Shopify Deletes Inactive Draft Orders After One Year: How to Keep the Ones You Need

Updated September 2026

Shopify now deletes draft orders that nobody has touched for a year. The rule covers drafts created on or after April 1, 2025, and the first removals started on April 1, 2026. Any edit to a draft resets its clock, and once a draft is paid it becomes a normal order that this rule doesn't touch.

If you use drafts for phone orders, quotes, wholesale or layaways, that's mostly good news: the Drafts list stays tidy on its own. It only hurts when a draft is quietly doing a job for you, such as holding a price you promised a customer or standing in for a quote you plan to revisit next season. This guide covers how the rule works, how to keep the drafts you need, how to turn a draft into a real order, and what to do when Shopify says a draft is out of date.

The short version

• What gets deleted: draft orders created on or after April 1, 2025 that have gone 12 months without any edit.
• What resets the clock: any type of edit to the draft.
• What's safe: drafts that have been paid. They become orders on your Orders page.
• What you can't do: restore a deleted draft. Shopify doesn't offer a way to bring one back.
• What to do now: open Orders → Drafts, and for every draft you still need, either collect payment, send the invoice again, or make a small edit.

How the one-year rule works

Shopify announced the change in its changelog in March 2025: “Draft orders created on or after April 1, 2025, will be automatically removed after one year of inactivity. Automatic removal of inactive draft orders will begin on April 1, 2026.” The help center adds the detail that matters most in practice: “Any type of edit to the draft order resets the timer.”

Three points are easy to misread:

1. It isn't retroactive in the way early reports suggested. The wording applies to drafts created on or after April 1, 2025. If you still have drafts from before that date, Shopify's announcement doesn't put them on the same schedule, but don't treat them as permanent records either. Anything you'd hate to lose belongs somewhere other than a draft.
2. The clock runs from the last edit, not from creation. A draft created in May 2025 and edited in January 2026 is safe until at least January 2027.
3. It's about draft orders only. People sometimes search for “Shopify automatically delete inactive products.” The rule doesn't mention products, customers or completed orders.

Which of your drafts are at risk

The last row is the one we see most. Merchants create a draft for a trade customer, email a quote, and keep the draft as the record of what was offered. That works until it doesn't. A note on the customer's profile, a PDF of the invoice, or a line in your CRM will outlast any draft.

How to convert a draft order to an order

Paying a draft is the cleanest way to keep it, because the result is a real order with its own history. Open Orders → Drafts, select the draft, and use the Payment section:

1. Send invoice. Emails the customer a secure checkout link. When they pay, the draft becomes an order. Good for remote customers and anything you'd rather not key in yourself.
2. Collect payment → Credit card. Enter the customer's billing and card details and click Charge. This uses Shopify Payments, so it's only there if your store uses it.
3. Collect payment → Mark as paid. For money you've already received another way, such as a bank transfer, cash or a check. You can change the Amount received, then click Create order.

For B2B customers you can also set payment terms (due on receipt, due on fulfillment, net 7 to 90 days, or a fixed date). The customer gets their goods first and pays later, and the draft still becomes an order.

“New updates to this draft order”: fixing an outdated draft

Drafts are a snapshot. Every product, price and shipping rate is saved as it was when you added it. If something changes before you complete the draft, for example a price goes up, a shipping rate changes or a product is deleted, Shopify tells you when you try to take payment. You have to deal with the changes before payment can be captured, and you get two choices:

• Review draft order takes you back to the editor with the updates applied but not saved. Use it when you promised the customer a price: put back a custom discount or custom shipping rate to match what you agreed, then collect payment.
• Create order accepts the updates and completes the order with the new values. Use it when the new price is fine, and tell the customer if their total changed.

This is the fix people are looking for when they search for “draft order details outdated.” It isn't an error, and nothing is broken. The longer a draft sits, the more likely you'll see it, which is another reason not to leave quotes open for a year.

Keeping the drafts you still need

There's no switch to exempt a draft from removal. You have four practical options:

A meaningful edit is better than a token one. Adding a note like “Quote re-confirmed with buyer, Sept 2026” resets the clock and leaves a trail for whoever opens the draft next. Editing drafts just to keep them alive forever defeats the point of the Drafts list, so use it for drafts that are genuinely still in play.

Shopify's own CSV export covers orders but not draft orders, which is why the table mentions third-party export apps. If you need an archive, export before drafts reach the one-year mark, because a deleted draft can't be exported afterwards.

Automating it with Shopify Flow

If you keep more than a handful of drafts open, let Shopify Flow warn you. A simple workflow:

1. Trigger: Scheduled time. Run it once a week.
2. Action: Get draft order data. Use an advanced query for open drafts that haven't been updated in about 11 months, for example status:open AND updated_at:<'{{ scheduledAt | date_minus: "330 days" }}'. The action returns up to 100 drafts per run.
3. Action: Send internal email. Loop through the results with For each and email yourself the draft names and customers, or send one summary.

Test the query on a copy of the workflow and check the results against your Drafts list before you rely on it.

You'll also see a Draft order deleted trigger in Flow. Its limits matter: the draft order ID is the only detail you get, because deleted objects aren't available through the API, and Shopify documents it as firing when a staff member or an app deletes a draft. It doesn't say whether it fires for the automatic yearly removal. Use the reminder approach above to act before anything is deleted, rather than relying on a trigger that only fires afterwards.

Troubleshooting

• A draft you expected to see is gone. Check the filters and search on the Drafts page first, including completed drafts. If it's really gone, it can't be restored. Recreate it, or duplicate the customer's last order or a similar draft. Duplicating copies products, customer, addresses, notes, tags and market, but not discounts or shipping rates, so re-add those.
• You can't collect payment. Look for the New updates to this draft order prompt and resolve it with Review draft order or Create order.
• The customer paid the invoice but the price looks different. The draft picked up a price or shipping change. Next time, review the draft and put back a custom discount or shipping rate before resending the invoice.
• Reserved stock disappeared. Reservations belong to the draft. If the draft was deleted or completed, the reservation ended with it.
• An app that uses draft orders stopped working on old drafts. Some quote, wholesale and B2B apps store their data as draft orders. Ask the app developer how they handle the one-year rule.

Common questions

Does Shopify delete draft orders automatically?

Yes. Draft orders created on or after April 1, 2025 are deleted after one year without any edits. Removals started on April 1, 2026.

What counts as activity on a draft order?

Any type of edit resets the timer, according to Shopify's help center: changing products, prices, the customer, notes or tags all count. Simply opening the draft to look at it isn't described as an edit, so don't count on it.

Can I recover a deleted draft order?

No. Shopify doesn't offer a way to restore deleted drafts, and the Flow trigger for deleted drafts only gives you the ID. Recreate the draft, or duplicate a previous order or draft to save time.

Are completed orders or products affected?

No. The rule is about draft orders. Once a draft is paid it's an order on the Orders page, and products aren't part of this change.

How do I convert a draft order to an order in Shopify?

Open the draft from Orders → Drafts and either click Send invoice so the customer pays online, or use Collect payment and choose Credit card or Mark as paid. Once payment is accepted, the draft becomes an order.

Can I use drafts in Shopify POS?

Yes. With POS Pro, staff can save a cart as a draft order and finish it later. Those drafts follow the same one-year rule, so finish them rather than parking them.

Related reading

If you take phone and wholesale orders, it helps to see your store the way a customer does. Here's how to log in as your customer on Shopify. For finding old drafts and orders fast, see how Shopify's admin search and filters work now. And if your drafts are mostly wholesale orders with minimums, read how to set minimum and maximum order quantities.

If your store runs a lot of manual orders and you'd like someone to set up the Flow reminders or tidy the process, talk to us. It's the kind of thing our monthly care plans cover.