Inquiry without breaking Shopify TOS

Hydrogen and Storefront APIs
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1

Hello,
I’m looking for guidance on how to implement a B2B-style inquiry / order request flow on a Shopify Storefront (Hydrogen / Storefront API) without breaking Shopify TOS.

Key constraints:

  • No online payments

  • No payment methods at all (not now, not later)

  • No intention to bypass fees or Shopify Checkout

  • B2B use case (offline pricing, manual follow-up)

Intended customer flow

  1. Customer browses products from Shopify catalog

  2. Customer selects products (similar to a cart / selection list)

  3. Customer fills in contact details (name, email, phone)

  4. Customer submits the form

  5. Merchant contacts customer manually within 24h

At no point does the customer:

  • pay online

  • complete Shopify Checkout

  • receive an invoice automatically

  • trigger fulfillment

What is the best, TOS-compliant way to implement this?

Is it acceptable to store the submission as an inquiry only in our own database (not as a Shopify Order)?

Is automatically creating Draft Orders from a storefront submission discouraged or disallowed?

Any official guidance, examples, or best practices would be highly appreciated.

2

At what point in your flow does the merchant pay? It is possible on PLUS with B2B to submit orders as draft, and also to use manual payment methods like invoicing.

Using Shopify to sell products without using the checkout is against ToS. I dont think theres any “loopholes” really.

3

Hi, thank you very much for the response,
there would no payment at all,

customer add items to cart, than he sends the order inquiry form.
No payment is captured at any time.
I understand that if any payment would occured i would have to use shopify’s checkout

Also no shopify order would be made, we would just recieve their inqury by email or something

4

Hi, i found the solution witht his app "request-for-quote”