Orders & customers

Orders lists every order as it arrives. Search by order number or customer name, filter by status or payment, sort by date or total, and click a row to open it.

Each order carries three separate labels, and they mean different things.

1. Status - where the order is: Pending, Confirmed, Processing, Shipped, Delivered, Cancelled or Refunded.
2. Payment - Unpaid, Paid, Failed or Refunded. A cash-on-delivery or bank transfer order starts Unpaid, because nothing has settled into a payment account yet.
3. Fulfillment - Unfulfilled, Partial or Fulfilled. This one is only about the parcel.

Bank transfer and cash orders start Unpaid, and nothing moves them on its own. Mark as paid, on the order, records the money once you have it - for a bank transfer, after it shows up in your bank account. It cannot be undone, so only click it when the money is really there. A cash-on-delivery order flips to Paid by itself when you mark it delivered, since the courier collected the cash.

A cash-on-delivery order can also show a confirmation label: COD confirmed, awaiting confirmation, or a warning that the customer cancelled or never replied. Check it before you ship.

Add order, on the Orders page, records an order you already took somewhere else - on WhatsApp, on a phone call, on Instagram or Facebook, or over the counter. Pick the customer or type their name and number, add the products, and place it.

You choose where it came from, and the order wears that as a small badge in the list, so you can tell at a glance which orders came from your store and which you took by hand. Everything else about it is ordinary: it fulfills, prints, emails, edits and refunds exactly like an order a customer placed themselves, and stock comes off the shelf the moment you place it.

What does not happen by itself: spend-and-save tiers, free shipping and free gifts are not applied, because the customer never saw them. Type the discount and the delivery charge you actually agreed - either a discount code, which is checked like any other, or a figure of your own. Tax still follows your own tax settings.

Bookings, rentals and event tickets cannot be added here - there is no calendar on this screen, so the customer books those on your store.

Payment is cash on delivery or bank transfer only. Tick Already paid when the money is already in your hand; leave it, and Mark as paid on the order works exactly as it does for an online order.

Send confirmation is on by default: the customer gets the same order-received email as everyone else if you have their address, and a WhatsApp message on the number you entered. Switch it off for an order they already have a receipt for.

When Ask buyers to confirm their order is on - Settings, then Checkout, where it starts switched on - the order-received email carries a Confirm button. The customer presses it, lands on a short page on your store, and the order picks up a Buyer confirmed badge. Until they do, it shows Confirmation asked.

It is a signal for you, nothing more. Confirming never changes the order's status, its payment or its delivery - you still handle the order exactly as you would otherwise.

It is most useful on cash-on-delivery and other orders you pay to send out before you are paid: someone who presses Confirm is a real buyer reading a real inbox. An order nobody confirms is worth a phone call before you pack it.

The button works for a week, and pressing it twice is harmless. Orders placed before you switched the setting on, and orders left without an email address, carry no badge at all.

Tip: this is separate from the WhatsApp cash-on-delivery confirmation, which has its own labels on the order - a buyer may answer one and not the other.

Open the order and click Fulfill.

1. Choose the courier from the list, or Other courier to type a name yourself.
2. Enter the consignment number - the tracking number the courier gave you.
3. Click Mark as fulfilled.

The order moves to Shipped and the customer gets a Track parcel button pointing at that courier's tracking page. With Other courier you can paste your own tracking link instead. Trax and BlueEx have no public tracking page, so those customers see the consignment number only.

If you have connected a courier account, the order also shows a Book with courier button: we create the consignment from the order's shipping address, the courier issues the consignment number, and it fills in for you. The delivery city has to be one that courier serves. A PostEx booking also generates the load sheet, which is what schedules the rider. See Connecting a courier account and Automatic dispatch.

When the parcel arrives, open the order again and click Mark delivered.

Sometimes you cannot supply everything a customer ordered. Instead of cancelling the whole order, open it and click Edit items.

1. Use the plus and minus buttons to change a quantity, or the bin icon to drop a line.
2. Search to add something the customer asked for on the phone.
3. Write a short reason - it is saved to the order history so anyone on your team can see why.
4. Click Save items.

The totals update as you edit, and the amount to collect on delivery moves with them. If the order had a discount code, the discount is kept exactly as it was - the customer earned it, so we never take it away because the order got smaller. It is only reduced if it would be larger than the new subtotal. Sales tax is adjusted in proportion. Shipping stays as quoted unless you change it.

Edit items is only offered while the order is still yours to change. It disappears once the order is paid, once it is fulfilled, or once a consignment has been booked with a courier - at that point the courier is already holding an amount to collect, and changing the order behind their back would put the two out of step. Cancel the booking with the courier first. For an order that is already paid, use Record refund for what you cannot supply instead.

A line that booked a time behaves differently. Its quantity is fixed - a stay is one booking, and an appointment's number of people was set when the time was picked, which is when the seats were reserved - so changing it here would move the price without moving the booking. Removing the line cancels that booking and frees the time. Bookings and rentals cannot be added from this sheet either, because they need a time picked; take those through checkout.

To move a booking rather than drop it, click Reschedule on the line - or open it from Bookings and choose Reschedule there. You are offered only times the product is actually free for; its own current dates show as free to keep, but keeping them is not a move, so pick something different. Changing how long a stay is re-prices it from what the customer originally paid per night. On an order that is already paid that is refused outright: move it to the same length instead, or record a refund and settle the difference with the customer yourself.

After saving, tell the customer what changed. Every edit - and every booking you move - is listed under Edit history on the order, line by line, with who did it and when. A rescheduled booking emails the customer its new time automatically.

Every order page has a Notify customer button. Use it when something changed, when a buyer says they never got the confirmation, or when you want to re-send tracking details.

1. Pick what to send - ask the customer to confirm, what the order contains now, a fresh copy of the confirmation, or the tracking details once the order has shipped.
2. Send email goes to the address on the order, whether the buyer has an account or checked out as a guest.
3. WhatsApp opens WhatsApp with the whole message already typed. You send it from your own number, so the customer sees a message from the shop they know.
4. Copy message puts the same words on your clipboard for SMS, Messenger, or wherever else you reach them.

Ask the customer to confirm is for the order you are not sure about - a suspicious address, a number that does not answer. It emails them a Confirm button, and the order shows as awaiting confirmation until they tap it. Once they have confirmed, the option stops being offered; there is nothing left to ask.

For the two kinds that have a message, the exact words are shown to you before you send anything, and all three channels carry that same text - so an email and a WhatsApp about one order can never say different things.

A cash-on-delivery order waiting on its WhatsApp confirmation has its own button on the order - Ask again on WhatsApp. Use it when the customer never replied to the first ask: it re-sends the confirmation and puts the order back to awaiting confirmation. It is only there while their answer is still open - once they have confirmed or cancelled, the decision is theirs to change, not yours.

You can message one order every ten minutes, whichever button you use. That is deliberate - it stops a double-click sending the same thing twice. The button counts the wait down rather than letting you press it and be refused.

When you edit an order's items or move a booking, the buyer is emailed automatically. You do not need to press Notify as well, though a WhatsApp message on top is often worth it for a cash-on-delivery order.

Open an order and click Print slip. The slip opens in a new tab and the print dialog appears on its own - choose your printer, or Save as PDF if you want to keep a copy or send it to someone.

The slip is the sheet that goes INSIDE the parcel. It shows the order number, the delivery address and phone, every item with its quantity, and - the important bit - whether the rider collects money and how much. A prepaid order says "collect nothing" so nobody is charged twice.

To print a batch, go to Orders and use the Print packing slips button at the top. It prints the orders you can currently see that are not fulfilled yet, up to 25 at a time, one per page. Filter the list first if you only want some of them. The button always says how many it is about to print.

You do not need a courier account to use this. Print the slips, pack the parcels, and hand them to whichever courier you use - then come back and mark each order fulfilled with the consignment number the courier gives you.

Note that this is not a courier label. A courier label carries the barcode their staff scan, and it comes from the courier's own system when you book through them.

Cancel is for an order you are not going to ship. It is offered until the order ships - after that the button is gone, because the parcel is already with the courier. Cancelling cannot be undone.

Record refund appears on orders marked Paid. Storecrafto never moves the money. None of the payment methods we support - cash on delivery, PayFast, EasyPaisa or bank transfer - lets us send a refund on your behalf. Return the money yourself first, in your gateway's own dashboard or in cash, then record it here so your records match.

Set the amount (Full fills in the order total), add a reason if you want, then click Record refund. Part refunds are fine.

Recording it does three things: it stores the refund against the order, it takes the amount off your revenue, and it emails the buyer to say their refund has been approved. So record it only once the money is genuinely on its way back - otherwise the buyer is told about a refund that never arrives.

A cash-on-delivery order is marked Paid automatically when you mark it delivered, because the courier collected the cash at the door - so a refund can be recorded on it like any other paid order, with the cash going back to the customer from you.

If the customer refuses the parcel and the courier brings it back, open the order and click Mark returned. The order closes and its amount comes off your revenue. Stock is not adjusted automatically - if the items came back sellable, put them back yourself in Products.

Refunds come off your revenue on the day you record them, not the day the order was placed - see How revenue and orders are counted.

Customers lists the people who have an account with your store. Search by name or email, then click a row to see their contact details, their saved addresses and every order they have placed.

There is nothing to set up here - the list fills itself as people buy from you.

Someone who checked out as a guest appears on the order rather than in this list. Once they create an account with the same email address and confirm it, their earlier orders are attached to it.

Reviews shows every rating customers have left. Only approved reviews appear on your storefront.

Work through them with the Pending, Approved, Rejected and All tabs, approving or rejecting each one. Two switches sit at the top of the page: Enable reviews turns ratings and the review form on your storefront on or off, and Auto-publish new reviews skips moderation so a review goes live the moment it is written.

Only a customer who actually bought the product can review it, and only once - so every rating on your store comes from a real buyer.