The Anatomy Of An Order

So we're now looking at the full detail of an order. Clearly there is a lot of information on this page. At the top left, there is the order number and timestamp. Clicking on Orders would bring you back to the orders section. Over to the right-hand side, the down and up arrows will bring you to the previous and next orders.



Here's an overview of the rest of the page:

  • Print: Further right, clicking the Print button will print the detail for this order. Note this will print the order detail and not an invoice. To be able to print invoices you'll have to add one of the apps from the App Store.
  • Cancel order: Clicking on the Cancel order link will open up a form for cancelling the order. Select the reason in the dropdown, specify if the authorization should be voided or the payment refunded, confirm if you want to restock the items and if you want to send an email to the customer. We'll look at this in more depth later.



  • Payment and fulfillment status: On the left, below the order number, there will be two buttons. These buttons indicate if the order has been fulfilled (or shipped) and if it has been paid for. You can see in the screenshot above, the buttons are marked Fulfill 1 line item and Capture up to $104.00. We can use these buttons to mark the order as fulfilled and capture the payment. We'll look at both payment and shipping in full a little later.
  • Items ordered and totals: Below that is the list of items (or products) ordered, the individual prices, quantities, subtotal, shipping paid, taxes paid and the total. For each item, there is also the specific variant that was ordered and you can click the product name to view the product in the admin. Make sure to double and even triple-check the products when packing an order: it's easy to make mistakes particularly in relation to the product variants and the quantities.
  • Payment and fulfillment detail: Below that is the detail for the shipping method, the order weight and the payment method. In the screenshot above, we can see this order is for "International Shipping", it weighs 1lb and it was made through the Bogus Gateway, the gateway for testing payments.


  • Archive: As explained earlier, new orders start off as "open". When you have dealt with an order you can archive it by clicking on the Archive button. The order will no longer appear in the list of open orders shown in the orders section though it can be found again by looking at the orders with an "archived" status. You may also have noticed the number that appears beside Orders in the navigation panel: this is the number of orders currently open.



  • Order note: It can be handy sometimes to attach a note to an order. Just write your note and click Save note. I gave the example above of a change of address note. We can however also update the shipping address, more on that next. Note with some themes, the customer can write a note for you when they make the order. Any notes the customer makes will appear in this same box as your notes.
  • Customer shipping address: On the right-hand side, you'll find a panel with the customer's shipping address. When you are packing the order, make sure to send it to the shipping address and not the billing address. Mistakes can be expensive and time consuming for your customer service. There's also the customer's telephone number if they provided it and there's a small map of the customer's address. Clicking on the map will open the address in Google Maps.


  • Edit the shipping address: At the top right of the panel is an edit link, use this should you need to change the shipping address. That reminds me, I need to update this customer's shipping address.


  • Customer billing address: Below the shipping address you'll find another panel, this one with the customer's billing address. This is the address to be used for invoicing. There is also the email address for the customer, clicking it will create a new email to them in your default email software. If the customer has a publicly available photo, it will also be shown. And below that there is a link to view the customer's full profile.


  • Risk analysis: Below the billing address there is a panel "Risk Analysis". As someone running an ecommerce store, you need to be on the watch for suspicious and fraudulent orders. Unfortunately it's a reality of ecommerce that there are people that make purchases with stolen credit card credentials and that the banks will often take back the payment without hesitation regardless of whether the order has been shipped or not. Shopify provides one basic risk assessment: it checks if the billing address country is the same as the country that the customer placed the order from. These not matching does not necessarily make an order fraudulent but it does flag it as suspicious and worthy of further assessment before you ship the order. Your payment gateway admin should be able to provide you with more information before you decide to honor the order or not.


  • Conversion information: Conversion is the process by which a visitor to your store becomes a customer. In the panel "Conversion" you'll see for most orders a landing page and a referring website. The landing page is the page that the customer "landed" on when they first came to your store. The simple / (slash) in the screenshot on the previous page means that the customer landed on the homepage of the website. The referring website shows you how the customer found your store: from which website they clicked to end up on your store. In the example screenshot on the last page, the customer clicked a link on the Swiss Miss blog.




  • History: Lastly on the left-hand side, you'll see the history. This is the order history, it's a list of all the dates and times that major events relating to the order happened. So for example, when the order was placed, the payment was authorized and captured, emails were sent to the customer and the order was fulfilled. This can be useful if you want to know a bit more about the order.

    You can click on some events, those for payment authorization or capture for example, to see more detail. These events will be in blue.