Accept part of a quote

Read time: 6 minutes. Last updated: September 16, 2026 Who it's for: Merchants sending multi-item proposals, and anyone who needs to read what a buyer actually agreed to. Plan: Partial acceptance is available on the Professional plan and above.

On a multi-item quote, "do you accept?" is usually the wrong question. A buyer wants two of the four lines now, doesn't want a third at any price, and needs another week on the fourth. QuotWay lets them answer that way: each line carries its own decision, submitted in one go.

The three decisions

When a buyer opens a sent proposal - in their Shopify customer account or in the hosted portal - every line offers three choices:

Decision	What it means	What happens next
Accept	The buyer commits to this line at the quoted price.	Carries into the Shopify draft order when the quote converts.
Decide later	No commitment yet; the line stays on the table.	Shown to you as "Still open". Remains negotiable - you can counter it or send another round.
Decline	The buyer does not want this line.	Stays visible on the quote, struck through, and is excluded from the order.

A buyer can use all three on the same quote in a single submission.

Why "Still open" is not "Declined"

This distinction is deliberate, and it is the main reason to prefer per-line decisions over a single accept/decline on the whole quote.

A deferred line is a line you can still win. If QuotWay reported it as declined, you would stop working it - you'd read a door as closed when the buyer deliberately left it ajar. So a deferred line is labelled Still open everywhere: in the timeline, on the quote, and in the buyer's own view. Only an explicit decline is reported as declined.

What you see afterwards

Open the quote in your QuotWay admin:

The timeline records the acceptance as "N accepted · N declined · N still open", and lists what happened to each line.
The line items keep every line. Declined lines are struck through and dimmed, with a short explainer beneath the list. Nothing is deleted.
The status becomes Partially accepted when some - but not all - lines were accepted.

Why declined lines stay on the quote: a quote that quietly drops what the buyer turned down is a quote you can't reconstruct later. Six months on, "why didn't they take the extended warranty?" is a question your own record should be able to answer.

What the buyer sees

In the customer account and the portal, the buyer's quote shows an outcome badge on each line - Accepted, Declined, or Still open - and states the accepted figure alongside the quote total.

Both numbers are shown on purpose. The quote total still describes the whole quote, because the lines that are still open may yet be agreed; the accepted figure is what the buyer has actually committed to. Showing only one of them would either overstate the commitment or hide the remaining opportunity.

What the documents show

The paperwork follows the same rule - a document must not say more than what was agreed.

Confirmation PDF and Pro-Forma PDF list only the accepted lines, headed by an "Accepted items (N)" count and an Accepted total that equals the lines printed beneath it. There are no discount, shipping, tax, or grand-total rows implying the whole quote was bought; shipping and tax are confirmed at order creation, and the document says so. The acceptance stamp reads "confirms acceptance of N items from quote QW-…, items not listed were not accepted."
Proposal PDF still lists every line, including ones later declined. Its job is to document what was offered, so scoping it to the accepted subset would misrepresent the offer.

For how the documents are branded and which one is issued when, see PDF branding and documents.

Continuing the negotiation

A partially accepted quote is not finished. You can:

Send another proposal covering the lines that are still open. The accepted lines are already settled and aren't re-opened.
Convert what was accepted into a Shopify draft order now, and keep negotiating the rest. See Convert a quote to a draft order.
Let the buyer accept more later - from their account or the portal, they can accept remaining open lines without starting over.

Splitting the accepted lines across several draft orders - different ship-to addresses, staged deliveries - is covered in Partial acceptance and split conversion.

Troubleshooting

The buyer only sees one Accept button for the whole quote. Per-line decisions require the Professional plan or above. On lower plans the buyer accepts or declines the proposal as a whole. Check Settings → Billing.

A line shows "Still open" but the buyer told me they don't want it. They chose Decide later rather than Decline. QuotWay reports what they selected; ask them to decline it explicitly, or remove the line yourself - see Add or remove items on a quote.

The Confirmation PDF total doesn't match the quote total. That's expected on a partial acceptance: the Confirmation shows the Accepted total, not the quote total. The two agree only when every line was accepted.