Sending orders
How email body orders work
When an email has no supported attachment, the message itself can become the order.
Updated
Plenty of B2B orders never become documents. A buyer writes “can you send us 10 cases of A12 and 5 of B14 on the usual terms” and hits send. PO Autopilot reads those.
The rule
- No supported attachment, and the message has content → the body becomes the order.
- At least one supported attachment → the body is ignored, and each attachment becomes its own order.
That second half is deliberate. When a buyer attaches a PO and also summarises it in the covering note, you want one order, from the document — not two orders that disagree slightly.
What a body order looks like
Exactly like any other order. It is read, matched against Shopify and reviewed the same way. On the review screen you can open the source and see the message text that produced it.
The text is treated as a plain-language description, in the same way as the Describe order tab. See Describe an order in plain language for what reads well.
What this means in practice
A covering note is not a second order. “Please see attached, and add two extra cases of B14 to it” will produce an order from the attachment only. The extra two cases in the note are not added — the note is not read at all. Watch for this with buyers who amend orders in the covering message; the amendment will not be in the draft.
A Word document is not an attachment. Because unsupported files are skipped,
an email carrying only a .docx counts as having no attachments. The body is
used instead, and you get an order made from the covering note rather than from
the purchase order the buyer thought they sent.
Signatures can produce their own orders. An inline logo is an image, images are supported, so a message with a logo attachment has an attachment — the body is skipped and you get an order made from the logo. See Emails with multiple attachments.
Expect more questions
A body order carries less than a document. There is usually no letterhead, no account-number block, no ship-to address and no PO number, so there is less for the buyer match to work from and you will more often be asked which company it is for.
The fix is the same as everywhere else: when you choose the company, use Remember this buyer?. If the sender’s email address is on the order, mapping it means their next message resolves without asking. See What happens after you confirm a match.
Empty messages
A message with no supported attachment and no usable body creates nothing. An auto-reply or a blank forward will not clutter your Orders list.