The money sitting in your draft orders

If you send quotes or draft orders in your store, this one’s for you.

Here’s something we ignored for years.

Every time a customer wanted a quote, we’d send a draft order, they’d say “let me have a think,” and then… usually, nothing. It just sat there. Unpaid. Quietly dying.

We always wrote those off. Tyre-kickers. Not real buyers.

We were wrong.

Years ago we built a scrappy little tool for our own stores that chased those cold draft orders for us. When a quote went quiet, it followed up on its own, the way an abandoned-cart sequence chases a lost checkout. A branded invoice, a pay-now button, the nudge we never had time to send ourselves. Then it tracked the money it won back, so we could actually see it.

In 90 days, that scrappy little system pulled back just over $200k in orders we’d have left for dead. That’s money we’d been leaving on the table. We just stopped leaving it there.

Those weren’t tyre-kickers. They were buyers who needed one more nudge.

For stores like ours, especially high-ticket ones, a customer usually needs more than one touch to get across the line. Way more than the single draft order email Shopify sends and forgets about. And if you sell to commercial or B2B buyers, they’ll expect a proper, professional invoice too. That’s exactly what this does.

So we finally did it properly. We rebuilt it into a real app, with your own dashboard, and called it Draft Order Sync. It plugs into Shopify, chases your cold draft orders the same way, and shows you exactly what it claws back.

I’m not going to hard-sell you. If you run quotes or draft orders, go and have a look at what it would’ve won back for you. It’s free if you’re an Escape Velocity member, and $39 a month for unlimited stores if you’re not.

The maths is almost silly. Win back one order a month and it’s paid for itself many times over. Ours has done a fair bit more than one.

— Matthew