Use case
Turn emailed sales orders into Shopify draft orders automatically. Reps stop retyping, catalogue pricing is applied, and a human confirms. This page covers the sell side view: where sales orders come from, how they differ from purchase orders, and how to acknowledge them fast.
The same transaction generates two documents. Your customer's procurement team raises a purchase order, which is their authorisation and their commitment to buy. When it reaches you, you create a sales order, which is your commitment to supply and the record your warehouse and your accounting will work from. Two numbers, two systems, one shipment.
This matters operationally, not just semantically. The buyer's PO number is how the buyer reconciles your invoice, so it has to survive the journey onto your order and onto your invoice. Your sales order number is how you find the order internally. Lose either and you get an accounts payable hold three weeks later.
It also settles a common argument about pricing authority. The purchase order states what the buyer believes the price is, often copied from a confirmation you sent months ago. The sales order states what the price actually is, taken from the price list on that account. When those two disagree, the sales order wins and someone tells the buyer before the truck leaves. Sales order automation is the discipline of making that happen every time without a person retyping forty lines to get there.
If your team uses the terms interchangeably, this is the table to pin above the desk.
| Purchase order | Sales order | |
|---|---|---|
| Who creates it | Your customer's buyer or procurement system | You, on receipt |
| What it commits | The buyer to purchase | You to supply |
| Where it lives | Their ERP or purchasing system | Your Shopify admin and your ERP |
| Who owns the price | What the buyer believes it is | Your price list for that account |
| Numbering | Their PO number, which you must carry | Your order number, which they must carry |
| How it arrives | PDF, Excel, email body, EDI 850, scan | Created from the above, by hand or automatically |
| What closes the loop | Your acknowledgement | The shipment and the invoice |
Nobody budgets for sales order entry. It hides inside customer service, inside the rep's evening, and inside the credit note pile.
Your buyer typed it once into their system to produce the PO. You type it again into yours. Two people did the same keystrokes, and only one of them was paid by you.
It gets dropped, abbreviated or typed into the wrong field. The invoice then fails the buyer's three way match and payment stalls for a month over a reference.
The buyer's document carries last year's price. A rushed clerk accepts it. The margin gap is discovered at month end, and the credit note is written by someone senior.
A rep closes six orders on the road, then spends the evening keying them into Shopify. That is the most expensive data entry in the company.
The buyer does not know what you accepted, so they email to ask. Each chase is a few minutes for them and a few for you, on every order.
When an out of stock line is not flagged at intake, the customer finds out when the pallet arrives light. That call costs more than the line was worth.
The first source is the buyer. Wholesale accounts send what their process produces: a formal purchase order out of an ERP, a spreadsheet a category buyer keeps by hand, a list in the body of an email, a scan of a signed order form. They are not going to standardise for you, and asking them to log into a portal loses orders from the accounts least willing to change.
The second source is your own sales team. A rep on a store visit writes the order on a form, in a notebook, or straight into an email on a phone in a parking lot. That document is complete and accurate at the moment it is written, and then it waits until somebody transcribes it. The delay is where quantities get remembered wrong and where the urgent line gets missed.
Both sources produce the same thing: a document that already contains the order. Sales order automation reads that document instead of retyping it, which means the rep stays in front of customers and the buyer keeps ordering the way their own process demands.
Four steps, whether the order came from the buyer's ERP or from a rep's phone.
Forwarded to your LevelOps address, or uploaded inside Shopify. PDF, Excel, CSV, Word, a scan or plain email text. No template, no reformatting, and nothing for the sender to learn.
Products, quantities, the buyer's PO number, the ship-to address and any requested date are pulled out. The customer is resolved to the right Shopify account and company, including new accounts that do not exist yet.
Price comes from the Shopify price list for that company, and payment terms come from the account. Whatever number sits on the buyer's document is recorded but not obeyed.
The draft order is reviewed, adjusted where stock or credit requires it, and approved. Sending the draft order invoice from Shopify gives the buyer an acknowledgement that reflects your catalogue, not their assumptions.
Nothing is committed or sent automatically. The approval step is the point of the design.
Send this within the day and most order status emails stop arriving. Every item below closes a question the buyer would otherwise ask.
Built for the specific shape of wholesale sales orders, not for generic document scanning.
Buyers order by their internal code, an old product name, or a description with a typo in it. Matching resolves all three against your Shopify SKUs, and a reviewer confirms anything uncertain.
The negotiated price for that company is applied from Shopify. The number on the inbound document never overrides it, which removes the single most expensive sales order error.
Orders land against the right B2B company, contact and ship-to. New accounts still produce a draft order rather than an error.
PO number, requested delivery date and freight notes travel with the order, so the acknowledgement and the invoice both reconcile on the buyer's side.
A rep's own order form or emailed list becomes a draft order the same way a buyer's PO does, so field sales stops doubling as order entry.
The result is a standard Shopify draft order. Shopify Flow, your fulfilment stack and your QuickBooks, Odoo or Katana MRP sync all see it as a normal order.
Manually processing B2B orders is something you simply have to deal with if you want to keep specific customers. LevelOps provides a great time-saving solution for reading orders in various formats and converting them to draft orders for final review.
Really big potential for a B2B store. We are using it to streamline our quotation process for multi-line requests and custom discounts with great success. Extremely responsive team.
For me, LevelOps is the first easy step into AI, relevant, and you see the impact the day you install it.
A sales order is the seller's record of what a customer has agreed to buy: the account, the lines, the quantities, the agreed prices, the ship-to and the terms. It is the document your warehouse, your accounting and your customer service all work from. On Shopify the sales order is the order object, and the draft order is that record before it is committed.
They are frequently the same transaction seen from opposite sides of the table. Your customer's procurement team issues a purchase order, which is their commitment to buy. You receive it and create a sales order, which is your commitment to supply. Same lines, two documents, two numbering systems, two systems of record. Confusion usually starts when someone on your team calls the incoming PDF a sales order because it is going to become one.
No. Smaller accounts send an email listing what they want, a spreadsheet they maintain themselves, or a photo of a signed order form. Larger accounts send a formal PO out of their ERP. Some send nothing and place the order by phone with a rep. Automation covers everything that arrives as a document, which is most of the volume.
The intake and the transcription. The inbound document is read, the lines are matched to your Shopify catalogue including when the buyer uses their own part numbers, the customer is resolved to the right account and price list, and a Shopify draft order is created for review. Approval, pricing exceptions and credit decisions stay with your team.
Reps in the field write orders the way the visit allows: a form, a notebook page, an email typed on a phone. Rather than requiring the rep to key the order into Shopify later that night, the document they already produced becomes the draft order. That is the difference between a rep selling and a rep doing data entry.
An order acknowledgement is your reply confirming what you will ship, at what price, on what terms and when. Wholesale buyers use it to close their own PO loop, so a fast acknowledgement removes a whole class of chase emails. Shopify can send the draft order invoice to the buyer, which serves as the confirmation, and it always reflects your catalogue rather than what the buyer typed.
Yes, and it takes it from your Shopify price list for that company, never from the buyer's document. That single rule removes the most common and most expensive sales order error, which is honouring a stale price a buyer copied from an old confirmation.
The line is created with the quantity requested and flagged during review, so the person approving decides whether to short ship, substitute or backorder. That decision belongs to a human who knows the account, not to a matching engine.
Yes. A multi-line request with custom discounts is the same reading and matching problem, and the draft order is a natural quote. Merchants use it to turn quotation requests around faster, then convert the accepted quote into the order.
No. Sales order automation works on any Shopify plan that supports draft orders. If you do run Shopify B2B, companies, price lists and payment terms are used automatically, which makes the resulting sales orders more complete.
Install from the Shopify App Store, let the catalogue sync for 2 to 5 minutes, then forward a real order. Most teams are processing live sales orders in their first week, with your first 5 orders free to test on their own files first.
Their PO number so it reconciles on their side, your order number, the lines you accepted with confirmed quantities, anything short shipped or substituted, the price per line from your price list, the payment terms on the account, and a ship date or ship window. Silence on any of those turns into a phone call.
The same handoff read from the buy side document, channel by channel.
For reps writing orders on the road, without the evening data entry.
The Shopify object every automated sales order lands in.
When the sales order is three lines in the body of a message.
The category view: five kinds of tool and how to evaluate them.
Roles, approvals, credit terms and the metrics behind the orders.
Send us a week of inbound sales orders and we will show you exactly what comes out the other side, on your own catalogue and your own price lists.
your first 5 orders free. free allowance of 5 orders. No credit card required.
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