View & Process Orders

The order details page

Once you have located the order that you would like to process, click on the View & Process link to load the Process Order page. This page containing details on the order itself (products purchased, discounts used, customer information, payment information, shipping details, etc.) and tools to process and edit it.

If the order was referred by an affiliate Web site, that information will also be displayed, together with the commission owed to the affiliate on that sale (if needed, you can edit the commission earned on that order).


The Order Details page is divided into 7 tabs. Simply click on a tab to visualize the information that it contains, without refreshing the page.
 

• General
  General details about who, when, and how much, plus a summary of order status, payment status, and administrative comments. Comments added by the customer during checkout are instead shown on the Other Details tab.
  
  You can use the Administrator Comments text area to enter notes about the order. Click on Add Comments to save the notes to the page. Saved notes will appear in the same text area the next time you load the Process Order page. Adding administrator notes can be useful especially in a scenario in which there are multiple Control Panel users that have access to processing orders. These comments are never shown to the customer in the storefront.
  
  The top part of the page also includes the following general order information:
   
  • Order name: regardless of whether the order nicknaming option has been enabled for your customers (General Settings > Store Settings), ProductCart shows this feature to the store administrator.
• Order Date & Time: If the delivery date & time feature has been enabled on the store, these two fields will show the entries made by the customer during the checkout process.

 

• Product Details
  Lists what was purchased and package-specific shipping information (what was shipped, when and how). If any of the products are to be drop-shipped, that information is also shown, together with a way to notify the drop-shipper of what needs to be shipped, if needed (i.e. if the drop-shipper has not already been automatically notified by the system).

 

• Process/Update
  Gives you access to several tools to update the order status. In all cases, you can add a comment that is added to the e-mail message sent to the customer. When updating the order status, you can opt to send the customer an e-mail notification or not. The page also allows you to resend previously sent messages (e.g. customer calls saying they never received the Order Confirmation e-mail: you can quickly resend it).

 

• Shipping Center
  Allows you to launch the Shipping Wizard for any shipping provider that is active on the store.

 

• Payment Status
  Provides information on the payment method used by the customer. If a payment gateway was involved (real-time payment processing), information on the transaction will also be provided (e.g. transaction ID) so you can reference it against the reports available in the payment gateway's administration area.

 

• Billing & Shipping
  Billing information for the customer that placed the order, together with the shipping details (shipping service selected by the customer, order weight, number of packages, etc.) and ship-to address.

 

• Other Details
  Other information related to the order. This includes:
   
  • Reward points accrued or used, if any
• Gift certificate information for any gift certificates purchased

 

• Downloadable products information, if any (e.g. download link, license details, etc.)

 

• Affiliate information, if any (affiliate that referred the order, commission amount, etc.)

 

• Terms & Conditions: when the customer agreed to your Terms & Conditions (if active)

 

Printer-friendly version

Click on the print icon to view a printer-friendly version of the order, which is laid out similarly to an invoice generated by accounting packages such as QuickBooks®. The printer-friendly version of the order will open in a separate window, and includes the image defined in the Store Settings area of the Control Panel using the Company Logo field.

When you generate the printer-friendly version of the order, you also have the option to show or hide pricing information, which allows you to create either a packing slip or an invoice/sales receipt. If you are creating an invoice, you can also have ProductCart use an invoice number that you can manually enter. This allows you to address the issue of having an invoice number that might be different from the order number automatically generated by ProductCart.

In addition, if the order was placed using offline credit card processing as the payment option, ProductCart will prompt you to select whether or not you would like the credit card number printed on the page. If you are using a Point of Sale (POS) system to process the credit card transaction offline, this feature allows you to print the information that you will need to enter in the POS system. For privacy and security reasons, make sure you shred any printed invoice that contains the customer’s credit card number, immediately after the POS transaction has been completed. The card security code cannot be collected, is never stored in the database, and therefore will not be printed.
 

What happens when you process an order

After you have verified the accuracy and legitimacy of an order, you can update its status to processed. If you need to change the products that were added to the order, their quantity, discounts, taxes, and shipping charges, edit the order.

You can process orders one by one or batch process multiple orders at once using the Batch Process Orders feature. Please note:
 

• ​When you individually process an order, your payment gateway (if any is being used to collect payment) is NOT contacted to capture a previously authorized transaction. You will have to perform that task separately by logging into the payment gateway's administration area.

 

• If you batch process multiple orders at once and you are using either Authorize.Net, NetSource Gateway, USAePay, PayPal Website Payments Pro or PayPal PayFlow Pro as your payment gateway, then the payment gateway is contacted by ProductCart and the orders - previously authorized - are captured and will be settled. This is only true if you are using one of these payment gateways. In all other cases the payment gateway is not contacted to finalize payment.

To process an order, click on the Process/Update tab. If the order is currently Pending the Process Order area of the page will be shown. When you click on the Update Order Status button, the following will happen:
 

1. The order status will be changed to Processed. The payment status is not affected.

 

• If the order contains one or more Downloadable Products, and any of the products have been configured to use a license generator, the license generator will be invoked to generate N licenses for the order, where N is the number of units purchased for each Downloadable Product that requires a license.

 

• If the order contains a Gift Certificate, a unique gift certificate code is generated for each of the gift certificates that were purchased. An e-mail notification is sent to the person for which the Gift Certificate was purchased, if specified by the customer during checkout

 

• The Order Confirmation e-mail will be sent to the customer, unless the corresponding check box has been unchecked. The order confirmation e-mail will include license information for Downloadable Products, if any, and Gift Certificate information on any gift certificates that were purchased.

 

• Inventory adjustments: inventory is adjusted at the time the order is placed, not at the time the order is processed. So when you process an order, nothing happens with regard to the inventory status.

 

• The number of points Reward Points accrued with the purchase, if any, will be credited to the customer account. If Points were used against the order, those Points were deducted from the customer account at the time the order was placed (so that they could not be redeemed again while the order was being reviewed).

 

• If the order is placed by a new customer that was referred by an existing customer, and the Reward Points system is set up to reward the referrer, the referring customer's Reward Points account will be credited an amount of points determined by the current Referral Points settings.

 

• If an affiliate referred the customer and the affiliate is eligible for a commission on the order, the commission amount will be recorded to the affiliate account and an e-mail notification will be sent to the affiliate.

 

• If any of the products require drop-shipping and any of the drop-shippers were setup to be automatically notified, a notification e-mail will be sent out to them with instructions on which products to ship, how, and where.

 

• The order will be included in all sales reports.

 

• The order status will be updated on the order details page in the customer's account area.

​

Processing status and payment status

Please note the following, important comments about processing orders placed using a real-time payment option:
 

• ​Payment Status
  The payment status does not change when the order is processed. You can change it manually from the Payment Status tab. 

 

• Funds not captured upon processing the order.
  If the order was submitted using a real-time payment option setup in the Control Panel to authorize, but not capture funds, processing the order will not update the transaction status in the payment gateway’s system. In other words, when you process an order manually from the Order Details page, ProductCart does not connect to the payment gateway to capture the funds. You will have to log into the payment gateway’s administration area and manually capture the funds according to the instructions provided by the payment gateway.

 

• Funds captured via batch processing. To capture funds automatically as the order is processed you will need to use the Batch Processing feature.

 

• Order already processed. If the order was submitted using a payment option configured to immediately process an order at the time it was placed, the order status will be already set to Processed when you view the order in the Control Panel, and all of the tasks mentioned above will have already been performed by ProductCart at the time the order was placed.