What happens to draft orders and open carts sitting in the old Shopify store during a consolidation cutover? Do they need manual handling?
Open carts need no handling and draft orders do. Shopify carts expire within 30 days of creation (per shopify.dev, September 2026), so a retiring store's carts die on their own. Draft orders do not: they hold prices, discounts and invoice links pointing at the old domain, and must be re-created by hand in the surviving store.
Four objects, four different fates
| Object | What happens at cutover | Manual handling |
|---|---|---|
| Open cart on the storefront | "Unused and abandoned carts automatically expire within 30 days of creation" (per shopify.dev, Sep 2026), and Shopify deletes the cart when checkout completes | None. Let them expire |
| Abandoned checkout | "Abandoned checkouts that are older than three months are automatically deleted from the Shopify admin" (per Shopify Help Center, Sep 2026) | Export the recoverable ones before the store closes |
| Abandoned-checkout recovery link already sent | "You can't disable or expire an abandoned checkout link after you send it" (per Shopify Help Center, Sep 2026) | Real risk. See below |
| Draft order | Persists, and is "automatically deleted after 1 year of inactivity" for drafts created on or after April 1, 2025 (per Shopify Help Center, Sep 2026) | Recreate by hand in the surviving store |
The link you cannot recall is the actual problem
Everything else on that list resolves itself. Recovery links and draft-order invoice links do not. Shopify states directly that an abandoned checkout link cannot be disabled or expired once sent. The same practical issue applies to any draft-order invoice already emailed to a customer: it points at the retiring store.
So the sequence at cutover matters more than the data does:
- Stop sending. Pause abandoned-checkout automations and stop issuing draft-order invoices from the retiring store, a full recovery-flow cycle before the cutover date.
- Let the outstanding links run down. Keep the retiring store able to take an order for as long as live links remain outstanding. Turning it off first turns a recoverable cart into a support ticket.
- Redirect, do not delete. Put domain redirects to the surviving store in place so a stale link lands somewhere useful rather than on an error.
- Then close.
Recreating draft orders honestly
A draft order is not just a cart. It carries negotiated prices, custom line items, applied discounts, notes, tax overrides and sometimes reserved inventory through reserveInventoryUntil (per shopify.dev, September 2026). Recreating one means restating each of those in the surviving store, and restating a negotiated price is a commercial decision, not a data task.
The rule that keeps this small: only recreate a draft order whose owner will personally re-send it. An unowned draft order recreated for completeness is a price quote nobody will honour and everybody can see.
What to export before the store closes
- The draft order list, with line items, discounts and notes, as the record of what was outstanding.
- Abandoned checkouts you still intend to recover, since the three-month deletion clock runs regardless of the migration.
- The full order history and customer list, which is a separate obligation covered by the parent page and the reconciliation page in this set.
When NOT to migrate
- When the draft is stale. A quote nobody has touched in a quarter is a cleanup item, not a migration item.
- When the price is no longer one you will honour. Recreate the conversation, not the draft.
- When the customer is not migrating. Consolidations sometimes retire a segment along with the store.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: Sequence the cutover around the outstanding links, not the outstanding records. We set the pause date for automated recovery flows before the cutover date, keep the retiring store transaction-capable until live links have run their course, and treat draft orders as a reassignment exercise with a named owner per draft. Carts get no plan at all, deliberately.
- Where we disagree: Consolidation checklists put draft orders and abandoned checkouts in the same bucket, usually labelled open transactions. They behave in opposite ways: carts and checkouts are self-cleaning and their risk is entirely in links already sent, while draft orders persist, carry commercial commitments, and quietly self-delete after a year of inactivity. One needs a comms sequence and the other needs an owner list.
- What this page adds: the actual expiry mechanics, 30 days for carts, three months for abandoned checkouts, one year of inactivity for draft orders created since April 2025, and the fact that a sent recovery link cannot be expired, which is what makes the shutdown order matter more than the export.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-14.