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 they only dropship part of their range, fill in Dropship only these product tags just below the checkbox: only their products carrying one of those tags become eligible, and everything else is ordered to you as normal. Leave it blank and their whole range dropships. See Dropshipping only some of your products below.
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.
Dropshipping only some of your products
There are two ways to say which products dropship, and they work together.
By tag, on the supplier. Dropship only these product tags on the supplier's page, separated by commas. This is the one that keeps working on its own: tag a new product next month and it dropships without you touching anything.
Product by product. Tick Auto-create dropship POs in the Costs & replenishment section of a product's page. Use this for the odd exception, or when the items you dropship have no tag in common. A product marked this way always dropships, whatever the supplier's tags say.
You do not have to tick that box hundreds of times. Two ways to mark a batch:
From your product list. In Inventory, narrow the list however you like - the Filter by tag box, a vendor, a search - then tick the header checkbox and choose Select all matching products. Mark for dropship marks the lot, and Remove dropship takes it back off. Up to 1,000 products at a time.
By spreadsheet. The stock-settings CSV has a dropship_eligible column - put yes or no against a row. Export it from Inventory, fill the column in, and import the file back. Blank cells never change what is already saved, so a partial file is safe.
The Automation section counts how many suppliers and products you have marked, so you can check a batch landed.
Choose when and how
These are shared with the out-of-stock rule and work with either rule turned on.
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.
Skip orders with these tags - orders carrying any of these tags never create purchase orders, under either rule. Useful for orders imported from another system, which usually arrive tagged (for example Imported). Separately, an order placed more than 2 days before Stockroom hears about it is treated as history rather than new demand and creates nothing - so a historical import never spawns purchase orders, even if you only set the tag afterwards. On the An order is paid trigger that check uses the payment date, so an invoice paid weeks after the order still counts as new.
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 when it is marked as ordered. 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. By default your Shopify stock never moves and delivery is recorded with Mark as delivered - unless you have set that supplier, or your store, to update stock anyway - 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.
Out-of-stock and low-stock items
Two more rules in the same section raise a purchase order for what an order left you short of, one per order or one per supplier each day, and draft restock orders for items at their reorder point. See Create purchase orders automatically for out-of-stock and low-stock items.
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.
The same Automation section also has Details from the order, which copies a reference, an expected date, a note or the PO number off the Shopify order onto the purchase order it creates - useful for carrying a job or work number through to whoever fills it. See Create purchase orders faster: from orders, products, POS, and for multiple locations.