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
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. 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.
Purchase orders for out-of-stock items
The second rule in the same Automation section handles the opposite case: an order comes in for something you do not have. Tick Create purchase orders for out-of-stock items and Stockroom raises a purchase order for what you were short of, so you can order it or make it without watching for it.
Only the shortfall. If five are ordered and three were on the shelf, the purchase order is for two - not five. An order that simply cleared the last of your stock creates nothing, because you had enough.
Stock is read at the location the order was routed to, so a multi-location store orders for the place that actually ran short. The purchase order is set to receive back at that same location.
These are ordinary purchase orders. Unlike dropship ones they ship to you, they add incoming stock in Shopify, and you receive them normally.
They share Create when and Created as with the dropship rule above. You can run either rule on its own, or both.
Two things decide whether this can fire at all. Your store has to allow selling past zero for those items - if Shopify stops the sale when stock runs out, you were never short. And the items have to be tracked in Shopify; products with inventory tracking off have no stock level to be short of, so they are skipped.
Restock drafts: drafting your restocking for you
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. 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. How often controls the schedule: every night (the default), weekly on Mondays, or monthly on the 1st.
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 next 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, and neither are the items of a supplier you've set to Ignore in reorder suggestions on their supplier page.
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.
Could not tell which location the order was routed to - only on stores with more than one location, and only for the out-of-stock rule. Stockroom will not guess which location ran short, so create the purchase order from the order's page in Shopify.
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.