Managing orders

Every sale becomes an order, which you find and work under Sales in the admin — orders live there as sales records, alongside your quotes and invoices. This article covers storefront checkout orders, the ones your customers place at checkout. Orders you create yourself in Sales are commercial records that don't carry the checkout controls described below — see Sales records & statuses for those. A checkout order moves through a status lifecycle as you work it, and its fulfillment (what's shipped) is tracked separately — see Fulfillment.

Find an order

Sales lists every sales record, and Sales → Orders narrows the view to just orders. Open a checkout order's record to work it — the status, notes, and cancellation controls below live right on the record.

Looking specifically at storefront checkout activity? Operations → Checkout orders is a checkout-only compatibility list showing each order's number, customer, item count, status, total, and date, with a status filter to narrow the list to one stage — Pending, Confirmed, Processing, Completed, or Cancelled. Its entries open the same order.

What an order shows

The order page lays out the customer's name, email, and phone; the line items with quantities and prices; and the subtotal, tax, and total. These details are a record of the order as placed — line items aren't edited after the fact. You also get an internal notes field: a private scratchpad for your team that customers never see.

The status lifecycle

An order's status tracks where it is in your workflow. It moves forward one step at a time, and you can cancel an active order at any point:

Change the status from the dropdown on the order page. It only offers the valid next steps — you can't skip from Pending straight to Completed, and Completed and Cancelled are final, so there's no moving an order back out of them. (Need to reverse a completed sale? That's a return, not a status change.)

Cancelling an order

Cancelling frees the order's reserved stock back to available right away, so those units can sell again (see Stock levels). It does not refund the customer — handle the refund through your payment provider. Cancelled is final, so cancel deliberately.

Status vs. fulfillment

An order's status and its fulfillment are independent: an order can be Confirmed but still unfulfilled, or Processing with some items already shipped. Status is your workflow stage; fulfillment is what's physically gone out the door. Fulfillment covers the other half.

Who can do this

Any team member can view orders. Owners and Admins can change an order's status and edit notes, and so can Staff granted the Orders and fulfillment permission group — once granted, the order controls unlock for them. Staff without the group see orders read-only. See Team & permissions.

Related

• Fulfillment — marking orders shipped
• Stock levels & adjustments — how orders move stock
• Audit log — a record of who changed what