Chapter 12
So, You’ve Received an Order — Now What?
IN THIS CHAPTER
Getting familiar with orders in Shopify
Capturing payments
Contacting customers about their orders
Refunding orders and initiating returns
Checking orders for fraud
It’s important to know your way around your customers’ orders, because speedy, accurate order fulfillment is one of the key factors in determining whether or not a customer will return to your store. In this chapter, I’m going to introduce you to the three stages of an online order in Shopify — receiving an order, being paid for an order and fulfilling an order (Chapter 13 covers how to fulfill orders).
I also run through how to recognize when you’ve got orders to send out, how to check an order’s details (such as the delivery address) and how to make any changes (such as editing the delivery address). I also show you how to search for old orders, find customer contact details, and create refunds or returns.
From time to time, your online store will be subject to fraudsters trying their luck with stolen credit card numbers, and it’s important to know what to look out for and what to do if you’re targeted, so I finish the chapter with some additional tips for handling fraudulent orders.
Receiving and Confirming Orders
When a customer places an order in your online store — or any of your other activated sales channels, such as Amazon or eBay — it appears in the Orders page of your Shopify admin.
To view your orders at any time, go to your Shopify admin and navigate to Orders in the sidebar on the left of the screen.
Don’t worry, you won’t have to keep checking the Orders page every 20 minutes! You’ll receive an email when you get an order — and if you’ve downloaded the Shopify app, you’ll hear a delightful ‘cha-ching!’ sound each time you receive an order.
You can create and edit email notifications to let you and/or your staff know when a customer places an order. You need the Orders permission on your account to make changes to order notifications.
To add a recipient who will also get emails when a customer places an order, follow these steps:
From your Shopify admin, go to Settings → Notifications.
A list of notifications appears.
In the Staff Order Notifications section, click on Add Recipient — this is located towards the bottom of the page, on the left-hand side of the Notifications page menu.
The Add an Order Notification window appears.
- From the first drop-down menu that appears, select the email address for the notification from the following options:
- Select Email Address, and then enter a new email address that you want to send the order notification to, such as a team member who is fulfilling orders. (This option is to email people not set up with an account within your Shopify admin.)
- Select a staff member so you can send notifications to their email address. If the staff member is already registered as a user on your store, you will be able to select their email address when you click on Email Address under Notification Method.
Click on Add an Order Notification.
After you’ve set up a new order notification for an email address, you can test it by clicking on Send Test Notification, which is the last item in the Notifications menu, near the bottom of the page.
As well as you or your team receiving an email confirmation of a new order, so too will your customers. You can edit the style of your order confirmation email, or add an SMS notification, by navigating to Settings → Notifications, and then selecting Order Confirmation from the list of available notifications. You may want to hire an expert from the Shopify Experts marketplace to help you style your order confirmations, or you can click on Customize, which is the very first option that appears in the Notifications section, and do some basic style editing, including adding logos, and changing colors and messaging.
When you click on the Orders section of your Shopify admin, you see a heading called Abandoned Checkouts. These are customers who reached the checkout but didn’t follow through to a completed sale. An absolute must for any ecommerce store is to have an abandoned checkout email flow that sends customers who abandon their checkout an email reminding them to complete it, with a link to the items they added to their cart. I look at automated abandoned checkout emails in Chapter 15.
The Three Stages of an Online Order
Orders go through three stages in your Shopify admin:
Order State | Action You Need to Take |
|---|---|
1. Order placed | Capture payment |
2. Order paid for | Fulfill the order |
3. Order has been paid for and fulfilled | Archive the order |
The following sections look at different ways to take action to process orders through each stage.
Order placed: Capture payment
Most merchants set their stores to capture credit card payments automatically, which means that payment is charged to the customer’s credit card straight away rather than the merchant needing to go into each order and manually capture payment. This saves time and also ensures that money flows into your business promptly.
A situation where you may not automatically capture payment may be if you’re unsure about whether or not you have the stock to fulfill an order, or if you’re taking pre-orders and you don’t want to charge the customer until you fulfill the order. Another possibility is that you want to accept part payments; for example, if you have one but not all of the ordered items in stock.
If you don’t automatically capture payments, you need to manually process each payment.
Chapter 6 covers payment set-up if you need to refer back to getting started with processing payments.
Capturing manual payments in Shopify
I don’t usually recommend this approach, because it means you don’t get paid straight away — and if you’re selling in a foreign currency, the exchange rate may change between the time the order is placed and the time you process the payment.
However, if you feel manual payment processing is for you, then follow these steps to get set up:
From your Shopify admin, go to Settings → Payments.
The Payments page appears.
In the Payment Capture section, click on the Manage button.
The Payment Capture Method dialogue box appears (see Figure 12-1).
Two options appear in the dialogue box:
- Automatically Capture Payments for Orders
- Manually Capture Payments for Orders
- Select Manually Capture Payment for Orders.
- Click on the Save button.
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 12-1: The Payment Capture Method dialogue box.
Capturing automatic payments in Shopify
Most online merchants will capture payments automatically, because it means you won’t have to take action, which saves you time and brings money into your bank account faster.
To ensure your store is set up to automatically capture payments (which I recommend you enable), follow the steps in the preceding section, selecting Automatically Capture Payments for Orders rather than Manually Capture Payments for Orders in Step 2. This option is already ticked, as it is Shopify’s default payment capture option, so you simply leave it ticked.
If you’re capturing payments automatically and you don’t have the product the customer ordered in stock, you’ll need to issue a refund because you’ve already taken the customer’s payment. I talk about processing refunds later in this chapter in the section ‘Refunding a customer’.
Order paid for: Fulfill the order
Fulfillment is a word you hear a lot in ecommerce. It means to pick, pack and send the order, thus completing it, or fulfilling it.
After payment has been captured, your customer will want their order quickly; however, there are numerous ways Shopify can handle order fulfillment, so I dedicate Chapter 13 to exploring all your order fulfillment options.
Order has been paid for and fulfilled: Archive the order
After the order has been paid for and fulfilled, the next action is to archive the order. Archiving an order means to close it, meaning no further action is required, so you can clearly see how many open orders there are in the Orders section of your Shopify admin — in other words, orders that have not been fulfilled.
You can elect to either archive orders manually or automatically.
Manual archiving
I rarely see any online retailers manually archive their orders, although you may want to do this at the start of your Shopify selling career so you can get familiar with the ins and outs of each order, and check them before they’re archived.
To manually archive orders in Shopify, follow these steps.
From your Shopify admin, go to Orders.
The Orders page appears, which lists all of your store’s orders, with the most recent orders appearing at the top.
- From the Orders page, click on the checkbox to the left of the orders that you want to archive.
Click on More Actions, which is an option that appears in the header, above your order list, after you select an order, and then click on Archive Orders from the drop-down list that appears.
Your order is now displayed as Archived.
You can also print packing slips using the same steps — a good tip to remember when you start dispatching orders.
Automatic archiving
Automatic archiving is the most common way to archive your orders due to its simplicity and the little effort required.
Orders can be set to automatically archive after they’ve been marked as fulfilled (when you see your orders in the Orders page, the status is displayed alongside each order; you also see an order’s status at the top of the Order Details page when you click on an order on the Orders page) — I look at how to fulfill orders in Chapter 13.
To automatically archive your orders, follow the below steps:
From your Shopify admin, go to Settings → Checkout.
The Checkout page appears, which enables you to customize your store’s checkout — the page where your customers pay you.
- Scroll down to the Order Processing section of the Checkout page.
- Under the heading titled After an Order Has Been Fulfilled and Paid, you have one option: Automatically Archive the Order, which directs Shopify to automatically archive an order after it has been paid and fulfilled. Select this feature if you want to automatically archive all orders.
- Click on the Save button.
Creating Draft Orders for Customers
From time to time, you may need to create an order for a customer. This actually happens more than you might think, and it can be a useful selling point. For example, if you’re selling a product that might be well-suited to you offering phone support, you may want to take orders over the phone to save the customer any hassle. This is particularly helpful if you’re selling things that are technical, such as computer parts, or products that might be geared towards older people, who may be more used to phone or store sales — don’t underestimate the personal touch!
Other reasons you may find it helpful to create draft orders, sometimes called backend orders, might be for taking wholesale orders either in person or over the phone, or if you’re selling at a physical location, such as a trade fair.
To create a draft order:
Go to your Shopify admin and click on Orders, then click on the green Create Order button.
The Create Order page appears (see Figure 12-2).
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 12-2: The Create Order page.
- Add the order details in the following sections:
- Order Details: In this search field, you can search for products already added to your store, or you can add a new product that isn’t in your online catalogue by clicking on Add Custom Item, located just above this field. This will be a quick product set-up, useful for selling items like one-off samples that don’t need to be shown on your website. You will be prompted to enter an Item Name, a Price and a Quantity, then you can click on Done to finish adding the product.
- Find or Create a Customer: Here you can select the customer that you’re placing the order for by searching for them in the Find or Create a Customer search field — if they have already been a customer of your store, you’ll see their information pop up as you begin typing their name. If it’s a new customer, just select Create a New Customer from the Find or Create a Customer search field and enter their details as prompted.
- Tags: Tags are used a little differently here to the way I showed you to use them when creating products and collections in Chapter 5. Here, you may like to add a tag to help you easily find an order in your list of orders, such as using the tag ‘wholesale’ — you can then search for orders tagged with ‘wholesale’ on your Orders page (to access this page, select Orders from your Shopify admin, then Orders again from the list that pops up).
- Notes: You have an optional field to add any notes, such as ‘call customer before fulfilling order’. The person fulfilling this order will see the notes when they’re looking at the order details. Notes are also useful for when a customer calls to tell you special information about the order, such as, ‘Item is a gift; please remove invoice from order.’
Edit the price, shipping costs and tax information.
When you enter a product into Shopify, a new section pops up in which you can manually edit the price of the item you’re selling and add a shipping cost. You can also elect to charge tax or charge no tax.
Click on the green button labelled Send Invoice. Shopify then asks for your customer’s email address, along with space for a message to be included in the email.
If the customer is on the phone, or in front of you, you can select the other green button Pay by Credit Card, which brings up a section for you or the customer to enter payment details in, followed by pressing the Charge button at the bottom of the screen, which processes the payment.- After the payment has been made, finish the process by selecting Mark as Paid (at the bottom of the page) or, if you’re waiting for the customer to pay an emailed invoice, select Mark as Pending until the customer pays — this ensures your order isn’t accidentally sent to the customer before their payment has been captured.
Managing Orders
From time to time, you may need to check certain information in an order, or even make changes to an order. You’d be surprised how often a customer enters their shipping address incorrectly, only to call or email later to update it.
In this section, I show you how to access, edit and manage your customers’ orders, including discovering how to contact customers about their orders, update them on their order or check the status of an order — for example, checking if an order has been sent or not.
Viewing an order
You can view your orders, and view the details of specific orders, by following these steps:
In your Shopify admin, click on Orders in the left-hand menu.
A list of all your store’s orders appears, in order of newest to oldest (see Figure 12-3).
- Click on the order number of the order you wish to view, and the order details will appear.
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 12-3: The Orders page in Shopify.
You can search for a customer’s order using a number of parameters, including name, order number and email address. Simply enter the search details in the Filter Orders field at the top of the Orders page.
You can also filter orders at the top of the page in the same section, by clicking on the Filter option in the header, where you will see various parameters, including an order’s Status — for example, you may like to check all your unfulfilled orders each morning so you can get round to sending them! (To do this, click on Fulfillment Status → Unfulfilled.)
When you click inside a customer’s order, on the right-hand side, under the Customer heading, you can see their complete history with your store, including how often they’ve ordered from you and how much they have spent with you. It’s always nice to acknowledge your VIP customers, and noticing your VIPs in this way gives you a nice opportunity to write a message to your customer, give them a little extra love when you send their order or swiftly handle an enquiry from them.
In the same right-hand side of the customer’s order page, you see a section called Conversion Summary. A conversion is an ecommerce term for a sale, or transaction. If you click on View Conversion Details, a dialogue box will pop up displaying information about how many times the customer visits your store before placing their order, and how many orders they’ve placed with your store overall. It also tells you their traffic source — in other words, how they found you (for example, direct — meaning they typed your website into their browser directly — or via a search engine such as Google). I cover these traffic channels in Part 5, which covers attracting customers through your marketing efforts.
Viewing an order’s Timeline
When you’re in an order, you can see the details of the order, including the product the customer ordered, along with their shipping address and contact details (see Figure 12-4). (You can also create shipping labels from this page, but I come to that in Chapter 13, when I talk through fulfilling orders.)
At the bottom of the order page, you see a section called Timeline. Here, you can see the sequence of events that occurs after the order has been placed, including when the customer was sent their order confirmation email (along with a button giving you the option to resend an order confirmation email to a customer), and when the money from the order will be added to your Shopify Payout (Chapter 6 covers Shopify Payouts in more detail). You can also add notes for other team members to see in the order’s Timeline, which is useful for noting things like customer address changes or notes for the warehouse.
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 12-4: The Order Details page.
With Timeline, you can view detailed histories and write notes and comments for orders, draft orders, customers and transfers in Shopify. All notes and comments are internal and will not be visible to your customers. If you use the Shopify app, then you can receive notifications whenever you’re mentioned in a Timeline comment (you can @ mention any team members who are users on your Shopify store, which notifies them of your message).
Editing an order
Customers may contact you after they’ve placed an order to make changes, such as adjusting the delivery address, changing sizes or colors, or even selecting an entirely new product that costs a different amount to what they initially chose!
Here’s a chance to provide a great customer experience (commonly called CX, and which I explore in Part 3). Log into your Shopify admin and navigate to Orders, then select Orders again in the drop-down menu of the sidebar. Search for the customer’s order in the Filter Orders field using parameters such as their order number or email address, and click on the order number when it appears.
When you’re inside the order you wish to edit, you’ll see three options in the top-right corner: Refund, Edit and More Actions. Click on Edit and the Edit Order page appears. To adjust the product quantity in the order, click on Adjust Quantity; to remove the item altogether, click on Remove Item; or to add a completely new item to the order, click on Search Products to Add. When you’re done, click on Update Order to save your changes.
You can add a reason for the edit, if you wish, at the bottom of the page. If you’re adding an item, or increasing the price of the order, you then need to hit the Send Invoice button on the right when it pops up — this sends an email with an invoice to the customer, allowing them to pay the difference. Once done, click on Update Order in the top-right corner to save your changes.
Contacting a customer about their order
If you need to contact a customer about their order — for example, if you’re out of stock of an item they bought, or you need to clarify their address details — you can access their order details to do so.
On the right-hand side of the Order Details page, you see a section called Contact Information, followed by the customer’s email address. Click on the email address and a pop-up box appears, prompting you to email the customer directly from the Order Details page. You can enter the email text here — and add other email recipients as well, if needed. Click on Review Email to check you have covered everything, and then click on Send Notification if you’re happy to send the email.
If you want to call the customer, the phone number (if supplied by the customer) can be found in the Customer Information block on the right-hand side of your Order Details page.
Customers often claim they haven’t received an order confirmation email (which may be due to their email service’s spam settings). In the order’s Timeline, you’re able to see when that email was sent, along with a button labelled Resend Email — click on that to resend a copy of the order confirmation to the customer.
Checking an order’s status
To check the status of an order in your store, you or your customers can use the Order Status page, which keeps a customer informed of where their order is up to — for example, whether it has been fulfilled (picked, packed and shipped), or whether it’s yet to be processed.
The customer will be sent a link to their order status page, which helps them to feel comfortable about their order while they wait for it to be delivered.
You can also check an order’s status by following these steps:
From the Order Details page, click on More Actions in the top-right corner, and from the drop-down menu that appears select View Order Status Page.
The Order Status Page appears with the customer’s order details, along with updates as to where the order is up to. For example, the first stage of an order status will be Order Confirmed, and once it’s been shipped, the Order Status Page updates to reflect the tracking number (I talk more about shipping orders in Chapter 13).
- Update your customer and/or take action (such as organizing shipping) if required.
Refunding a customer
If a customer requests a refund — and you’ve decided that as part of your Returns policy, you’ll offer refunds — or if a product you sell is faulty and the law in your country requires you to offer a full refund, then you’re able to quickly issue a refund in the Order Details page of the customer’s order.
Navigate to the top-right corner of the Order Details page inside the order that you’re refunding. You’ll see three options, including Refund.
Click on Refund and you’ll be taken to a new screen (see Figure 12-5) that gives you the chance to confirm the items you’re processing for refund, including being able to select how many items you want to refund (along with the option to refund, or not refund, shipping, depending on your Refund and Shipping policies).
You may sometimes want to offer a partial refund — for example, if a customer is unhappy because their delivery was late, you may decide to take $10 off the order as a gesture of good will. You do this by editing the Refund Amount field on the right-hand side of the Refund page.
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 12-5: The Refund page.
Enter a refund reason if you’d like to, at the bottom of the page, such as ‘faulty item’, and then select whether or not you would like the item to be added back to your inventory. For example, if the customer has sent the product back and you can resell it, tick the box that says Restock Item At. If the item is damaged or faulty, or the customer is keeping it, then you don’t need to add it back to your inventory as you can’t sell it, so leave the box unticked.
Tick the box labelled Send a Notification to the Customer if you want the customer to be emailed confirming their refund, and click on the word Notification to edit the messaging inside the email.
Finally, check that the amount in the Refund Amount section is correct, and then click the green button labelled Refund (which also shows you the amount you’re refunding).
Creating returns
If a customer wants to send an item back to you for a refund, or for any other reason (such as requiring a different size), then select Return Items, which is located in the top-right menu, right alongside the Refund option. Note: You only see this option on orders that have been fulfilled.
You’re taken to a new page that looks similar to the Refund page — the Return Items page (see Figure 12-6). The first section of the page asks you to Select a Return Reason, such as ‘size too small’ or ‘unknown’ (you don’t need to enter this, but it’s useful to keep track of why customers are making returns).
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 12-6: The Return Items page.
If the customer has sent the item back to you, you can request a tracking number and enter it in the Tracking Information field further down the page; otherwise, select No Shipping Required if you don’t need to track the package on its way back to you.
Select the checkbox under Notify Customer of Return to send an automated email to your customer, confirming their return.
Returns can be hairy! Slow return processing leads to very cranky customers, who are unlikely to return to your online store. Try and keep your returns neat and tidy — using features like the ability to enter tracking numbers into a returned order can make life much easier for you in the long run.
Checking an Order for Fraud
Unfortunately, where there is ecommerce, there is fraud. The good news is that Shopify has some inbuilt tools to help prevent fraud. Failure to recognize a fraudulent order can result in a chargeback, which is when a customer disputes a transaction that occurred on their credit card, often because it’s been stolen and used on an online store like yours. (Chapter 6 shows you how to process chargebacks.)
If your store is on the Basic Shopify plan and you don’t have Shopify Payments, then fraud analysis includes the following:
- Fraud analysis indicators
- Support for third-party fraud prevention apps
If your store is on the Shopify plan or higher, or you have Shopify Payments on any plan, then fraud analysis includes the following:
- Fraud analysis indicators
- Support for third-party fraud prevention apps
- Fraud prevention recommendations
Although I’ve provided an overview of fraud investigation strategies in Chapter 6, the Order Details page offers some further information that you can use to examine potentially fraudulent orders within the process of confirming your orders — as explored in the following sections.
Fraud analysis indicators
Shopify’s fraud analysis provides indicators for each order. The indicators can be used to investigate an order that you think may be fraudulent.
The fraud analysis indicators include information such as:
- Whether the credit card used for the order passes address verification service (AVS) checks. These checks compare the address entered in your store’s billing address field when a customer places an order against the billing address that the bank has on file for the credit card being used.
- Whether the customer provided the correct CVC code. The CVC code is the three- or four-digit code on the back of your credit card, near the signature panel.
Details about the IP address used to place the order. IP stands for Internet Protocol, and the IP address is used to provide the address of the device being used to place the order. If an IP address is very far from a billing or delivery address, there’s a chance the credit card may have been stolen.
For example, if you see an order placed with an IP address in Dubai but the billing address provided is in Los Angeles, then that’s an order worth checking for fraud — also known as a high-risk order.
- Whether the customer tried to use more than one credit card. Another high risk-factor! Shopify can identify if multiple credit cards have been used to try and pay for an order, which is a sign that a fraudster may be cycling through stolen credit card numbers.
The full analysis for an order lists all the indicators. These indicators are marked with green, red or grey icons to help you highlight different behavior types (see Figure 12-7):
- Green indicators show information about the order that is usually seen on legitimate orders.
- Red indicators show information about the order that is usually seen on fraudulent orders.
- Grey indicators give you additional information about the order that may be useful.
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 12-7: Shopify’s fraud analysis indicators.
To view the fraud analysis of an order, follow the below steps:
In your Shopify Admin, click on Orders in the left-hand menu.
A list of all your store’s orders appears, in order of newest to oldest.
Click on the order number of the order you want to investigate.
The Order Details page appears. You see a section titled Fraud Analysis on the Order Details page. If your store is on the Basic Shopify plan or higher, then you see a list of indicators and a button you can click on to view the full analysis.
Review the fraud analysis indicators (as shown in Figure 12-7).
If your store is on the Shopify plan or higher, or you’re using Shopify Payments, you also see a fraud prevention recommendation.
At the start of the chapter, I looked at manual payment capture as an option. If you want to allow time to investigate orders before you accept payment for them, you can set up manual payment capture for your store.
How to handle potential fraud in your store
If an order is flagged as high risk, or even if you think it’s suspicious, you have three options:
Verify the order.
Reminder, go back to Chapter 5 to review how to verify whether payments from customer’s are legitimate or not.
Cancel the order.
To cancel an order in Shopify, go back into the Order Details page of the order you wish to cancel, and navigate back to the More Actions button in the top right. Click on Cancel Order.
If you want to add the stock back to your inventory (which you would, in the case of spotting a fraudulent order before you’ve sent it out), then leave the box labelled Restock Items ticked before you click on Cancel Order. As with most actions that affect customers, you can select whether you want to notify the customer or not, in the same way you do for processing refunds.Refund the order (if you have already accepted the payment).
Refer to the earlier section ‘Refunding a customer’ for how to refund an order.
Order refund and order cancellation actions are slightly different. You can only cancel an order if payment has not been accepted, or if payment has been accepted but the products have not been shipped. If you cancel an order that has been paid for, then a refund is issued as part of the cancelling process. If you cancel an order that has not been paid for, then you only need to cancel the order, as there’s no payment to refund.
If you’ve placed a test order and want to delete it so as not to impact your sales reports, first cancel the order and then click on Delete This Order at the bottom of the Order Details.