivery Country, and Delivery Phone. They’re not in the default column set; add them from a purchase-order or line-item export template the same way you’d add any other column.

These columns follow the same two-tier rule as the PDF’s Delivery address block: the PO’s own shipping address first, falling back to the Shopify location, so they’re correct for both dropship POs and warehouse POs that carry an address override. For a dropship PO that reads its address from a Shopify order they stay blank; the customer’s address never goes into a spreadsheet.

Merging, splitting, and returns

Merging: two POs can’t be merged if either one is a dropship PO, since each dropship order ships to a different customer. This applies even between two dropship POs. Deliver-to-supplier POs are blocked from merging too, for their own reason.
Splitting or duplicating: the customer’s delivery address is copied along with the rest of the order, so a split dropship PO keeps its ship-to address on both halves. A PO that reads its address from a Shopify order keeps reading it from the same order on both halves.
Returns (RMAs): creating a return from a dropship PO uses the PO’s own customer address as the return’s origin, since that’s where the goods are physically coming back from; there’s no warehouse location to fall back to. A PO that reads its address from a Shopify order has no stored address to copy, so add the origin address on the return.

Limits

Dropship destinations can only be set or changed while the PO is Draft.
Creating from customer orders always creates new POs, one per order; there’s no “add to an existing PO” option and no way to combine orders for a dropship destination.
Orders mirrored from a connected store, and imported or historical orders, can’t supply a dropship PO’s address from Shopify; create the dropship PO without the order and enter the address by hand.
Line handling on a dropship PO offers Ship to customer and Buy and hold at supplier; the warehouse options don’t apply, since there’s no location to deliver or consign to.
Custom items on a dropship PO can’t be converted into a real Shopify product.
Replenishment flows (Min/Max, Sales History) fall back to shop-wide thresholds for a dropship destination; per-location overrides don’t apply.