What is an ‘Order’ – in general? #

An order refers to a customer’s request to purchase a product or service from a business. It is typically initiated by the customer through an online store or by phone, email, or in-person. The order includes details such as the customer’s contact information, the items being purchased, and the total cost. Once the order is placed, the business will process the payment, package and ship the items, and send a confirmation of the order to the customer..

What is an ‘Order Record’ in eTail Support? #

The purpose of an order record in eTail Support is to document a customer order placed on your business – it contains a list of goods and services that a customer has requested from you, along with the customers details, payment details and other reference numbers that you need to have to process the order correctly. etail Support’s order records are designed to help you to get the products to the customer as fast as possible and to record what the customer has agreed to pay for the goods.

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ACCOUNTS TIP – Placing an order has no effect on your accounts at all. Your accounts are updated when an INVOICE is created as your order is shipped.

An order is a record that links customer details and product details together and stores the order details. #

The first thing that you need to know about how eTail Support stores orders is that every order record stored in eTail support is linked to a customer record and to a one or more product records. The order record relies on the underlying customer record for the customer details and on the product records for the details of the items on the order.

The name and address of the customer is not actually stored in the order record, the Order record is linked to the customer record and draws the data about the customer and their addresses from there.

Similarly the product details are not stored in the order, they are just linked to from the order record.

The order number, the prices that the items were sold at and the order specific information like the date that it was placed, the date that it was shipped, the tracking number it was shipped under and the courier that it was shipped with are all stored in the order record.

How are orders created in eTail Support? #

The eTail Support system allows orders to be created in a number of different ways.

Click here for more details on what happens when an order is added to eTail Support.

Click here to see how you can manually add an order through the user interface.

Order Statuses #

Every order in the eTail Support system has an order status, orders can only have one order status at any one time.

Click here for more details on order statuses

How do Order Records relate to Warehouse Records in tail Support? #

Each order is allocated to a warehouse.

An order can only be allocated to one warehouse.

Each stock item is also allocated to a single warehouse – so the system can check to see if each order can ship or not using the stock that is stored in the warehouse that the order is allocated to.

Only stock stored in the warehouse that the order is allocated to is considered when the system allocates stock to the order.

Shipping a part of an order (Part Shipping) #

Orders in eTail Support can not be ‘part shipped’ but they can be split into two parts, a part that can be shipped and another part that is back ordered – for that reason there is no ‘part shipped’ or ‘part shippable’ status in the system.

Part shipping an order is a manual process – a user has to decide to do it and take manual action in the system.

This video explains the options for shipping orders in eTail Support

The Order Details Page #

The Order details page for any particular order can be opened from the List & Search orders page by pressing the ‘edit order’ button.

The order detail page has two tabs “Basic Info” and “Notes”

The Basic Info tab contains all of the details of the order laid out in a format that is easy to read and use.

The Notes tab contains a list of text records that can be used to trace the history of the order.

If the order has not been shipped, then most aspects of the order can be edited you can change the customers order number, the factory order number, edit the products on the order and the selling prices of those items.

You can also change the warehouse that the order is allocated to and the vat rules that are applied to the order.

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Shipping details #

One of the major benefits of the eTail Support system is the way that it tries to automatically create shipping labels for each added order.

If the system sees that all of he stock that the order needs to ship is available in the warehouse to which the order is allocated, then it will use the details shown in the ‘Shipping Details’ section of the order record to automatically create an appropriate shipping label for the order.

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This speeds up the shipping process and saves you a lot of time in the warehouse.

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