Email to Order Automation
Turn customer order emails into Shopify draft orders.
Your wholesale customers send orders by email. Plain text, PDF attachments, scanned files, Excel sheets. LevelOps reads every format and creates a Shopify draft order — automatically. No retyping. No template setup. No middleware.
From: orders@bestbuyer.com → orders@yourstore.com
PO #45821 — replenishment order
Hi team, please process the attached order for our 3 retail locations. Net 30, ship to warehouse address on file…
📎 PO_45821.pdf
→
Shopify Draft Order
#D2197 · Best Buyer Co.
SKU-A100 · Espresso Blend×24
SKU-B205 · Decaf House×12
SKU-C330 · Cold Brew Kit×8
Payment termsNet 30
StatusReady to review
What is email to order?
A definition you can act on.
Definition
Email to Order is the automated workflow that converts inbound customer order emails — including PDF, image, and Excel attachments — into Shopify draft orders without manual data entry. Customers keep emailing the way they always have; the order arrives in Shopify ready for review.
How it works
Four steps from inbox to fulfillable Shopify order.
01 — Forward
Auto-forward your orders inbox
Set Gmail, Outlook, or your shared inbox to auto-forward order emails to your unique LevelOps address. Customers keep sending to the same email they always have.
02 — Read
AI reads body and attachments
Plain text, HTML, signed PDFs, scanned images, Excel sheets — every part of the email is parsed. SKUs, quantities, customer, address, PO number, and payment terms are extracted.
03 — Match
Resolve to your Shopify catalog
SKUs match against your products. The sender is matched to your B2B companies hierarchy. Pricing always comes from Shopify, never from the email.
04 — Draft
Native Shopify draft order created
A draft order appears in your Shopify admin, tagged for review. Your team approves, edits if needed, and converts to a confirmed order. Same workflow you run today.
What you get
Six things that matter when emails become draft orders automatically.
✓
Any email format works. Plain text, HTML, signed PDFs, scanned images, Word documents, Excel sheets, multi-attachment threads. The model generalizes — it does not need a template per sender.
✓
New senders work on day one. A buyer you have never received an email from can place their first order without any setup on your side.
✓
Customer matching to Shopify B2B. Sender email and shipping address resolve to the right company, location, and price list automatically — no lookup table to maintain.
✓
Pricing always from Shopify. The email may list outdated prices or no prices at all. LevelOps ignores email pricing and applies your current Shopify catalog and B2B price lists.
✓
Confidence flagging on every order. Low-confidence extractions are tagged for review so your team only checks the edge cases, not every order.
✓
Two-minute install. No middleware. Install on the Shopify App Store, set up forwarding, send a real PO email, see a draft order. No Zapier, no Make, no integrator.
How it compares
Five ways B2B teams handle order emails today.
Each option has trade-offs. Here is what to expect from each in a Shopify B2B workflow — including the DIY route with Claude.
| Approach | Setup time | Handles attachments & scans | Native Shopify draft | Ongoing engineering |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manual entry from inbox | None | Yes (a human reads them) | Yes | None — but human time per email |
| Shared inbox + tagging (Front, Help Scout) | Hours | Triage only — humans still type | No (no auto-creation) | Triage workflow upkeep |
| Mailparser / regex email rules | Days per sender | Limited — plain text only | Workaround | Per-sender rules to maintain |
| Claude or Claude Code (DIY pipeline) | Days to weeks of dev | Yes (LLM is flexible) | Yes — if you build the API integration | You own the inbox plumbing, prompts, error handling, Shopify API |
| LevelOps email to order | 2 minutes | Yes — every format | Yes | None — managed product, updates ship to you |
Note on the DIY route: Claude is excellent at reading order emails. The other 80% of the workflow — inbox forwarding, attachment extraction, scanned-image OCR, SKU and customer matching against your live Shopify catalog, confidence scoring, error recovery, draft-order API plumbing, and merchant feedback loops — is what LevelOps productizes so your team does not maintain it.
Frequently asked
Common questions about email to order on Shopify.
What email formats does email to order support?
All of them. Plain text emails, HTML emails, multi-recipient threads, replies, and forwarded chains. Attachments include typed PDFs, scanned PDFs, Word documents, Excel and CSV files, and images of POs (JPEG, PNG, HEIC). The model generalizes across formats — there is no template configuration per sender.
Does it handle scanned PDFs and images of purchase orders?
Yes. Scanned PDFs and image attachments are processed with OCR and the same extraction pipeline as typed documents. Quality depends on the scan; severely skewed or low-resolution scans may be flagged as low-confidence for human review.
How does it match the email sender to my Shopify B2B customers?
The sender email is looked up against your Shopify customer records and B2B company hierarchy. If you operate Shopify B2B, the order resolves to the correct company, location, and price list automatically. Unknown senders are flagged with a
LevelOps-Customer-Not-Found tag for first-time review.What about pricing — does it use prices from the email or my Shopify catalog?
Always your Shopify catalog. Email pricing is ignored on the way in — the draft order is created at your live Shopify product prices, including any B2B price list or volume discount that applies to that customer. This eliminates a whole class of pricing errors that come from outdated PO documents.
How do I set up email forwarding to LevelOps?
After install, you receive a unique LevelOps inbox address. You add a forwarding rule in Gmail, Outlook, or your shared inbox (Front, Help Scout, Hiver) so order emails are auto-forwarded. Setup is documented for each platform and takes about two minutes. Your customers continue emailing the same address they always have.
What if a customer is not in Shopify yet?
The draft order is still created, with the customer fields populated from the email. The order is tagged
LevelOps-Customer-Not-Found. Your team either creates the customer in Shopify and re-runs matching, or proceeds to fulfill manually if it is a one-time buyer.Related
Continue the deep dive.
Stop retyping order emails. Start reviewing draft orders.
Two-minute install on Shopify, or send us a real customer email and watch it become a draft order live.