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.