Once a customer goes through the checkout in your online store a sales order will be created. It doesn't matter if the order was paid for or not. As soon as the customer confirms the order in Magento, it has been created.
Navigate in the top menu to Sales | Orders:
This page shows all the sales orders that have been received in your Magento installation with the newest one on top. Strangely though, there's no possibility here to filter on website or storefront scope.
From here you have several possibilities:
- Create a new sales order directly in the Magento backend. This could come in handy if you're also taking orders by telephone and want to register them all in Magento.
- Change the status of an existing sales order.
- Print a document for the received sales order.
- Add a filter on the shown sales orders by using the label fields on top of the order grid.
- Export orders to a
CSVfile format. This default export function won't be very useful in practice though. Yes, it's possible to export your orders to Excel using theCSVexport, but often you'll need something that is tailor-made for your situation. - Open an existing order to look at the details and perform further actions.
Just as in every grid page in Magento, there are several ways to browse through your sales orders using the pagination on top, or use the filters to search for specific sales orders. Please note that when using filters, only those orders that meet all criteria will be visible. It's always possible to delete all filters and show all orders again by clicking on the Reset Filters button:
Besides that you have several options to select and deselect orders and use the same action for all selected orders. Be careful though, as it's easy to accidentally cancel orders, even canceling multiple orders at the same time!
Tip
Order numbering
Magento uses default number ranges for orders, invoices, shipments, and credit notes. If you're running only one website and store front these will all start with number 10000001, 9 numeric digits, going up from this number. However, if you are running multiple store fronts, Magento will automatically assign 200000001 to your second store front and so on. Sometimes it is necessary to change the way Magento handles these number ranges and you could even use a smaller or longer number to fit your needs. Unfortunately, there's no immediate setting available that you can use to change its behavior. You need to go into the eav_entity_store table to make changes. If you need to do this, we recommend that you consult a Magento specialist to help you out.
Looking at our Sales Orders grid, there are several fields immediately available that you can use to make sure you identified and are working on the correct Sales Order. One of the fields that needs a better explanation is the Sales Order Status field.
Depending on where your order is in the sales process, the status of your order will differ. Some of the following statuses may not even occur, depending on your settings and the payment methods you use:
- Canceled: This speaks for itself. A canceled order can get this status because the payment was canceled by the customer, or if you manually canceled the order in the Magento backend.
- Closed: A closed order is generally an order that was partly delivered, but where it wasn't possible to deliver the remaining items anymore. You close the order to mark it as ''done'', being aware that it was never fulfilled completely. You should be in contact with your customer when closing an order.
- Complete: An order that has been delivered to the customer completely is marked as complete. Note that the order receives this status as soon as all items have been shipped (this doesn't mean that the customer also received the items!).
- Suspect Fraud: This is used for orders paid with the PayPal gateway only, where the PayPal service is expecting a possible problem with the transaction. Normally you will receive an e-mail message from PayPal as well, describing the problem and the steps you need to take. This status might be used by third-party extensions for other payment methods as well.
- On Hold: If there's any reason why you temporarily need to wait before delivering an order to your customer, you have the possibility to put it on hold manually in the Magento backend.
- Payment Review: This status means that the external payment gateway is still verifying the transaction. Do not yet deliver your items without checking if the order has really been paid for. This status is closely related to Pending Payment and actually it is uncertain what the exact difference between those two is.
- Pending: This is the first status an order receives when it has been placed. A pending order means that the order was created, but hasn't been paid for yet.
- Pending Payment: The order receives this status as soon as the customer is in the payment process, but hasn't completed that yet.
- Pending PayPal: This is the same as Pending Payment, but this one's specific for the PayPal payment method. All other payment methods would receive Pending Payment.
- Processing: As soon as an order has been paid for and invoiced, the status changes to Processing. This means that from here you can continue with the delivery of your order. An order with the status processing could have been shipped or invoiced, but not both! Note that invoicing a pending order will also change its status to processing. Be careful, because you might think that it has been paid for, which doesn't necessarily have to be the case!
Your sales orders will receive most of the statuses described above automatically, depending on the actual status of your order. You can control some of them manually as well, like putting an order On Hold or setting it to Canceled.
It's also possible to define additional Order Statuses yourself. You may do so by navigating to System | Order Statuses.