Does Shopify send invoices? What merchants need to know

Short answer: no. Shopify does not send invoices. It sends order confirmations, and the two are not the same document.

What Shopify actually sends

When a customer pays, Shopify emails an order confirmation and shows an order status page. You can also print a packing slip from the order. All three are useful and none of them is a legal invoice. The order confirmation is a summary of what was bought, written for the customer. It usually shows tax as one total, it has no invoice number, and it does not carry your company registration or VAT number.

That is fine for most consumer orders, right up to the moment someone asks for a real invoice. Then you are building a document by hand, on a busy day, for an order from three weeks ago.

What an invoice must contain in the EU

EU VAT rules are specific about what a sales invoice needs. In practice that comes down to:

• The invoice date
• A sequential invoice number that is unique and has no gaps
• Your company name, address and VAT number
• Your company registration number, the KvK number in the Netherlands
• The customer name and address, plus their VAT number for B2B
• What you sold, with quantities and unit prices excluding VAT
• The VAT rate per line and the total VAT amount
• The total including VAT
• The reverse charge wording when you zero rate an intra EU B2B sale

A Shopify order confirmation has the customer, the products and the totals. It misses the numbering, your tax identity and the VAT breakdown, which are exactly the parts the tax office cares about.

Why this matters more than it looks

Three reasons. Business customers cannot reclaim VAT without a compliant invoice, so they will email you until they have one. Your accountant needs a numbered series to reconcile against your payouts. And if the tax office ever reviews your administration, a folder of order confirmations is not the record they ask for.

Do you have to invoice every order?

For business customers the answer is yes. If your buyer is a company, an invoice is required, and they need it to reclaim the VAT. For consumers the rules are softer in most EU countries, but three things push you towards invoicing everything anyway. Consumers ask for invoices more often than you would think, especially on larger orders. Your own administration is easier when every sale has the same kind of document behind it. And a numbered series with holes in it, because you only invoiced some of your orders, is worse than no series at all.

The simplest policy is the one you never have to think about: one invoice per paid order, every time.

Your options

Do it by hand. Export your orders, create invoices in your bookkeeping software and email them. This works at ten orders a month and falls apart above that. It also puts the numbering in your hands, which is where most mistakes start.

Edit the packing slip. You can add fields to the packing slip template and use it as a makeshift invoice. It prints, but it does not number your invoices, it does not reach the customer by itself and it does not keep a copy for your records.

Use an app. An invoicing app reads the order, creates the invoice and delivers it. The differences between apps are in the details: does it number correctly, does it handle EU VAT and reverse charge, does the customer get the invoice without asking, and can it invoice the orders you already have.

How Marketplace Invoice does it

We built the app around one idea: you should never have to touch an invoice again. When an order is paid, we create the invoice, attach it to the order in your Shopify admin and email it to the customer. There is nothing to click.

Around that:

• Five invoice templates and a design editor, so the document looks like your brand
• EU VAT with reverse charge for business customers with a valid VAT number, plus a VAT export for your accountant
• An invoice download block for your Thank you page, so customers help themselves
• A Print action in the More actions menu of every order
• Import of past orders from the last 30, 60 or 90 days
• Up to 5 stores on one account, each with its own design and numbering

The Free plan lets you create and download invoices manually, with no limit. Automation starts at $4.95 a month, billed through Shopify, with a 14-day free trial on your first paid plan and two months free on yearly plans.

What about the orders you already have?

Most stores install an invoicing app with a backlog. Orders from last month that a customer still wants an invoice for, or a whole quarter your accountant is waiting on. You can import the last 30, 60 or 90 days of orders and we create the invoices for them in the order the sales happened, so your numbering follows your sales history. Do that import once, before new orders start running through, and your series is complete from the first day.

Get started

If you are answering invoice requests by hand today, this is a ten minute job to fix for good. Install on Shopify.