Overview

Each order has one page in the admin, and that page is the full working record of the order. You use it to pack and ship the order, answer questions about it, and decide whether to give money back.

Several people often work on the same order. One person packs it, another answers a question about it, and someone else decides on a refund. Litestore gives them all the same page so that nobody works from a partial view.

The order page shows the items and totals, the shipments and their tracking, and any refund requests and returns. It also shows who the order is assigned to and a log of what has happened to it. Payment status, fulfillment status, any open chargeback and staff notes appear there too.

Support conversations don't appear on the order page, because a conversation belongs to the customer, not to an order. A customer who writes to you about three orders has one conversation with you, not three.

You handle refunds and returns from a Refunds & Returns page under the order. It shows how much of the order you can still refund.

Working an order

An order normally goes from payment to delivery in three steps.

1. Payment is captured. Litestore commits the stock that was reserved at checkout.
2. Pick and pack the order. Then record a shipment for the lines it contains. You can ship everything at once or in parts.
3. Handle refunds, returns and chargebacks. Do this from the order's Refunds & Returns page, which shows how much is left to refund.

Litestore does step 1 for you. When a shopper starts checkout, Litestore reserves the units. When the order is paid, it commits that reservation instead of taking the units again. By the time you see the order as paid, its units are already out of sellable stock and have only been counted down once.

Shipping an order in parts

You don't have to wait until every line is in stock before you send something.

Each 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.

Each shipment names exactly how many units of each line it contains. From that, the order always knows how much of each line is still waiting to ship.

This also prevents a common packing mistake:

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

No. The admin won't let you put more units of a line into a shipment than the order has left to ship. Litestore checks this against the order line, not the box, so it holds however many shipments you split the order into.

The tracking email

When you mark a shipment as shipped, Litestore queues the "Your order is on the way" email with the tracking link.

You don't send it yourself. Litestore sends one for each shipment, not one for each order, so a customer whose order arrives in two boxes hears about both.

There is one exception. If a guest placed the order and has no customer record, Litestore doesn't send the email, because there is no customer to send it to.

Manual orders

Not every sale starts on the storefront. You can create an order directly in the admin for any of these:

• 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 just like an order from checkout. When you send out a replacement, your stock counts reflect it.

The admin won't let you start a manual order until you have at least one published product, because each line needs a real product.

Assignment

You can assign an order to a staff member.

You can then filter the order list to show only the orders assigned to you. This makes a shared queue workable when more than one person is picking orders from it.

What an order is made of

Behind the order page, Litestore stores these records:

Order
OrderItem
Shipment
ShipmentItem
ShippingRate
StockLocation

Partial shipments work because Shipment and ShipmentItem are separate. The shipment stores the carrier and tracking number, and its items store how many units of each line it contains.

Money on the order

Litestore also stores the order total in your base currency, using the rate at the moment of purchase.

It never recalculates that figure. If the exchange rate moves next month, last month's earnings stay the same.

The store itself enforces two limits on order money, so nobody has to remember to check them:

• Order money totals can't go negative.
• The refunded amount can't be more than the order total.

These aren't warnings in the interface that someone can click past. The store refuses to save an order in either state. No sequence of actions, however unusual, can leave an order owing the customer more than they paid.

Where the work happens

Use the order page for anything about what the customer bought and what is going out. That covers items, totals, shipments, tracking, assignment and notes.

Use the order's Refunds & Returns page for anything that changes what the customer paid. Read the remaining refundable amount there before you promise anyone a figure.

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

Open the customer, not the order, when the question is about a conversation rather than a purchase.

Before you act on an order, ask yourself:

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

Related