Create a quote manually

Raise a quote yourself for a request that came in by phone, email or in person.

Not every enquiry comes through your form. When a customer phones or emails, you can raise the quote yourself so it sits alongside the rest — and can be emailed, downloaded, exported and turned into an order like any other.

Do the customer first, the products second. Until the quote has a customer email on it, Search products and Manage products stay greyed out, and the Customer card is badged (Compulsory). Working the other way round is why people get stuck on this screen.

Create one

1

Open Quote list

Go to Quote list in the app navigation. On the Quotes page, click Create quote at the top right, next to Export.

Create quote starts a quote you raise yourself.

The Create quote page opens — the same layout as a quote a customer sent, but empty. It has two halves: the product information down the middle, and the customer and additional information in the column on the right.

2

Fill in who it is for

Start in the Customer card on the right. Its search box reads Search or create a customer: type a name or an email and the app offers matching people, each shown with their name above their email address.

Those suggestions come from your Shopify customers, so anyone who has bought from you or been added to Shopify is already there. Picking one fills the quote in for you. If the buyer is new, Create a new customer at the top of the same list starts a blank record instead.

The customer picker only appears when Customer info is switched on in the Form builder — Quote settings > Customize > Quote form tab. With it off, the Customer card is badged (Optional) and you fill the details in by hand. See Customer information fields.

Name the customer first — the product search stays locked until you do.

Then work down the rest of the right-hand column. Contact information and Company information cover a business buyer — the company name is what fills the Company column back on the list. Shipping address and Billing address matter as soon as delivery is part of the price. Payment terms records what you have agreed, Extra info is the free-text note, and Tags are your own labels for finding this quote again later.

3

Add the products

With the customer in place, the product controls come alive.

Control	What it is for
Search products	The search box above the line-item table. Type a name to find one product and drop it on the quote.
Manage products	The button beside it. Opens the picker so you can tick several items from your catalogue in one pass — quicker when the quote runs to more than a line or two.

With a customer set, you can add the products.

A quote you raise yourself uses the same screen as one a customer sent.

Everything on a quote has to be a product that already exists in your Shopify catalogue — there is no control for typing in an off-catalogue line. A delivery charge or a setup fee goes in through shipping and discount in the Payment panel instead.

4

Price the lines

Set the numbers in Price & quantity on each line. The Total column and the Payment panel follow as you type.

Each line shows its SKU, so check you picked the right variant before you go any further. Duplicate items copies a line when several are near-identical, and the delete control on a line takes one off again.

5

Check the money

In the Payment panel, Subtotal adds the lines up. The links below it read Add discount, Add shipping and Add tax rate until something is set, and Edit discount, Edit shipping and Edit tax rate afterwards. Total is what the customer will be asked to pay.

Those three links relate to Cost management in the app navigation, which has Discount, Shipping and Tax tabs of its own. Set your usual rules there once and there is less to adjust on every quote you raise — see Convert to a draft order.

6

Save

Nothing is stored until you save. A save bar appears across the top of the screen as soon as you change anything, carrying Save and Discard changes — click Save.

The app confirms with Successful and takes you back to the Quotes list, where the new quote is now a row like any other.

Leaving the Create quote page without saving loses the whole quote. If Save does nothing when you click it, the quote is not yet complete: it needs both a customer email and at least one product. The app says so — "You must choose at least 1 item", or on a sectioned quote "Each section must contain at least one item. Add an item, or delete the section."

7

Send it

The quote now appears on the Quotes page like any other. Open it again and use Resend an email at the bottom of the Payment panel, or the Resend email action on its row, to get it to the customer — see Send a quotation.

Check the Email before you send. On a quote you raised yourself there is no customer submission to check it against, and a typo means your offer quietly goes nowhere.

When this is useful

• A regular customer phones an order in and you want it tracked properly

• An enquiry arrives by email rather than through your form

• You are at a trade show taking requests in person

• You want to send a proactive quote to a customer who has not asked yet

Long quotes

Create section, below the line-item table, groups the lines into named sections. Worth doing on a big job so the buyer can see one phase separately from another — a site survey, then the installation, then the parts.

A sectioned quote is also easier to negotiate. The customer can question one section without reopening the whole price.

Every section has to end up with at least one product in it. An empty section blocks Save, so use Clear group to remove one you no longer need.

If Create quote is blocked

If the app shows a red Quote limit reached banner, you have used up the quotes your plan allows for the month. The banner carries Upgrade plan, which opens Pricing plans, and Contact support. The same limit greys out Duplicate quote.

After it is sent

A quote you raised behaves exactly like one a customer submitted, so the rest of this section applies to it unchanged.

What you can do	Where
Send it again after a change	Resend an email, at the bottom of the Payment panel.
Put it back on someone's list	Mark as unread, beside it — the quote returns to the Unread tab.
Record that they paid	Mark as paid, beside that.
Turn it into a sale	Convert to Order, at the top right next to More actions — see convert-to-draft-order.md.
Send a document	The download PDF action on the quote's row — see download-pdf.md.

Manual quotes also show up under the same status tabs and count towards your Export.

Keeping manual quotes tidy

Use the Timeline comment box to note where the enquiry actually came from, and press Post. "Only you and your staff can see comments", so a note like "phoned in, asked for delivery before the 14th" is safe to record and still there in three months when somebody else picks the quote up.

If you regularly raise the same quote, build one properly and then duplicate it rather than starting from scratch each time — see Duplicate or delete a quote.

Next steps

• Send a quotation — email it to the customer

• Duplicate or delete a quote — reuse a quote as a starting point

• Convert to a draft order — turn it into an order once agreed