Commerce Commerce 1.x User Guide Order States & Statuses

All orders in Commerce have a State and a Status.

Table of Contents

States

There are 4 different States:

  • Draft is used for orders that have not yet been completed by the customer. Orders are created in the database with a draft state when they click Checkout in the cart, so this may contain abandoned carts as well as customers that are still going through the checkout.

  • Processing is for orders that have been received (and paid), but have not yet been handled and marked as completed by the merchant. When in the Processing state, you can make changes to orders via the dashboard.

  • Completed is for orders that the merchant has marked as being completed. This means the order has been shipped and no changes to the order are allowed anymore.

  • Cancelled is for orders that were cancelled. These could have been draft or processing orders, but the bottom line is that they have not been fulfilled.

States cannot be changed and are core to the Commerce system.

Statuses

Statuses on the other hand are configured by your development team, and determine how an order flows from one state to the next.

A typical status workflow could be, for example:

  1. Draft
  2. Received
  3. Processing
  4. Ready for shipping
  5. Shipped

In this example, the Draft status matches the Draft state, and when payment is received Commerce automatically sets the order to the Processing state with the Received status, notifying the merchant and the customer about the new order.

Then when you or your warehouse starts working on the order, they change the status to Processing. When the package is packaged, they change the status to Ready for shipping which may automatically create the shipping label for your carrier and send the customer their tracking code.

Finally, when the package has been picked up, the status is changed to Shipped, and the state is changed to Completed.

Status Changes

What status changes are available to you when managing an order depends on how your development partner set up the status workflow. Commerce offers a lot of flexibility for custom integrations to enhance your fulfillment process, with automatic actions and messages being sent at any step.

If you’re unsure about the specifics of your status workflow, or how to improve the process, please contact your development partner.