Hey all, Nick here, co-founder of Giftnote (apps.shopify.com/giftnote). Plus Support told me to post this here (tickets #69851334 and #70234382).
We let Shopify stores sell corporate gifting through their own store and Shopify checkout. One buyer, one payment, 50 to 500 recipients. Most corporate gifting doesn’t run this way…buyers go to standalone gifting platforms with their own checkout, and the brand’s Shopify store never sees the order.
We’ve kept these orders on Shopify for 2+ years. Here’s the flow:
- Buyer picks products and uploads their recipients (often 100+ addresses)
- They confirm every address with us
- We create a draft order with the buyer’s address as the shipping address, then send them to Shopify checkout to pay
- After payment we create child orders, one per recipient, each with the recipient’s real shipping address
So the address on the draft order is just a placeholder (it’s really the billing address). Nothing ships to it, and shipping is free.
Recently checkout started showing this at step 3:
- “You can’t change your shipping address”
- “Your order can only be shipped to this address”
The buyer just uploaded 100 addresses and checkout tells them it’s all going to one. They don’t know if their recipients saved, so some bail at payment. We’ve lost deals to off-Shopify gifting platforms because of it (their checkout doesn’t do this).
We added a Checkout Block saying recipients are saved and this is the billing address. It sits between the two Shopify messages…still reads broken. Support confirmed extensions can’t remove or override them and there’s no merchant setting.
Questions:
- Did something change? I can’t find it in the changelog
- We’re testing a parent draft order where nothing requires shipping (custom line items with
requiresShipping: false, billing address only) so checkout skips shipping altogether. Is that the approach Shopify recommends, or is there a better one for draft orders? - Is there an extension target that can replace the notice rather than sit around it?
- Longer term, any plans for multi-recipient orders natively in checkout? We’d much rather keep these orders on Shopify
If you run gifting, multi-address or B2B draft order flows and you’re seeing the same thing, please reply here.
Cheers,
Nick