How to Edit an Order in Shopify: What You Can and Can't Change

To edit an order in Shopify, open it from Orders and click Edit. Shopify's order editor lets you add or remove unfulfilled products, add custom items, change quantities, add or remove custom shipping fees, and manage manual discounts. Shipping address and contact details are changed separately, from the order's Customer section. Some things can't be changed at all: the billing address, the order date, fulfilled items, and whole categories of orders such as imports and Shop Pay Installments orders. This guide covers both lists, the steps, and what happens to payment, inventory and reports after you save.

What can you edit on a Shopify order?

You can change what's in an order, what it costs to ship, its manual discounts, and where it goes. Here is the full picture from Shopify's help center, in one place:

To swap one product for another, Shopify has no "swap" button. You remove the unwanted item and add the new one in the same edit. And if the variant you want to add is already on the order, increase its quantity instead of adding it again.

How do you edit an order in Shopify?

Open the order, click Edit, make your changes, then click Update order. On desktop, the full flow looks like this:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Orders and click the order.
2. Click Edit.
3. Make the changes you need:
   • Add a product: click Product, search for it, select it and click Done.
   • Add a custom item: click Custom item, enter the name, price and quantity, tick Item is taxable or Item is a physical product if they apply, then click Add item.
   • Remove an item: hover on it and click ×. Removed products are restocked to their original location unless you deselect Restock units.
   • Change a quantity: type the new number in the Quantity column. Decreasing also offers Restock units.
   • Add a discount: click the item's price, pick a Discount type, enter the value and click Done. Anything you type in Reason for discount is shown to the customer.
   • Add a shipping fee: in the Payment section, click Add shipping fee (or Edit shipping fees > Add shipping fee if the order already has one), enter a name and price and click Save.
4. Optionally write a note in the Reason for edit section. Customers don't see this one, so it's the right place for "customer called, swapped size M for L."
5. Review the new total and click Update order.

In the Shopify app the steps are the same, except you tap Review changes before Update order. Shopify's Sidekick assistant can also stage product, quantity and discount changes in the order editor for you to review.

One staff detail: editing items requires being the store owner or having the Edit orders permission. Editing a shipping address is a little looser and also works with Manage order information or Fulfill and ship orders.

What happens to payment and inventory after you edit an order?

Nothing moves automatically. Shopify recalculates the total and shows either an amount to collect or a refund owed, and you act on it.

The second row catches people. Shopify is explicit that the refund isn't complete when you edit the order and notify the customer. You still have to go to the order and refund the difference.

A worked example: a customer orders two $30 shirts with $8 shipping, paying $68 plus tax. They ask to drop one shirt and upgrade to express shipping. You remove one shirt (restocking it), remove the $8 fee and add a $15 custom fee. The order now owes $45 plus tax, so you'll refund $23 plus the tax difference. Check the summary before saving, because two other things don't adjust on their own:

• Shipping isn't recalculated. Shopify doesn't rerun your shipping rates. If you add heavy items, add a custom shipping charge yourself.
• Some discounts aren't recalculated. Order-wide percentage discounts are recalculated when items or quantities change, and fixed-amount product discount codes are recalculated in narrow cases; other discounts stay as they were. If an order has a fixed-amount discount on the whole order, you can't change quantities at all unless it's a custom discount you remove first and add back after.

A few downstream effects are easy to miss. If the customer pays a balance through the new checkout, accelerated options like Apple Pay aren't available there, and the order's fraud analysis can change. Fulfillment apps and services may not pick up edits, which is how a removed, unpaid item ends up shipped anyway, so check with your fulfillment provider before relying on edits.

Which Shopify orders can't be edited?

Some orders can't be edited at all, and others only partly. If the Edit option is missing or disabled, the order probably falls into one of these groups:

• Imported or app-created orders. Only the app that created an order can edit it. Orders that started as draft orders are the exception and can be edited normally. This matters if you imported historical orders into Shopify: plan to get them right at import time.
• Shop Pay Installments orders. Not editable. Shopify's workaround is to refund the order and create a new one.
• Local delivery orders. Not editable, and no order can switch its delivery method.
• Fully fulfilled orders. Fulfilled items are locked, so only manual discounts remain. Orders with duties and taxes (such as DDP) can't be edited once any item is fulfilled.
• Pending payment orders. You might not be able to edit items or discounts.
• Orders in another currency. Editing orders in international currencies is only available to some stores. Shopify's developer docs also say only orders placed after January 1, 2019 can be edited, and archived orders can't.

Bundles add their own rules: you can't add a bundle during an edit, can't raise a bundled item past its original quantity, and can't add an order-wide custom discount to an order containing one. In-store pickup orders can be edited in the admin or the Shopify app, but not from POS.

When an order can't be edited, the documented fallback is the same in most cases: refund it and create a new order, usually as a draft order with an invoice. Keep in mind that a draft order gets the date it's completed, not the original purchase date; our post on Shopify draft order dates explains why.

Can you edit the order date in Shopify?

No. The order editor has no date field, and neither does any other part of the order page. Shopify stores more than one date on an order (createdAt and processedAt), and the one shown in the admin is the processed date; our explainer on created_at vs processed_at covers the difference.

Editing does interact with dates in reports, though. If you edit an order after the day it was placed, Shopify shows the edit as a separate order in the Orders over time, Sales over time and Average order value over time reports, even though no new order was created. Adding a $40 item on November 3 to an October 30 order puts $40 on November 3 in those reports. That's expected behavior, but worth knowing before you reconcile a month.

How RetroOrder helps

RetroOrder covers two gaps in native editing. First, the date: the admin can't change it, and RetroOrder adds Backdate with RetroOrder to More actions (⋯) on the Orders page. Select one or many orders, pick a date and click Backdate. It changes the processed date shown on the order (anchored to noon in your store timezone), leaves line items, totals, taxes, customer and fulfillment untouched, and can't change Shopify's createdAt. It also doesn't move existing orders in Shopify Analytics, which keeps them on the day they were first recorded. See how to backdate orders in Shopify for the full walkthrough.

Second, the address. Native editing is staff-only, so customers have to email you to fix a typo; our guide to letting customers change their shipping address after checkout covers the native options. On RetroOrder Unlimited, customers get a Change shipping address block on the Thank-you page and on the Order status page (which needs new customer accounts). Only the order's own customer can use it, and it disappears once the order is fulfilled, even partially, or cancelled. The free plan includes 10 backdated orders per calendar month; Unlimited is $9.99/month with a 14-day free trial.