Order Management and Status

Once an Order has been created, you can view and manage the status of the order by selecting the order from the "Overview of your orders" page (accessed from the "orders" tab on the toolbar.

Order Status

An order has a number of different status conditions to help you track the progress of the order as you process it.

Open Status

All orders are either open or closed. An order is open if it is being actively processed. As it goes through the various phases of order processing such as payment and shipping, it will eventually reach a final stage, either fully paid and shipped, or perhaps cancelled because no payment was received. Once it has reached this final stage, then the order requires no further processing and can be closed.

Generally, an open status for the order indicates that you need to do something or are waiting for something to happen with this order. When there is nothing more to be done, the order is closed.

Payment Status

An order will be in one of the following Payment states.

• Pending - No payment has been received for the order.
• Authorized - A credit card authorization has been received, but no actual payment has yet been captured.
• Error - An error occurred while processing a payment request over a payment gateway.
• Paid - Full payment has been received. If only a partial payment has been received, then the order remains in an unpaid status.
• Cancelled - The order has been manually cancelled as payment has not been received and the customer no longer wishes to continue with the order.
• Abandoned - The order has been automatically cancelled because the order has been in a pending state for more than 21 days.
• Deleted - The order has been deleted and removed from system. This is only permitted for test orders which have been placed via the Test Payment gateway.

You can also apply part payments to orders. To do so, click the "Mark as paid" button, and enter the amount that has been paid. The payment status of the order will remain as "Pending", but when you view the order, you will see a note stating how much has been paid. When an order has been fully paid, the status of the order will change to "Paid".

In future we'll modify the orders list page to show that the order has been partially paid. If you have received a manual payment through PayPal, the "Mark as paid" button will not show up until 24 hours after the order was placed.

PayPal Website Payments Standard

If you receive an order using PayPal Website Payments Standard, occasionally customers get confused by the PayPal screens and end up abandoning the payment for an order either intentionally or by accident. When this happens, you will receive a notification from us that the order has been processed, but payment will not have been completed.

In instances like this, you should contact the customer directly and arrange for a manual payment if they want to continue with their purchase. You generally do this by sending them an invoice through PayPal.

When the customer pays you, you can then mark the payment as received manually. 24 hours after the order has been placed, a new "Mark as paid" button will appear when viewing the order in your Toolbox. Click the button and select "Manual PayPal Payment" as the payment method.

Shipping Status

Once an order has been paid, the goods or services can be shipped or supplied.

An order will be in one of the following Shipping states.

• Unshipped - No items have yet been shipped.
• Partial - Some of the order items have been shipped.
• Shipped - The order has been fully shipped.

Order Workflow

An order needs to go through a number of phase transitions, also called the Order Workflow.

• Initial - A new order has been received. It is open and is pending and unshipped.

At this point we can receive payment(s) for the order, either automatically through a payment gateway, or manually by some other means. Once the order has been fully paid, then it can moved to the Paid state.

If payment is not received, then the order can be manually cancelled and it will move to the Cancelled state.

If nothing happens to the order, it will be abandoned after 21 days and moved to the Abandoned state.

Note: If an order has partial payments, but is cancelled or abandoned, then the store owner may need to make arrangements for the amounts to be refunded separately.

• Cancelled - The order has been cancelled. It is now closed and marked as cancelled. A paid order cannot be cancelled.

If any of the order items have inventory management, then these items are returned to the inventory.

If the customer wants to activate the order, then it can be reopened and moved back to the Initial state. All items that require inventory management are checked for availability, and if all items are not available, then the order cannot be reopened.

• Abandoned - The order has been automatically cancelled. It is now closed and marked as abandoned. A paid order cannot be cancelled.

If any of the order items have inventory management, then these items are returned to the inventory.

If the customer wants to activate the order, then it can be reopened and moved back to the Initial state. All items that require inventory management are checked for availability, and if all items are not available, then the order cannot be reopened.

• Paid - The order has been fully paid. It is now ready to be shipped. The order is still open and its status is now paid.

As each line item is ready to be shipped, it can be processed and the shipment details recorded. Once all the line items are marked as shipped the shipping status is set to Shipped. If only some of the items have been marked as shipped, the shipping status is set to partial.

Once all the items have been shipped, the order is complete, and can be closed and moved to the Complete state. Actually, the order can be closed at any time, even if all the items have not yet been shipped. For example, an item may have become unavailable after payment and cannot be shipped. In this case, the order can be closed and a partial refund organized for the customer.

• Complete - The order has been completed. It is now marked as closed and its status is paid.

There is no further processing to be done on this order. If the shipping status is not shipped, then the order can be reopened and returned to the Paid status. Any unshipped items that are under inventory control will be returned to the inventory.

If the order was processed via the Test Payment gateway as a test order, it can be deleted at this stage.