How to Take a Deposit on Shopify When You Sell Made-to-Order

You quote a $3,800 dining table. The build runs ten weeks. The customer is happy to pay half now, and your storefront has no way to ask for half. That is not a settings problem you have failed to find — it is where Shopify's checkout ends.

Most deposits in this trade sit between 30% and 60% of the price. On a $900 commission that costs $520 in materials and workshop time, 30% covers barely half of what you are about to spend, 50% covers 87%, and 60% puts you slightly ahead. Those three numbers decide whether you can start work. A checkout that only understands "paid" or "not paid" has no opinion about any of them.

Why a storefront cannot hold a deposit for you

The first idea everyone has is to authorise the card now and capture it when the piece is ready. It does not survive contact with a lead time. A card authorisation is a short-lived hold, expiring in roughly a week depending on the gateway, and a made-to-order build takes eight to sixteen.

So the hold is gone long before the piece exists. You are back to asking for money at the end, on a card that may have expired, been replaced or simply be someone else's problem now. Every workable answer accepts this and takes real money now, rather than reserving the promise of it.

What Shopify gives you on any plan: draft orders

Draft orders are the tool most sellers land on, and they are genuinely useful. You build the order in the admin, add the products and any discount, and send the customer an invoice with a secure checkout link. Shopify's own documentation describes the payment options as sending an invoice, processing a credit card manually, or marking the order as paid when the money already arrived.

Read that list again for what is missing. All three are ways of collecting the whole amount. A draft order lets you assemble a custom order and bill for it, which is exactly what you want on a bespoke piece — and then asks for it in one payment.

The line where deposits appear: Plus

Shopify does have deposits. Its help centre documents a deposit requirement you can set as a percentage — on orders created at checkout, or on individual draft orders — and states that the feature is available on the Shopify Plus plan. Partial payments are documented the same way, collected by vaulted card, a new card, or a manual method such as a bank deposit, as a fixed amount or a percentage.

That is the real answer to "can Shopify do this": yes, on the enterprise tier. Which is worth knowing before you spend an evening looking for a toggle on a plan that does not have one. Verify current plan availability before you make a decision on it — Shopify moves features between tiers.

The quirk in Shopify's own deposit maths

If you do get there, one detail deserves a note in your quote template. Shopify calculates the deposit as a percentage of the order subtotal. Tax and shipping are not in that base; they land in the balance.

Take the table. Subtotal $3,800, shipping $180, tax at 21%, so the customer owes $4,815.80. A 50% deposit is $1,900 — half the subtotal, but only 39.5% of what they actually owe. The balance is then $2,915.80, which is $507.90 more than the customer who halved the total in their head is expecting. Nothing here is wrong. It is just a conversation you want to have at quoting time rather than at delivery.

Route one: charge the full price at checkout

The simplest option, and better than its reputation. You get the cash, the order is paid, and nothing needs chasing. It suits shorter lead times, repeat customers, and prices low enough that paying in full is not a decision.

Where it fails is the first-time buyer at a serious price. Asking a stranger for $3,800 up front for an object that does not exist yet, from a workshop they found last week, loses orders you would otherwise win. The deposit is not only a cash-flow device. It is a way for a nervous buyer to commit in a size they can live with.

Route two: sell the deposit as a product

This is what most made-to-order sellers on standard plans actually do. You create a product — "Commission deposit", priced at the deposit amount, or with variants for common tiers — and the customer buys it like anything else. When the piece is ready you invoice the balance, usually as a draft order.

Keep the deposit product out of your collections and out of search, and title it so it reads sensibly on a receipt six weeks later. Two small rules make it behave: state the total price and the balance in the order note, and never let the deposit product carry inventory, or your storefront starts counting stock you have not built.

What route two costs you in the admin

The money arrives. The record splits in two. Shopify now holds a $450 paid order in June and a $450 paid order in September, with nothing connecting them but your memory and a note. Neither says what the piece actually is.

On five orders a year that is fine. On thirty concurrent orders it is the thing that goes wrong: someone gets a balance invoice twice, someone gets one for the wrong amount, and one order slips through delivered but never fully paid. The failure is not the payments. It is that no single place holds the order, its deposit, its balance and its cost.

Route three: a deposit app

There are apps for this, and they do real work: splitting the payment, holding a card for the second charge, sending the reminder. If the collection mechanics are what is costing you time, an app is a reasonable purchase.

Two things to check before you commit. What happens when the second charge fails — that is the whole point of the app, and it is where they differ most. And what the app records: almost all of them treat the order as a payment schedule, not as a thing you are building. Your margin question is still unanswered when the second charge succeeds.

The three routes side by side

Read the last row first. It is the one nobody mentions when they answer this question.

The other Shopify problem behind this one

Deposits are usually the second thing that breaks. The first is inventory: a storefront wants to count units, and a made-to-order piece does not exist to be counted. Sellers work around it with continue selling when out of stock, or by keeping the item at a fictional quantity, and both quietly distort every stock number they have.

If you are solving deposits this week, solve that in the same pass. Selling made-to-order on Etsy or Shopify without wrecking your inventory covers the settings and what each one costs you.

Write the schedule down before the money moves

Whichever route you pick, the storefront will not hold the terms for you. Three lines in the order note or the agreement remove almost every later argument:

• The numbers. The total price, the deposit amount, and whether the percentage refers to the subtotal or to the full amount including tax and shipping.
• When the balance is due. On completion, before shipping, or on delivery — and how you will ask for it.
• What happens on a cancellation. Whether the deposit is refundable once work has started, and up to which point.

The third one is the one that gets skipped and the one that gets tested. The eight elements of a custom order agreement is the longer version of this list.

Where the order should actually live

Notice what none of the three routes did. They collected money in different shapes, and not one of them told you what the order is worth. Shopify knows what the customer paid. It does not know what the timber, the workshop and the finish cost, so it cannot tell you what the commission earned.

That is the gap a storefront is not built to close, and the reason sellers end up with a spreadsheet beside it. Spreadsheet, accounting software or an order tool walks through what each option holds and where it stops.

And decide the number itself once

The mechanics are the easy half. The percentage is the half that decides whether a quiet customer costs you a weekend or a month of production. Cover your materials and your workshop payment with the deposit and a silent buyer is annoying; take 20% and the same silence is your money.

How much deposit to charge works through it by price band and lead time, including when a staged schedule beats a single deposit.

The bottom line

Shopify can take a deposit properly on Plus, and cannot on the plans most workshops are on. On a standard plan the deposit product plus a draft order for the balance is the honest workaround, and it works — provided you accept that your admin will hold two payments and no order.

The storefront's job is to take the money. Knowing what each commission actually earned is a different job, and no plan of Shopify's includes it.

Frequently asked questions