Order management is one of the main and important activities in the eCommerce business. It refers to the process of receiving, tracking, and fulfilling customer orders that begins when an order is placed and ends when a customer receives their package.
Your online store records all orders placed by customers in the Orders List (Orders -> Order List section) in the Admin area.
X-Cart also allows creating orders manually from the Admin area if required. See the "Operate as a User" Feature description for more details.
The order listing page gives a store administrator the following information about orders:
Order number: Orders are numbered sequentially, starting from the value set in the "Next order #:" field in the store's General settings.
Date: The date and time the order was placed.
Customer: The name and the email address of a customer (by clicking on the customer name a store admin will be redirected to the user profile page).
Payment status: The current payment status of an order. See more info in Order Payment Statuses in X-Cart.
Fulfillment status: The current fulfillment status of an order. See more info in Order Fulfillment Statuses in X-Cart.
Amount: The order total and the number of items ordered.
In case an order was paid via an online payment processor the order payment status is updated automatically at the time X-Cart receives the order related info from the payment processor.
In case an order was paid via an offline payment method a store admin will have to manually update the order payment status each time it changes.
An order fulfillment status must be manually updated by a store admin each time the order progresses in the fulfillment chain.
The orders listing page has an advanced search panel where a store admin can filter orders to work with according to several parameters (order ID range, date, payment and fulfillment statuses, customer name, etc.).
The chosen search parameters can then be saved and displayed along with the preset filters on the top of the page.
There are 2 preset filters by default:
All orders: This filter allows to see all orders available in a store.
Awaiting processing: This filter displays the recently placed orders that have both the payment and fulfillment statuses unchanged from the moment of placement. At the moment any order status changes, the order is removed from the list of awaiting processing.
Generally, to process an order, a store administrator either needs to open the order details page by clicking the order number or use the tools at the bottom of the page to bulk edit orders.
When the initial order processing is complete, it will be necessary to ship the products (in case you sell physical goods) and manage further as you may need to add notes, tracking number, process refunds, or follow up with the customer.
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