Lesson 44. Orders — How to Process an Order from the Admin Panel

We continue to work with the order created in the previous video, but this time we describe how to process it from the Admin Panel of CS-Cart shopping cart platform until it’s complete. To learn that there are new orders in your store, you can check the order department email, check Recent orders section at the Dashboard, and simply visit the Orders page of the open source ecommerce system.

Our new has an Open status. Open is assigned to the order right after it was submitted. Each status has its own colour so you will easily distinguish them from each other.

Statuses do one very important thing — they control the inventory. For example, Open, Processed, and Complete decrease quantity of a product, while Failed, Declined, Canceled return quantity of a product to its primary state. Also an administrator can notify a customer about all status changes, just tick the corresponding checkbox.

Click on the order title to get access to details, and start processing it. To the left there is customer information, billing and shipping addresses. At the center of the page we have a number of tabs that influence the order processing, product-related information with totals, and notes left by a customer or a staff member. There is also a barcode presented. To the right is the action panel where we change the order status, assign managers to orders, and create shipments.

All of this is located on the General tab. On the Add-ons tab all add-ons that are related to this order are presented. For example, we can enable or disable communication for this order. Next tab is Promotions. It contains the list of promotions that have been applied to this order. There is also might a Communication tab if a customer sent you a message related to the order. We can reply to such messages right on this tab. Now, let’s go back to the General tab.

Recently we updated shipment processing for the online store builder, so now you can create shipments using two paths, a short path — with tracking number and a carrier, and a detailed path — with several additional options including the ability to change the shipping method. Also, detailed shipments can come in handy if you need to split the order into two or more batches. Just select what products to send in the first batch, in the second, and so on. After we filled all required fields, we can change the status of the order, to processed for example, and notify a customer about a new shipment. All shipments are contained at Orders → Shipments. online E-commerce solution shipments also have their own statuses to make it easier to manage them. The only thing left unattended is the sheer functionality of the gear button. I guess there is no need to review all printing options, instead let’s take a look at Tweak and send invoice.

Clicking this button will take you to a separate page where you will see an invoice of the order. You can change the content of this invoice, and the send it straight to the customer. A PDF-document with invoice can also be attached.

You can still edit the order, simply click the Edit order button, and tweak order as much as you like.

And the Copy button creates a copy of the order which saves time if you need to create lots of similar orders.

The processing is finished when you receive the money, and customer receives an order, and have no complaints about it. After all that you can set the order status to Complete.

And that’s how you process orders in CS-Cart and build web store business.