Shopify invoices: how to create, send, and store them

Shopify creates an order record, not an invoice. To produce one you either print from the admin, turn on Shopify Tax’s VAT invoice for EU and UK orders, or install an app that generates a PDF for every order and stores it. Which you need depends on who will ask for the invoice later, and how often.

What counts as an invoice on Shopify?

Three documents get called “the invoice,” and only one of them is.

The order confirmation email is a receipt. It tells the customer what they bought and what they paid. It has no invoice number, no seller tax details, and no legal standing as a tax document.

The draft-order invoice is a payment request. When you build a draft order and click Send invoice, Shopify emails the customer a secure checkout link. It exists to collect payment. Once they pay, it has done its job.

An invoice, in the sense an accountant or a tax office means, is a numbered document that states who sold what to whom, on which date, for how much, with the tax broken out. For a consumer sale in the US it is optional. For a B2B sale, or any sale where VAT applies, it is required, and the required fields are specific. Our docs page on EU VAT and B2B fields lists them.

Everything below is about that third document.

How do I create an invoice in Shopify without an app?

You have three built-in routes, and they cover fewer cases than most people expect.

The admin print button. Open an order, choose Print, and Shopify produces a basic summary of the order. It is a printable page, not a numbered invoice. It carries your store name and the order details. It does not carry your VAT number, a sequential invoice number, or per-line tax rates. Fine for a pick list. Not an invoice.

Shopify Order Printer, the free app maintained by Shopify. It prints invoices, packing slips, and pick lists from templates you edit in Liquid, Shopify’s template language. You can bulk print from the orders page. If you are comfortable editing HTML and Liquid, you can make the template say almost anything. If you are not, you are stuck with the default or paying someone. Documents are rendered when you print them, from the order as it is at that moment. See our comparison with Shopify Order Printer for the full picture.

Shopify Tax’s VAT invoice. For orders shipping to the EU or the UK, with VAT calculated and your VAT registrations complete, Shopify can generate a VAT invoice and show it on the customer’s order status page. It carries your VAT ID and legal business name, and you can add a logo. That is the extent of the customization. Shopify’s own documentation states the invoices are not automatically emailed to customers, and orders shipping to Portugal are excluded. There is no equivalent for non-VAT orders, and no credit note when you refund.

One more limitation that catches wholesale sellers: a draft order has to be completed and converted into a regular order before Shopify will print anything for it.

How do I send invoices to customers automatically?

Shopify does not email invoices. The order confirmation goes out automatically, but as described above, it is a receipt. The Shopify Tax VAT invoice sits on the order status page and waits for the customer to find it.

Every automatic approach works the same way underneath: something generates a document when an order event fires, and a link to that document gets into an email the customer already receives. The email is still Shopify’s. No separate sender, no separate domain to warm up.

Docket does this with a snippet. You paste one block into Shopify’s order confirmation template, once. From then on, every order confirmation carries a link to that order’s invoice PDF. The fulfillment notification can carry the invoice or the packing slip, and the refund notification can carry the credit note. The customer clicks, gets the PDF. Docket hosts the file; it never sends email itself. The auto-delivery guide shows the snippet and where it goes.

Quotes are the exception. A quote comes from a draft order, and draft orders do not trigger the same notifications, so quote links get shared by hand.

Where are my Shopify invoices stored, and will an old one still be right?

This is the question nobody asks until an auditor does.

Shopify stores the order. It does not store an invoice, because it never made one. If you printed from the admin or from Shopify Order Printer, what you printed went to the printer and nowhere else. Print it again next year and you get a fresh rendering of the order as it stands next year, edits, refunds, and product name changes included.

A stored invoice is different. Docket generates each document from the order at the moment the event fires, renders it, and keeps the PDF and its HTML as an immutable record. Reopen it in January and it says what it said in August. That is what “invoice” means to a tax office: a document that was issued, not a view that gets regenerated.

The limitation is stated plainly on our documents page: records are retained while Docket stays installed. Cancelling the subscription keeps them. Uninstalling the app deletes them. Download what you need before you uninstall anything, ours included.

What should a Shopify invoice include?

At minimum, and regardless of country: your legal business name and address, the customer’s name and address, a unique sequential invoice number, the invoice date, each line item with quantity and unit price, the tax rate and tax amount per rate, and the total. For VAT sales, add your VAT number, the customer’s VAT number on B2B sales, and the reverse-charge note where it applies.

Shopify holds most of this on the order already. The pieces it does not hold, your VAT number, a numbering sequence, seller details, and footer text, are what an invoice app adds through settings. In Docket those live under seller and VAT details and document numbering, set once.

Which option should I use?

If you sell to consumers in one country, rarely get asked for an invoice, and can live with a printed order summary when you do, the admin print button is enough. Stop reading.

If you sell in the EU or the UK and every order needs a VAT invoice, Shopify Tax’s VAT invoice covers the basic case as long as your customers are willing to fetch it from the order status page, you never issue credit notes, and you do not ship to Portugal.

If customers ask for invoices regularly, you sell B2B, you need credit notes when you refund, or you want the invoice to arrive with the order confirmation without anyone doing anything, you need an app. That is what Docket is for: invoices, packing slips, credit notes, and quotes generated from Shopify events, stored as records, delivered through Shopify’s own emails. One Unlimited subscription, $9.99 USD monthly or $99.99 USD annually, with a Shopify-native 14-day trial. Zero usage metering, so the price stays the same at 50 orders a month or 5,000.

Setup takes three steps and one paste. The getting started guide walks through them.