Orders
Take an order from payment to shipment, ship it in parts, and create phone or in-person orders yourself.
Each order has a single page in the admin that contains its complete record. You use this page to pack and ship the order, answer questions about it, and choose whether to issue a refund.
Order page
Several people often work on the same order. One person might pack it, another might answer a customer question about it, and someone else might handle a refund. Litestore shows all of them the same page, so everyone has the full picture.
The order page shows the items and totals, the shipments and their tracking, and any refund requests and returns. It also shows a timeline of everything that has happened to it, along with the payment status, fulfillment status, any open chargeback and staff notes.
Support conversations don't appear on the order page because conversations are linked to the customer rather than to a specific order. If a customer writes to you about three different orders, that's still one conversation.
You handle refunds and returns in the Returns & refunds section of the order page, which also shows how much of the order can still be refunded.
Order workflow
An order normally goes from payment to delivery in three steps.
Payment capture
Litestore commits the stock that was reserved at checkout.
Picking and packing
Then record a shipment for the lines it contains, either for everything at once or in parts.
Refunds, returns and chargebacks
Do this from the order's Returns & refunds section, which shows how much is left to refund.
Litestore handles the first step automatically. When a shopper starts checkout, Litestore reserves the units, and when the order is paid, it commits that reservation instead of deducting the units a second time. By the time an order shows as paid, its units have already been removed from sellable stock, and they've only been deducted once.
Partial shipments
You don't have to wait until every line is in stock before you send something.
Each shipment records its own line quantities, carrier and tracking number. Ship the units you have now and record a second shipment for the rest later.
Because each shipment specifies exactly how many units of each line it contains, the order can always work out how much of each line still needs to ship.
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 need to send it yourself. Litestore sends one email per shipment, so a customer whose order arrives in two boxes receives an email for each.
The one exception is guest orders without a customer record. Litestore doesn't send the email in that case because there's no customer to send it to.
Manual orders
Not every sale starts on the storefront. The admin creates orders directly for phone orders, in-person sales, replacements and samples.
A manual order is a full order. It updates stock, records the payment, and appears in fulfillment and reporting just like an order placed through checkout. For example, when you send out a replacement, the stock counts are updated to include the replacement.
The admin only allows a manual order once the store has at least one published product, because each line has to refer to a real product.
Cancelling an order
You cancel an order from its page and choose a reason: the customer changed their mind, items are unavailable, a fraudulent order, a declined payment, or another reason. Cancelling needs permission to process financials, because a paid order is refunded in full as part of it: through Stripe for a card payment, or recorded as a manual refund otherwise. Litestore then puts the items back in stock, reverses the customer's stats, any referral reward and the coupon use, and emails the customer.
A cancelled order isn't deleted. It stays in the order list with its cancellation date and reason, so its history is still there.
Customers can also cancel their own order from their account within a short window after they place it (two hours by default), and that goes through exactly the same steps.
Order records
Behind the order page, Litestore stores these records:
Order
OrderItem
Shipment
ShipmentItem
ShippingRate
StockLocationPartial shipments are possible because Shipment and ShipmentItem are separate records. The shipment stores the carrier and tracking number, and its items store how many units of each line it contains.
Order totals
Litestore also stores the order total in the base currency, using the exchange rate at the time of purchase.
It never recalculates that figure, so if the exchange rate changes next month, last month's earnings stay the same.
The store enforces two limits on order money automatically: order money totals can't go negative, and the refunded amount can't exceed the order total.
These limits aren't warnings in the interface that someone could click past. The store rejects any order that breaks either one, so an order can never end up owing the customer more than they paid.
Quick reference
Use the order page for anything related to what the customer bought and what's being shipped, including items, totals, shipments, tracking and notes.
Use the order's Returns & refunds section for anything that changes what the customer paid. Check the remaining refundable amount there before you quote a refund amount to anyone.
Create a manual order when a sale happened somewhere other than the storefront but still needs to update stock and count as revenue.
If the question is about a conversation rather than a purchase, open the customer instead of the order.
Before you act on an order, it helps to consider whether you're changing the goods the customer receives or the amount the customer paid.
Related
Checkout
A shopper's checkout goes from the cart and discounts through shipping and tax to the finished order.
Inventory
The low stock list shows products that are about to run out, each product has a reorder point, and the ledger traces every stock change back to its cause.
Returns
A return comes back in, only resellable items go back into stock, and the refund follows.