This is how we open and process an order:
- Search for your order by using the filters and just click on it as soon as you've found the order you want to process. In our example, we're going to process the order of the camera that we bought ourselves earlier in this chapter. Clicking your order will open it. Note that our sales order has the Pending status, which means that it has not been paid for yet. Why not, we entered our credit card information, right? Yes, that's true, but our Magento system isn't connected to a payment provider that will actually check if the card is valid and is able to do the transaction. If your payment is validated and accepted online, the order status will automatically change to Processing.
- From here, you have several possibilities to process your order. On the top-right corner there are several buttons available that you can use:
- Edit: Actually you will not edit this particular order. The current one will be canceled and a new one will be created.
- Cancel: This really cancels the current order and reverses any stock transactions that have already been made.
- Send Email: This sends the order confirmation to the customer once more.
- Hold: This changes the status of the order to On Hold, just in case there's any reason for you to not to process this order yet.
- Invoice: This will bring you to a new page to create a sales invoice for this order.
- Ship: This will also take you to a new page, where you can confirm the shipment for this order or a part of it.
- The menu items on the top left of this page will let you navigate through various documents that could exist for this order, such as the invoice and shipping documents. Note that in this case, where this sales order was just created, those sections will all be empty.
- At the bottom left of the page you have the possibility to add a comment to this order and if you want, you can send this comment along with a copy of the order confirmation to your customer again. This comes in handy, for instance when there's any reason why the order cannot be delivered immediately. Note that the drop-down box holding the order status cannot be changed! The order status will change once you create an invoice for your order.
- The next step in handling your order is to create an invoice for it. Click on the Invoice button on the top, to create an invoice as shown in the following screenshot:
Normally it isn't necessary to make any changes to the invoice, although it is possible to change (decrease) the quantities of your item and add a comment to the invoice. You can only lower the quantities to split your order into two or more different parts. It isn't possible to invoice more than originally ordered. If you want to send the invoice to your customer by e-mail and include your comments in it, you have to click on the appropriate checkboxes. Next just click on the Submit Invoice button at the bottom. Since we have now invoiced the order, its status will automatically change to Processing.
- Once your invoice has been created, the Invoice button disappears from the row at the top of your screen. It is now possible to create a credit memo, in case you need to credit the created invoice. Note that although your invoice has been created, you did not automatically receive a print of it. If you need one, click on the Invoice menu on the left, open your invoice, and click on the Print button. A
PDFfile will be generated like seen in the following screenshot, which you can open and print using Acrobat Reader or any other tool that is able to open PDF files:
Your customer is also able to open the same PDF invoice, in the My Account section of the frontend website, but only if the customer decides to create an account before finalizing the order.
Tip
Document layout
Magento uses a default layout for all documents that will be generated, such as Invoices, Credit notes, and Packing Slips. Although they are generally OK with changes, they do not appreciate other documents that will be used throughout your company. You may add your own logo, but that's about it. There's no good solution available within Magento yet to change the look and feel of these documents. Some information is available here at: http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/5_-_modules_and_development/orders/editing_an_invoice_pdf.
But the problem is that programming skills for Magento will be required to really make some progress in this area. Another possibility would be to use an extension to help you. One of the offered extensions to do this task can be found here at: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/pdf-invoice-shipment-credit-memo-documents-5843.html.
- Next, we are going to ship our sales order. From the Sales Order page, click on the Ship button on the top-right corner of the screen. It is similar to creating an invoice, as this will open a page that will let you enter the quantities that we will ship. As when creating an invoice, it's possible to lower the quantities that we will ship.
On this page it's also possible to add a tracking number from your carrier, so that your customer can track where the package is. If you choose to send your customer an e-mail about the shipment from this page, the tracking number will be included in the message.
Once ready, just click on the Submit Shipment button at the bottom of the page:
Tip
Carrier integration
As there are lots and lots of carriers worldwide that you could be using, we are showing the manual process here. However, it will make life easier for you that some of them have integrated extensions for Magento. One of the examples is ShipRush for FedEx: http://fedex.shiprush.com/magento/index.shtml.
If you shipped all items, the status of your order has now changed to Completed. Congratulations, you just processed your first order! Now, repeat this process multiple times and learn as much as possible about the status an order can get. Use different scenarios for combinations of payment and shipment methods you are using in your store. You cannot practice and verify your process enough!
When your store grows, performing all these tasks, and keeping track of what's happening in your backend may become a problem. There are a number of things that you can do to increase the efficiency in this area that we would like to share with you:
- Automatic invoicing. If you're working with a payment service provider to handle your payments, it's often possible to change the order status after a successful transaction to processed automatically. The invoice will be created and there's no need to do this manually anymore for the majority of your orders.
- As an alternative you could use an extension to bulk invoice and/or ship your orders. One of the offered extensions can be found at: http://www.xtento.com/magento-extensions/simplify-bulk-order-processing.html.
- There are a percentage of customers that click on the BUY button, go through checkout, and reach the payment service provider, but after that do nothing or just close their browser. For some shops, this percentage can amount to 5-10 percent of the total orders. In Magento, these kinds of orders would stay in pending status indefinitely until the shop owner cancels them manually. If your store gets a fair number of these orders, having a developer create a small piece of software that cancels these orders for you can help greatly. The extension mentioned above could probably solve this problem as well.