Order safety
Duplicate order detection
The same document sent twice does not become two orders — whatever route it arrives by.
Updated
Purchase orders get sent twice all the time. A buyer resends “in case you missed it”, a forwarding rule fires on the original and a reply, someone uploads a file a colleague already emailed in.
What happens
If PO Autopilot has already seen a document, it does not create a second order. You are taken to the order that already exists.
This works on the contents of the file. Renaming a PDF, or sending the identical file from a different address, does not make it a new order.
Emails have an additional layer: a message that is retried or redelivered by the mail provider is recognised as the same delivery, so a transport retry cannot produce a duplicate even before the file contents are compared.
For text — plain-language descriptions and email bodies — the comparison ignores differences in line endings, so the same text arriving through different routes is still recognised as the same order.
Whatever route it takes
Detection is per store, not per intake method. A file uploaded by hand, then emailed in by the buyer, is recognised as the same document the second time.
What is not a duplicate
A genuinely different document. Two purchase orders for identical goods are two orders. If a buyer sends a revised PO with one quantity changed, the file differs, and you get a second order. That is correct — but it does mean you should check whether the earlier one should be deleted.
A retyped order. Describing the same order twice in slightly different words produces two orders, because the text differs.
A rescanned document. A second scan of the same paper is a different file, even if it looks identical.
Deleted orders
Duplicate detection only considers documents that are still present. If you delete an order and then send the same file again, it is treated as new.
That is deliberate: deleting is how you say the earlier attempt should not count, so re-sending it has to be able to work.
Drafts are created once
Separately from intake, an order that has already produced a Shopify draft order will not produce another. There is no way to accidentally create two drafts from one purchase order.
What you should expect to see
When you send something already known, you land on the existing order rather than a new one, and your Orders list does not grow. Nothing is lost, and no duplicate is billed. See What counts as a processed order.