To automate emailed purchase orders into Shopify, forward the PO to software that reads the PDF or email, identifies the customer, matches each line to your catalog, prices the order as that customer's company so your Shopify B2B catalogs and price lists apply, and creates the finished order in your store. With Dynition, forwarding the email is the only manual step, and anything the system is unsure about is flagged for a rep before the order is created.
Why does your Shopify store still get emailed PDFs?
Shopify runs your storefront, and Shopify B2B gives your wholesale customers company accounts, their own catalogs, and payment terms. But a large share of wholesale orders never touch the storefront: they arrive as a PDF attached to an email, or as an order typed into the message body. A rep opens each one, finds the company, reads every line, translates the customer's part numbers to your variants, checks that company's pricing, and builds the order in Shopify by hand.
That is slow, and it is where errors get in: a mis-keyed quantity, a wrong variant, or a list price applied to a company that has a negotiated price list. The store is modern; the order intake is still manual.
How does AI read the emailed order?
Modern extraction reads the PO the way a rep would, in seconds: it pulls every line item, quantity, unit, and customer part number off the PDF or email, including scanned and inconsistent formats. But reading the document is the easy part. The work that makes an order correct comes next.
How does Dynition fit into Shopify?
Dynition connects to Shopify through an app you create in the Dev Dashboard, reads your products, customers, and B2B companies, and writes finished orders back. Once it has read the PO, it:
- Identifies the customer, down to the company and location that sent the PO, and translates their part numbers and shorthand to your Shopify variants.
- Applies your B2B company pricing by pricing the order as that purchasing company, so Shopify's own catalogs, price lists, and volume pricing decide each line, not a generic list price.
- Validates the details, checking pricing, the ship-to location, and payment terms against what your store holds, with shipping rates and tax quoted by Shopify.
- Creates the finished order in Shopify, completed with payment pending so it carries your normal invoice terms, or flags anything uncertain for a rep to confirm first.
The connection itself takes minutes: you create an app in the Shopify Dev Dashboard, give it the Admin API scopes to read products, customers, inventory, and orders, install it on your store, and paste the Client ID and Client Secret into Dynition. Nothing changes on your theme or storefront, and your customers never see a change.
What does it look like in practice?
At First Place Supply, a janitorial and sanitation distributor:
- 95% of POs processed zero-touch, no rep involvement
- Order entry went from 15 minutes to 20 seconds
- Each rep got about 6 hours a week back
- Order error rate fell below 0.5%, from roughly 3% manual
- 100% of pricing, address, and payment-term errors were caught before an order went out
Read the full story at First Place Supply, or start with our guide to automating purchase order processing for the category overview. Running BigCommerce instead? Read the BigCommerce guide.
What would it save you?
Run your own numbers: how much manual PO entry is costing you today, and what per-PO automation into Shopify would save.
Defaults are what First Place Supply measured before automating: 15 minutes per PO and a ~3% error rate. Dynition pricing uses the published rate: your first 15 POs free, then $2 per PO, dropping lower at volume. We show the $2 rate here, so your real bill at volume only comes in below this. Error cost sits on the manual side because Dynition catches pricing, address, and term errors before the order is created. Every input is your own estimate, and the math is just arithmetic on it. See it run on your own POs.