Sending orders
Emails with multiple attachments
Each supported attachment becomes its own purchase order. Attachments are never merged, and unsupported ones are ignored.
Updated
Buyers often send several purchase orders in one message. PO Autopilot treats each supported attachment as an order in its own right.
One attachment, one order
Three PDFs in one email produce three purchase orders. Each is read, matched and reviewed separately, and each ends up as its own Shopify draft order.
They are not linked to each other afterwards. Once created, there is nothing to tell you they arrived together.
Attachments are never combined
PO Autopilot does not merge attachments into a single order, even when they plainly belong together — a two-page PO split across two files, or a covering sheet plus a line-item spreadsheet.
Each file becomes an order containing only what that file says. A page-two file with line items but no header produces an order with line items and no buyer, which will ask you who it is for.
If your buyers routinely split one order across files, ask them to send it as a single document. There is no way to join orders after the fact.
Unsupported attachments are ignored
An attachment PO Autopilot cannot read — a Word document, an older .xls, a
.zip — does not become an order and does not become a failed order. It is
skipped.
This has a consequence worth understanding. Skipped attachments do not count
when deciding whether the message had any attachments at all. An email carrying
only a .docx is treated as an email with no attachments, so its body is
used instead, and you get an order built from whatever the message said rather
than from the document.
If a buyer’s orders keep arriving thin or empty, check what they are actually attaching. See Supported order formats.
Signatures and logos
Images are a supported type, which means an inline logo or signature graphic can be treated as an attachment and become an order of its own.
If one sender produces a spurious empty order alongside each real one, this is almost always the cause. Ask them to send from a plain-text signature, or delete the stray orders as they arrive.
When the body is ignored
If a message has at least one supported attachment, the body is not turned into a separate order — even when it describes the order in full.
The attachment is treated as the authoritative version, and the covering note is left alone. See How email body orders work.
Limits
- Up to 20 supported attachments per message.
- Up to 50 MB of attachments per message in total.
- Each file up to 25 MB.
Over any of these, the whole message is rejected — nothing is partly processed. A buyer sending a monthly batch of more than twenty orders should split it across several emails.