LiteCommerce:Order Life Cycles

Every order placed at your LiteCommerce-based online store goes through a life cycle comprised of several order status stages.

When a shopper places an item into his shopping cart, a Temporary order is created to accommodate the contents of his cart. Orders with the Temporary status do not appear in the Administrator zone in the order list. Temporary orders are stored for the default period of 2 hours or until the shopper quits his browser application (whichever comes first), and if their status does not change during that period, they expire from the database. Keeping shopping cart contents for a certain period of time allows store customers to return to the store during the day and complete their orders without having to repeat product selection process again.

During the checkout process the order acquires an 'Incomplete' status after the shopper selects shipment and payment methods and provides the corresponding information. Typically an order remains in this status until a customer presses the 'Submit order' button, at which time an order using an offline payment method is assigned the 'Queued' status and the invoice is displayed to the customer. Orders using interactive payment methods remain in Incomplete status while being processed by the payment gateway and then acquire an order status according to results received from the payment gateway (either Processed for successful transactions or Failed for unsuccessful ones).

If your shopping system has AntiFraud add-on module installed and configured to perform order checkups, upon successful payment gateway processing the 'Processed' orders are being analized by anti-fraud service. If fraud checkup finds the order to be suspicious, the order is marked for manual processing by changing its status to Queued.

Note: Consult AntiFraud add-on module reference manual should you require further details on the functionality of this module.

Queued orders are the orders that require attention from the store administrator. These can be the orders using offline shipping methods or the orders found to be suspicious by the fraud protection service. Once the order details are reviewed by the administrator, and the necessary actions are taken, the administrator would typically change the order status to either Processed or Declined.

Declined orders are essentially the same as the orders with the Failed status. Similarly they do not affect stock amounts, do not take up gift certificates, bonus points or discount coupons and are kept in the order database for book-keeping purposes. While Failed status results from payment processors rejecting the payment, Declined status can be set by the store administrator for a number of reasons.

Complete orders are the orders that have been paid for and shipped out and thus do not require further attention. LiteCommerce system treats such orders just like the Processed orders, except for that they do not appear in the list of recent orders available in the 'Orders' section of the 'Management' menu.

'Failed' orders remain in the database for book-keeping records. They do not affect stock amounts (feature introduced by the Inventory Tracking module), neither do they take up gift certificates (introduced by the Gift Certificates module), bonus points or discount coupons (introduced by the Promotion Tools module).

Email notifications

Here are the notifications being sent to customers:

1. When an order is placed, and payment is not done real-time e.g. by check, the "initially placed" email is sent out, due to the status of Queued

2. When an order is placed and real-time paid, the Queued status is NOT used but the order becomes Processed right away, causing the initial email (with all invoice details!!) not to be sent out; instead, the your-order-has-been-processed message is sent out.

LiteCommerce only sends out one status email after the Queued status has changed. So:

1. If an order comes in as Queued, and admin changes the status to Processed or Completed, the customer will receive an email about this.

2. If an order comes in as Processed (because of real-time payment), and the admin changes this to Completed, then no email is sent out.