Ecommerce & Retail · Shopify Apps
Draft Deputy
A Shopify app that inverts order entry for live sellers: scan the product, and the draft order builds itself.
- Flagship build
- Focus
- SHOPIFY, MICRO-SAAS
- Delivered
- 11 Aug 2026
Outcome
Thirty or more line items saving reliably in a draft order built product-first from a single SKU scan.
What it is
Draft Deputy is a Shopify app for merchants who sell live. It replaces manual draft-order entry with a SKU scan, building the order around the product rather than around the customer record.
It was tested on live stores before submission, on real selling sessions rather than seed data, which is where the constraints that mattered actually surfaced.
What we built
- A product-first scanning workflow that creates and extends Shopify draft orders from SKUs.
- Reliable handling of large orders — a single draft carrying thirty or more line items saves completely, which the first version did not.
- Integration into the Shopify admin, so it sits inside the tool the merchant already has open rather than beside it.
- Product images and browsing in the scanning interface, so an operator can confirm the right item without leaving the flow.
Shipping before finishing
One deliberate call shaped the release. Session history was written to files rather than a database — fine at the volumes the app handles today, not the long-term answer.
Migrating it before submission would have delayed the App Store listing by weeks for a change no merchant would notice. We shipped, and scheduled the migration alongside the next piece of work. Knowing which shortcuts are safe to carry, and writing them down rather than forgetting them, is most of what shipping on time is made of.
Technologies
What we built it with
- Integrations
- Shopify
How we built it
Inverted the order-entry workflow to match how live sellers actually work. Shopify's draft order flow assumes you start with a customer and add products. A live seller works the other way round: items come off the rail one after another, each going to whoever claimed it seconds ago, and the operator is holding a garment, not a customer record. Draft Deputy starts from the product. Scan the SKU, and the draft order assembles around it. The same order that took several minutes of switching between screens becomes a scan and a name.
In the client's words
“Our sellers work off the rail, not off a customer record, and Shopify's draft order flow fights that the whole way. Robust Devs turned it around so scanning a SKU builds the order around the product, and fixed the bug that had been quietly dropping items from our biggest orders. What took minutes of jumping between screens is a scan and a name.”
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