Online order fulfillment in Lightspeed eCom

When customers purchase in your online store, a new order appears on the Inventory → Fulfillments page in your Retail POS. You need to prepare and deliver the items from the online order. This process is referred to as order fulfillment.

Online orders also appear on My Sales → Orders, a page in your eCom admin dedicated to online orders specifically. From that page, you can add tracking numbers to orders, buy and print shipping labels that are required to ship the order with carriers like USPS, DHL, etc.

What is an online order fulfillment?

Online fulfillment is a process of picking, packing, and shipping an order to a customer. Here are the general steps you go through when processing orders:

1. View the order details. View the items purchased, customer address, total, discounts, and all related information either on your Fulfillments page in Retail POS dashboard, or the Orders page in your eCom admin.
2. Fulfill the order. Find items from the order on your shelves or warehouse and pack them. If it’s a pickup order, it's ready to be handed to the customer. If the order requires delivery, hand it over to the delivery service.   
3. Inform customers that their order is on its way/ready for pickup. When you change the status of the order in your Retail POS, your customer automatically gets an email informing them that their order has been shipped or ready for pickup.

Viewing online order details

You can see the details for each online order in the Inventory → Fulfillments page in your Retail POS, or on the Orders page in your eCom admin. We recommend going to the Fulfillment page since your POS is the source of truth for your sales, both online and offline. 

Clicking an order expands the detailed information about it. Here’s the list of details that you can view for online orders: 

• Sale receipt. The receipt number and date/time the order was placed. This is the same sales receipt you use for in-store purchases.
• Status. The status of an order will detail whether the fulfillment is "New", "In Progress'', or "Packed". Note that completed orders are recorded on the Sales history page and do not appear on the Fulfillments page.
• Type. Tells you if you need to deliver the order, or the customer will pick it up himself.
• Customer. The name of the customer who placed the order.
• Item. The list of products that were purchased and that you need to pack.
• QTY. The quantity of each product purchased. If you are using the Scanner app to fulfill the order, this may display as a partially picked quantity when not all products are available.
• Sales note. Customer details, address, and notes synced from your eCommerce platform.
• Fulfillment notes. These are typically used to record any issues that arose during the fulfillment of the order, such as damaged or unavailable stock. Notes can only be added through the Scanner app and 
• Assigned user. That’s someone from your employees who is assigned to pack the order. You can assign users only with the Scanner app.

Fulfilling online orders that require pickup

Online orders that require pickup instead of delivery have the Pickup type on the Fulfillments page.

To fulfill a new pickup order, you’ll have to pick and pack the purchased items. To notify customers their order is ready for pickup, change the order status to Packed. When you update the order status, customers get an email notification that keeps them in the loop about their order, and the status is automatically updated on the Orders page in your eCom admin.

To fulfill the online pickup order:

1. Locate the order on the Sell → Sales history page and click it to expand.
2. (For orders paid in cash marked as Unpaid) Click Edit, scroll down and click Add Payment. Then choose a payment type from the dropdown, enter the amount, and click Save Changes.
   Manually receive payment outside Retail POS to balance your systems. Receiving payment may not necessarily coincide with assigning the payment type to the order. Instead, you have the flexibility to manually receive payments at a later point.
3. Click Print receipt to use it as your packing list.
4. Locate the products from the packing slip, pack them and attach the receipt to the box.
5. Locate the paid order on the Fulfillments page, click to expand the order, and select Mark as packed. Customers will receive an automated notification to the email they specified during the checkout. The email says their order is ready for pickup and provides the location address and business hours.
6. After the customer collects the order (and you received the payment), complete the order: on the Fulfillments page, locate the order, click it to expand, and click Mark as picked up.

Once you mark an order as shipped, the order status will be updated to Completed. The order will then be removed from the Fulfillments page. To access the order after it’s completed, navigate to Sell → Sales history.

Fulfilling online orders that require delivery

Online orders that require shipping or local delivery have the Delivery type on the Fulfillments page.

To fulfill a new order, you’ll have to pick, pack, and ship the purchased items. Along with that, you change the order status to In Progress or Packed. When you update the order status, customers get an email notification that keeps them in the loop about their order, and the status is automatically updated on the Orders page in your eCom admin.

To fulfill the online order:

1. Locate the order on the Sell → Sales history page, expand it and click Print receipt to print a packing slip.
2. Locate the products from the packing slip and pack products into shipping bags or boxes.
3. Locate the order on the Fulfillments page, click to expand the order, and select Mark as packed. If the order has the Unpaid status, you have to manually assign a payment method to it.
4. (For orders shipped with carriers) Buy and print the order shipping label that you then need to attach to the package.
5. After you hand over the goods for the delivery service, locate the order on the Fulfillments page, click to expand, and select Mark as shipped. 
6. To send customers a tracking number within the invoice, navigate to Sell → Sales history, locate the order and click it, then click Edit and enter details in the Sales notes field. Click Email receipt. Alternatively, you can send the tracking number as an email notification from your eCom admin.

Once you mark an order as shipped, the order status will be updated to Completed. The order will then be removed from the Fulfillments page. To access the order after it’s completed, navigate to Sell → Sales history.

Fulfilling orders in multi-outlet stores

A multi-outlet store is an online store that has several outlets connected to it. In general, fulfilling orders in multi-outlet stores is essentially the same as in single-outlet stores. In both cases, you receive the order and then proceed to process it, either as a pickup or a shipping order.

When you do not limit shipping methods based on inventory level, you may face a situation when a customer places an order and chooses a delivery method associated with a location where items are insufficient. In that case, you will have to:

• Transfer goods between locations and then create a transferring record in your POS about moving inventory. Alternatively, you can restock items from your supplier.
• Once you have all items ready for delivery/pickup, mark the order as Packed.
• After handing over the goods for the delivery service, you mark the order as Shipped. In case you hand the order to a customer in person through the in-store pickup, you mark the order as Picked up.

Fulfilling orders delivered with shipping methods not associated with outlets

There might be a small difference in how orders may appear on the Fulfillment page in your POS. That depends on whether you associate your shipping methods with outlets or not.

When you have a shipping method that is not associated with any outlet, orders will be assigned to outlets capable of fulfilling the order in full where possible.

If no outlet has all products within an order in stock, the order will appear as splitted on the Fulfillment page and assigned to multiple outlets based on available stock.

Let’s say, you have bike stores in Portland and Wisconsin. One store currently is out of bike helmets. Suppose a customer has purchased a bike and a bike helmet from your online store. When you get a new order, it will appear splitted into two separate sales:

Splitted online orders cannot be marked as partially fulfilled. To complete the order you have to fulfill products separately at each location where the items are available.

When you mark the sale as Packed in one outlet, the entire order is still in an Unfulfilled status. To fulfill the entire order, you need to mark each of splitted orders as Packed. If you need to transfer goods between outlets to pack the order, you also have to create a transferring record in your POS after moving inventory.