If your suppliers ship some items straight to your customers, you can skip the clicking entirely: turn on Automation and every new Shopify order containing those items becomes a dropship purchase order for its supplier - drafted for your review, or marked as ordered and emailed, your choice.
Turn it on
Two steps:
Mark who dropships. On a supplier's page, tick Ships direct to customers - every item matched to that supplier becomes eligible. If a supplier only dropships some of their items, leave their checkbox off and instead tick Auto-create dropship POs on each product's page, in the Costs & replenishment section.
Flip the switch. In Settings, open the Automation section and tick Create purchase orders automatically for items from dropship suppliers. The section counts how many suppliers and products you've marked, so you can tell at a glance that your flags are set.
Choose when and how
Create when - An order is placed (the default) or An order is paid. Pick paid if you'd rather wait for payment to clear first. Keep placed if you sell B2B on terms, where payment can arrive long after the goods should ship.
Created as - Draft for review (the default) keeps you in the loop: purchase orders wait in your list until you mark them as ordered. Marked as ordered sends them on their way the moment they're created.
Email the PO to the supplier - shown when you choose Marked as ordered. Each purchase order is emailed with your usual template as soon as it's created. Suppliers without an email address are flagged for you instead.
Suppliers connected on Stockroom Network receive the purchase order in their own Stockroom when it's marked as ordered - and when they ship, their tracking fulfills your customer's order. With everything on, a customer order reaches your supplier and comes back as a shipping notification with no clicks in between.
What gets created
One dropship purchase order per supplier, containing only the order's eligible items. Anything else on the order is left for you to handle normally.
The customer's shipping address is the ship-to, so the PDF and the supplier's email show where to send the goods. Your Shopify stock never moves, and delivery is recorded with Mark as delivered - see Dropship purchase orders: ship straight to your customer.
Each purchase order links back to the order it was created from, so you can always see why it exists.
Never a duplicate: if an order already has purchase orders - made by hand or by automation - nothing extra is created.
Restock drafts: the other half of Automation
The same Settings section can also draft your restocking for you. Tick Draft restock orders automatically for low-stock items, then mark suppliers with Auto-draft restock orders on their pages. Each night, any of their items at or below its reorder point is added to a standing draft purchase order for that supplier - one draft per supplier, topped up as more items run low, never a pile of new ones.
Drafts only. Nothing is ordered, emailed, or sent to a supplier without you - you review the draft, adjust, and mark it as ordered like any other purchase order.
Your own drafts count. If you've already drafted an order covering an item's shortfall, the nightly run leaves it alone - quantities never double up.
It follows your reorder points. Items use the reorder point and max level from their product page (or Stockroom's suggested thresholds once applied). Items excluded from reorder suggestions are never drafted.
When something needs you
Automation never fails silently. When it can't finish, a note appears in the Needs your attention feed on Stockroom's Home page saying what to do:
No customer shipping address - there's nowhere to dropship to, so create the purchase order from the order's page in Shopify and choose the address yourself.
No supplier matched - the order's dropship items couldn't be matched to a supplier. Fix the supplier's rules, then create the purchase order by hand. Orders that created purchase orders but had to leave some items out get their own note.
Supplier has no email address - the purchase order was still marked as ordered; add an email address to the supplier, then send it from the purchase order's page.
Notes clear themselves once the problem is fixed - there's nothing to dismiss.
Good to know
Turning Automation on also catches up on recent orders: eligible orders from roughly the last day that don't have purchase orders yet get theirs within a few hours.
The same safety net keeps re-checking recent orders every few hours, so an order Shopify didn't notify us about still gets its purchase order.
The supplier checkbox only feeds automation - a flagged supplier can still take an ordinary restock order, and a purchase order you create by hand is never marked dropship just because of its supplier.
Turning the switch off stops new purchase orders immediately; the ones already created stay exactly as they are.