The order book
Orders in the sidebar. Search finds the number on the customer's confirmation or their name. The quick filters are All, Open, To pick, Promised and Needs attention, and beyond them you can filter by status, by store and by the dates an order was placed between.
Each row shows the order number, when it was placed, the customer, which store it came from, its status and its total. An order carrying a line the catalogue does not have is flagged in the list rather than looking ordinary.
The three states
An order has three states at once, and conflating them is what makes other systems confusing. They move independently.
| Axis | Values |
|---|---|
| Payment | Awaiting payment, payment held, paid, part refunded, refunded, voided, payment failed |
| Fulfilment | To pick, stock promised, part shipped, shipped |
| Status | Open, on hold, cancelled, closed |
A paid order that has not been picked is paid and to pick. An order on hold keeps whatever stock is promised to it.
One order
Opening an order shows, in this order:
- When it was placed and when it was imported, and which store it came from with the channel's own reference beside ours, so a support call can be answered in either language.
- The customer, and the address to ship to.
- The lines: SKU, item, quantity, how many are promised, price and total, with subtotal, discount, shipping, tax and total underneath. Where a channel quotes tax-inclusive prices it says so rather than adding tax twice.
- History: every change since it arrived, with who made it - a person, this system, or the store.
Promising stock
Promise stock reserves what the order needs against your warehouses. It is the moment availability drops for every other channel, and it is what makes an order pickable.
- Everything available is promised, oldest order first.
- Where there is not enough, what there is gets promised and the screen says how many of how many. The rest is promised when stock arrives.
- Give stock back reverses it and asks why. The reason goes on the stock ledger, where somebody will read it later.
Holds and cancellations
Put on hold takes an order out of the picking queue and keeps its promised stock. It is for an order somebody is querying with the customer. Take off hold puts it back.
Cancel order gives the promised stock back to the shelf and cannot be undone. An order that has already shipped is not cancelled: record a return against it instead.
Mark as shipped is there for an order that left another way. The ordinary route is picking and packing, which does it for you and tells the channel.
Lines that match nothing
A line whose SKU matched nothing in the catalogue when the order arrived is marked Not in the catalogue, and no stock can be promised against it. It is shown rather than dropped, because an order that quietly loses a line is an order somebody ships short.
The fix is to add the product with that SKU, then import that store's orders again. The Needs attention filter lists every order in this state, and the Dashboard counts them.
Doing several at once
Tick orders in the list and the bar offers Promise stock, Hold, Take off hold and Cancel for all of them. Each says what it will do to stock before it runs, and the result lists anything that could not be done with the reason beside the order number.
Money and addresses
An order keeps the currency it was taken in. Where it is converted for reporting, the rate and its source are recorded on the order rather than applied invisibly.
Addresses arrive as the channel holds them and are used for the label unchanged. A channel that withholds part of an address - several marketplaces do, until an application is approved for personal data - is listed on the connection's Limits and permissions tab, so a short address is explained rather than mysterious.