Order processing

The First Order Has Arrived! What to Do..

These instructions describe how to process a new order that just arrived in your 21.Commerce and also show various possibilities and fulfillment procedures. It is your decision as a shop administrator what processes fit best to your company and your products. The instructions in this manual should be considered as recommendations.

If your 21.Commerce is connected to AbaNinja which processes the orders, this manual is usually not anymore required, because these steps are part of the ERP order handling process.

Receiving an Order

All begins when a customer places a new order in your webshop. Your Shop now sends an order confirmation email to the customer as well as to you as the shop administrator. This email contains all data relevant to be able to process this order: Customer invoice address, delivery address, order identification data and the shopping cart in the appropriate currency and language. The email to the shop operator is even more detailed, including a direct link to the order in the customer management of your Shop. Also regulative requirements are met. Please decide for yourself if you already want do declare an acceptance of the order, i.e. the conclusion of the contract, with the order confirmation.

Email is a technology that does not guarantee, that it will arrive at the destination. This can have various reasons (false spam detection, routing problems, SMTP problems, …). Your Shop as the mail sending instance cannot do anything about these type of transmission problems. It is therefore a good idea to periodically check the customer management in the shop administration of your Shop to see whether newly received orders have arrived - e.g. once a day or at a different interval depending on the number of orders in your own shop. If you open the customer management (shop administration → customers/orders → customer management), the latest orders are displayed on top.

Order Status: “received” / Customer Management

The start page of the customer management shows you a list of orders, sorted by date. All newly received orders have the order status “received”. As soon as you intend to fulfill the order / put the ordered goods in the package ready for shipment, select the order status “in progress”. Customers see the new order status in their customer accounts (“received” changes to “in progress”).

Order Status: “in progress”

Check the payment method at this point:

• Cash payment (goods are picked up at store): Make sure that the goods are available in the respective store.
• Cash before delivery: Please “do nothing” until you are sure that the correct amount has been credited to the appropriate account. In most cases, the invoice number or the order reference number is given as identification. If a customer has not paid his order after one week, he or she should be contacted. After two to three weeks at the latest, you should delete the order and inform the customer by email so that there are no unnecessary reservations of goods and orders that have not been executed. The PepperShop module payment status[^1] is used to manage payment status. With this module you can specify at any time the status of an order: not paid, money advised, money received.
• Online payment methods (credit cards): Generally, it should be possible to continue here without any problems.

If the payment method allows it, you can prepare the package for shipping. If physical products have been purchased, put them in the package and reorder goods that are not in stock.

When you have all your products ready for shipping, you can print a delivery note.

Order Status: “shipped”

You can now ship the package.

Now we have all the information to send an update to the customer and tell him, that his order has been shipped.

Use the drop-down menu in the list of orders in the customer management. Change the order status to “shipped” for each of the corresponding orders.

Now the order status is automatically changed to “shipped” and the customer is informed by email that his order has been shipped.

Order Status: “completed”

The goods have been shipped and therefore the order processing is almost completed. When the order status changes to completed, the order is marked as “completed” accordingly.

We recommend that the order status is not set to “completed” until the money has actually been credited to your account (with cash before delivery and cash payments there is no need to check again). Be especially careful with online payment methods and really make sure you check the payment status before you change the order status to “completed”. Credit card funds are sometimes transferred much later in a collective payment. Based on our experience, we can report that even large financial institutions have had very seldom issues, like transactions that have not been transferred. In addition, the corresponding order data can now be transferred to financial accounting, if not done automatically with a connected ERP system.

If you send goods and accept payment by invoice, we would like to give some more information here:

• Payment by invoice with no further protection can be very “dangerous”. Depending on the customer segment and branch of industry, the risk of large payment defaults is often unacceptably high. Here your own experience will certainly help. Especially for shop owners who have started a new business, we recommend to deactivate this payment method or have it protected by a third party tool.

Further help

Do you need further support? PepperShop provides you with different options.

• Often a click in the administration on the top right on the question mark icon helps. Here you can get direct help on the relevant topic.
• We are also available to you by email swiss21-support@peppershop.commailto:swiss21-support@peppershop.com)