Overview

Every order has one page in the admin, and that page is the whole working record of the order.

The design is deliberate. An order is worked by several people — someone packs it, someone answers a question about it, someone decides whether to give money back — and all of them should be reading the same page rather than three partial views of it.

That page holds:

• Its items and totals
• Its shipments and tracking
• Its refund requests and returns
• The staff member it is assigned to
• A log of what has happened to it

It also shows payment status, fulfillment status, any open chargeback, and staff notes.

One thing is deliberately absent. Support conversations do not appear on the order page, because a conversation is attached to the customer, not to an order. Someone who writes in about three of their orders has one conversation with you, not three.

Refunds and returns are worked from a Refunds & Returns page under the order, which shows how much of the order is still refundable.

Working an order

The normal path from payment to delivery is three steps.

1. Payment is captured and the stock reserved at checkout is committed.
2. Pick and pack, then record a shipment against the lines it contains — all at once or in parts.
3. Refunds, returns, and chargebacks are handled from the order's Refunds & Returns page, which shows what is left to refund.

Step 1 happens without you. By the time an order appears as paid, the units it contains have already been taken out of sellable stock — the reservation made when the shopper started checkout is committed rather than re-taken, so the stock is not counted down twice.

Shipping an order in parts

You do not have to wait for every line to be in stock before anything leaves.

A shipment records its own line quantities, its carrier, and its tracking number. Ship the units you have now, and record a second shipment for the rest later.

Because each shipment names the specific quantities of specific lines it contains, the order always knows how much of each line is still unshipped.

That is also what stops the common packing mistake:

Can I accidentally ship five of an item the customer only bought three of?

No. The admin refuses to allocate more units of a line to a shipment than the order has left. The check is on the order line, not on the box, so it holds however many shipments you split the order across.

The tracking email

Marking a shipment shipped queues the "Your order is on the way" email, carrying the tracking link.

You do not send it by hand, and it goes out per shipment rather than per order — a customer receiving an order in two boxes gets told about each one.

There is one case where it does not go out. An order placed by a guest with no customer record does not get it, because there is no customer to send it to.

Manual orders

Not every sale starts on the storefront. You can raise an order directly in the admin for:

• Phone orders
• In-person sales
• Replacements
• Samples

A manual order is a real order, not a note. It moves stock, records the payment, and appears in fulfillment and reporting like any checkout order — so a replacement you send out is reflected in your stock counts rather than quietly diverging from them.

The admin will not start one until you have at least one published product, since a manual order needs something real to put on a line.

Assignment

An order can be assigned to a staff member.

The order list then filters down to the ones assigned to you, which is what makes a shared queue workable when more than one person is picking from it.

What an order is made of

Six records sit behind the order page:

Order
OrderItem
Shipment
ShipmentItem
ShippingRate
StockLocation

The split between Shipment and ShipmentItem is what makes partial shipments possible in the first place: the shipment carries the carrier and tracking number, and its items carry the line quantities.

Money on the order

The order total is also stored in your base currency at the moment of purchase.

That figure is fixed at the time of the sale rather than recalculated later, so a rate that moves next month does not rewrite what last month earned.

Two limits on order money are enforced by the store itself rather than by anyone remembering to check:

• Order money totals cannot go negative.
• The refunded amount cannot exceed the order total.

These are not warnings in the interface that a determined click can get past. The store refuses to record the state at all, so there is no sequence of actions — however unusual — that leaves an order owing the customer more than the customer ever paid.

Where the work happens

Use the order page itself for anything about what was bought and what is going out: items, totals, shipments, tracking, assignment, and notes.

Use the order's Refunds & Returns page for anything that changes what the customer paid, and read the remaining refundable figure there before promising anyone a number.

Use a manual order when a sale happened somewhere other than your storefront and still needs to move stock and count as revenue.

Look at the customer, not the order, when the question is about the conversation rather than the purchase.

The question worth asking before you act on an order is:

Am I changing what the customer receives, or what the customer paid?

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