Old orders pile up. A season closes, a supplier is replaced, a duplicate draft gets abandoned - and none of it needs to sit at the top of your Purchase orders page any more. Archiving moves an order out of the way without throwing anything out: the lines, costs, receipts and history are all still there, and you can bring it back at any time.
Archive one order
Open the purchase order, then More actions and Archive. Any order can be archived at any point in its life - a draft you never sent, an order still on the way, one fully received last year. Archiving never changes the order's status: a received order stays received.
Archive several at once
On the Purchase orders page, tick the checkbox beside each order you want to clear out, then click Archive in the bar that appears above the list. The checkbox in the table header selects everything on the page, so a filtered view - one supplier, or everything received before a certain date - can be archived in two clicks. You can archive up to 250 orders in one go.
The selection can mix statuses freely. Drafts, ordered and received orders all archive together, and each keeps the status it had.
Find and restore an archived order
Archived orders leave the All tab and every status tab, and collect on the Archived tab instead. Search, the supplier and location filters and CSV export all work there exactly as they do elsewhere, so an archived order is still findable by PO number, SKU or supplier.
To bring one back, open it and choose More actions and Unarchive, or tick the rows on the Archived tab and click Unarchive in the bulk bar. The order returns to the tab matching its status, untouched.
Good to know
An archived order is read-only. You cannot edit it, receive against it, or mark it ordered or closed while it is archived - unarchive it first, then act on it as normal.
Archiving is not deleting, and nothing is lost. Costs already received stay in your COGS and margin reports, because the stock genuinely arrived.
Archiving an order that is still on the way does not remove its incoming quantity from Shopify. If you want those units to stop showing as incoming, either receive the order or use Close to write off what never arrived, then archive it.
Archived orders drop out of open-order counts, the overdue badge and stock alerts, so archiving an order you have given up on cleans those up straight away.
Deleting is only possible on drafts. For everything past draft, archiving is how you get an order out of sight - which is deliberate, since a received order is part of your cost history.