Orders and Fulfillment
What happens when a customer checks out, how to work through the order list, and what each order's detail screen and activity timeline show you
Once your shop is set up, customers can check out and place orders. This guide explains what happens the moment an order comes in, how to use the Orders tab to work through them, and what you'll find on an individual order's screen.
What happens when a customer checks out
When a customer completes checkout:
- Your admin dashboard double-checks that every item they ordered is still available.
- Stock is deducted from each variant's quantity on hand immediately, at the moment of checkout — not later. This protects you from overselling.
- If online payment is turned on for your shop (set up in the Payments tab), the customer is sent to a secure payment page to complete their card payment before the order is confirmed. If a payment fails or is abandoned, the stock that was set aside for it is put back automatically.
- If you don't charge online for the shop, the order is confirmed right away and marked as paid.
- A new order appears in your Orders tab, and the customer receives a confirmation email.
- The Orders tab in the Shop navigation shows a small red count badge for every order that's still brand new and hasn't been looked at yet.
The Orders list
Open the Orders tab under Shop to see every order that's come in. Across the top of the list you can:
- Search orders… by order number, customer name, email, phone number, or product name.
- Open the Status dropdown to filter to a single status (or All orders) — each status in the dropdown shows a count next to it, so you can see at a glance how many orders are sitting in each stage.
- Choose Newest first or Oldest first from the sort dropdown.
- Narrow the list to a date range with the From and To date pickers.
- Click Clear to reset every filter back to default once you've applied one.
The list itself shows, for each order: the Order number, the Date it was placed, the Customer (name and email), the number of Items, the order Total, and its Status badge, with a View link to open it. At the bottom, you can page through with Prev and Next once there are more orders than fit on one page.
Click anywhere on an order's row (or its View link) to open the order's own detail screen.
Inside an order
The order detail screen is laid out top to bottom like this:
Order items
Every line the customer bought, with its product name, variant (e.g. "250 ml"), unit price times quantity, and line total. Next to each item is a small bell button you can click to notify the customer about that specific item — more on this below. Under the items, the Subtotal and Total are shown.
Customer and Ship to
Two side-by-side cards: the customer's name with clickable email and phone links (or "No phone" if none was given), and the shipping address if the order is a delivery (or "No address provided" if it isn't).
Actions
This card groups every action you can take on the order, by purpose:
- Order Status — buttons appear here depending on the order's current status: Confirm, Mark Processing, Ready to Ship, Mark Shipped, Mark Delivered, Mark Fulfilled, Put on Hold, and Cancel. Only the moves that make sense from where the order currently is are shown — for example, you can't mark an order "Shipped" before it's been through "Processing". Once an order is Fulfilled, Cancelled, or Failed, this group disappears entirely, because there's nothing further to move it through.
- Fulfillment — an Update Shipping button (it relabels itself to show the carrier and tracking number once you've saved one) and, once the order is Delivered or Fulfilled and doesn't already have one, a Request Return button. Saving shipping details also moves the order to Shipped if it isn't already. On a finished order the button still shows the tracking you saved, but you can no longer change it.
- Communication — Notify Customer (a free-text message) and Issue Invoice.
- Financial — Refunds (with a red count badge if one is waiting on you), and, once the order has a credit note, a Credit Note [reference] button.
Order status
The order's lifecycle runs, in order:
New → Confirmed → Processing → Ready to Ship → Shipped → Delivered → Fulfilled
with Cancelled, Failed, and On Hold as side states an order can land in instead. You move an order forward using the matching button in the Order Status action group — for example, clicking Mark Processing once you start preparing it, or Mark Fulfilled once the customer has received it and there's nothing left to do.
Fulfilled, Cancelled and Failed are final. Once an order reaches one of them it can't be moved back to an earlier status — those orders are settled, and reopening one would contradict the stock, refund and email history already recorded against it. If goods come back after an order is finished, use a return rather than trying to reopen the order.
Cancelling an order puts its items back in stock automatically. The quantity the customer's checkout took off the shelf is credited straight back, so you don't need to correct anything on the Inventory screen. The same happens when you mark a return as Received or Accepted — and it only ever happens once per order, so stock can't be double-counted.
Changing an order's status, sending a notification, saving shipping details, and every refund or return action are all logged automatically on the order's activity timeline, so you (and anyone else on your team) can always see exactly what happened and when.
Notifying the customer
Clicking Notify Customer, or the bell icon on a single item, opens a message box where you type a free-text update; it's sent to the customer's email (and shows their phone number too, if you have one on file, for reference). Saving shipping details in the Update Shipping window (choosing a Carrier from the dropdown and typing a Tracking number, then Save & notify) also emails the customer automatically.
The activity timeline
Below the actions, every order keeps a running timeline of everything that's happened to it, each entry with its own icon color and a relative time ("3m ago", "2h ago", and so on). You'll typically see entries such as:
- Order placed — logged automatically the moment the order was placed.
- Status updated — logged automatically whenever you move the order to a new status.
- Entries for Invoice sent, Shipment dispatched, and every Refund, Return, and Credit step described in Refunds, Returns, and Credit Notes.
- Customer notified — any entry that went out as an email to the customer carries a "Notified" tag; click View email on one of these to see exactly who it went to, its subject, and its full body, right there in the timeline.
- Internal note — a note you add yourself, visible only to you and your team, never the customer.
At the bottom of the timeline there's a text box to Add note — use it to jot things down for your own records, like "waiting on a replacement from the supplier" or "customer asked to delay shipping." This gives you a complete, order-by-order history from the moment it was placed to the moment it's fulfilled — handy for answering a customer's "what's happening with my order?" question, or for your own records if a dispute comes up later.