Deposits, lay-by and layaway for Shopify retailers, with the rules, reminders, balances and owed-money ledger Shopify doesn't build. You never touch the money.
Shopify checkout has been all-or-nothing forever. Shops selling special orders, custom goods and high-ticket items have hacked deposits with dummy products, double orders and manual chasing. It wrecks inventory, tax and reporting, and quietly lets balances slip.
The 2026 Admin API lets an app set a real deposit on a draft order. The customer pays through normal checkout and sees the deposit and outstanding balance in their account. Collected adds the workflow on top: rules, chasing, the ledger, and compliant forfeiture.
Shopify ships the plumbing ("this draft order takes 30%"). Collected is the sellable layer on top.
Default % or fixed amount by collection, product tag, customer tag or order value. “Custom goods 50%, everything else 20%.” Priority order, per-order override.
A configurable reminder sequence: on arrival, before due, on the day, overdue. Each carries the native pay-balance link. Never twice in 24h.
Every open balance in one screen: customer, items, deposit, balance, due date, aging bucket and status. Filters and CSV export.
A POS tile turns the cart into a lay-by with the deposit paid natively at the register. Read the balance and due date back to the customer.
Balance paid flips the order to ready, sends an optional pickup email, and the POS Collections tile lists what's waiting to hand over.
Ghost handling by your policy: guided, logged, never automatic. Editable policy text surfaced to customers, because lay-by law varies by region.
In-store on the POS tile or on any draft order in admin. Collected suggests the deposit from your rules; staff can override. The customer pays it natively.
Reminders go out on your schedule with the pay-balance link, and stop the instant the balance is paid. You never lift a finger, or send the wrong email.
Paid in full flips to ready-for-collection. Hand it over from the POS Collections tile and it's marked done. Ghosts are handled by your written policy.
The one unforgivable failure for a chasing app is dunning a customer who has already paid. Collected guards against it in three independent layers (the status machine, the reminder engine, and a final check at send time), all covered by tests. Balance settled? Every reminder stops that instant.
Two POS tiles put lay-by where retail actually happens. Take a deposit against the current cart and customer, then read the balance and due date straight back to them. When they return, the Collections tile shows exactly what's theirs.
Layaway and lay-by carry real cancellation and refund rights. AU lay-by law, South Africa's CPA §62, New Zealand's Fair Trading Act, and US state layaway rules all differ. Collected never markets "keep the deposit" as universal: forfeiture is your written policy, confirmed by you, surfaced to the customer, and logged.
Right to terminate a lay-by; only a reasonable charge may be kept. (ACL, Sch 2)
CPA 68 of 2008, §62: refund on cancellation, capped penalty only.
Fair Trading Act layby rules: cancel with a reasonable charge.
State-level layaway disclosure rules + FTC clarity expectations.
Usage-fee competitors tax every deposit. We don't.
14-day free trial · everything included
Billed through Shopify. Cancel anytime.
No. Collected moves zero money. Every deposit and balance is processed by Shopify on your own payment gateway. The app is orchestration and the system of record: no PCI scope, no float, no payout risk.
The native draft-order deposit primitive is Plus-only at launch, so taking deposits requires Plus today. If you're not on Plus you can still install. We'll detect it, show an honest explainer, and email you the day deposits open up more widely.
Three independent guards: the status machine pulls a paid order out of every “chasing” state, the reminder engine refuses to send for a non-chasing order, and there's a final check at send time. It's the behaviour we test hardest.
Collected supports deposit-plus-balance today, with a reminder cadence that tracks expected progress. True multi-payment installments depend on what the native API exposes; if it supports them, we turn them on. We never fake installments with custom charges.
By email through Resend, from your own verified sending domain, with your logo and copy. Each reminder carries the native pay-balance link. Transactional only: no marketing, and a correct unsubscribe-free footer.
Your access token is revoked immediately and, per Shopify's shop-redaction webhook, all your shop's data is deleted 48 hours after uninstall. Individual customer erasure requests purge that customer's personal data on request. See our Privacy Policy.
Install Collected, set one rule, and take your first deposit in five minutes.
Install free on Shopify →