Managing orders

When your customer places an order, all its details are recorded in Ecwid control panel > My Sales. This article is about how to access and manage the orders in your store.
 

This video shows how to process orders in your Ecwid store. More tutorials on our YouTube channel: Ecwid Team

Order statuses

Each Ecwid order has a payment order state and a fulfillment order state.

Payment statuses

Fulfillment statuses

If the order statuses you see in your Ecwid control panel or on our forums are different, please, refer to this article for the explanation: Improved order statuses

Abandoned carts

Not every person who adds something to their cart in your online store makes it all the way through the checkout process to complete a purchase.

Each time a potential customer provides their contact information but leaves the checkout, we store that order attempt as an abandoned cart.

You can review the list of abandoned checkouts in your Ecwid store and follow up with cart recovery emails.

Please see the details in our article about Abandoned carts. 

Create orders

If you sell not only in your online store but also process sales offline, via phone or email, you still can record these orders in your Ecwid control panel and keep track of them.

In Ecwid it is possible to create orders manually for accounting purposes to have full orders history in your control panel even for orders that were processed via phone or offline.

To create an order go to My Sales -> Edit orders page and click "Create Order" button at  the top right of the page:

Fill in the order information and click "Place order". The order will appear in your sales list.

FAQ

I already have some orders, where is my money?

Ecwid itself does not collect or store any money for sales made to your customers. It just helps you sell your products and charge your customers, all sales are going directly to your payment gateway's account.  So you will need to contact your payment gateway(for example PayPal) to have your money transferred to your bank if it is not set up to do so automatically. 

If you haven't set up any payment gateway yet, please select one from this list and then follow the instructions.

Please note, that if an order was placed using a so-called "offline" payment method (for example "Phone ordering" or "Pay by check", such methods have the "Offline" type in the control panel), then Ecwid just creates a new order in the database and stores customer`s data. No actual charges are made, so you need to contact your customer to get your money.

How can I change my Order ID's?

By default, order id's are the numbers starting from 1, which are incremented for each order. Ecwid paid users to have the ability to change what their Order IDs look like for their customers and increase them if necessary. So if you don’t want to start with order #1 and want to appear as a mature online store for your customers, you can increase it to #1000 in a few clicks. 

The Order ID can be changed on the Settings → General → Cart page, (the "Order Settings" section).

Also, you can add a prefix or suffix to your IDs, so they can look like “MY-STORE-1000-2011″. Where “MY-STORE” and “2011″ are prefixes/suffixes set up in your Ecwid backend. For example, this feature is helpful if you have numerous Ecwid stores and want to differentiate your orders. 

So basically your Order ID has the following format PREFIX-NUMBER-SUFFIX, where, PREFIX and SUFFIX are static parts and can be empty. NUMBER always remains and is increased incrementally with each order automatically.

Why order IDs are not consecutive? Some order ids are missing

You may notice the missing order ids on the Sales page. E.g. you have order #10, the next order has the #14 ID and there are no #11, #12, #13 orders.

Such missing order IDs appear when your customer starts to checkout and doesn't finish the transaction. For example, if you use PayPal Standard payment gateway and customer is redirected to PayPal but doesn't pay, Ecwid will create a hidden "incomplete" order which isn't shown in the 'Orders' table. Such orders are listed under the Abandoned sales tab (this option is available for paid users only). So just ignore these missing IDs, it isn't an issue.

How to assign a tracking number to an order?

In order to assign a tracking number to an order, perform these steps: 

1. Log in to your Ecwid control panel and open the Sales tab.
2. Click the "Ship >>" button near the necessary order.
3. Enter the necessary tracking number and save the changes. A customer will get a notification with this number. 

If you want, you can modify or translate the text of such notifications. 

Ecwid App Market also features the apps that allow you to track all your shipments as well as update the customers on this shipping status.

AfterShip

AfterShip allows to track all your shipments and send delivery updates to your customers automatically. With this app, you can view order delivery statuses, filter your shipments by date, status, courier, and destination, take stock of your delivery performance, and take real-time action before problems might occur.

AfterShip automatically generates a tracking page for each shipment. You can customize tracking page with your brand’s logo, link to your store, or even its Instagram feed and generate more sales. You can also embed the AfterShip Track Button to allow tracking directly from your store’s site. 

The app has free and paid plans.

Can my customers get a tracking code by e-mail?

Yes, Ecwid sends the tracking code and URL in notifications to your customers.

If they don't get them, then first of all, please check if the "Order shipped" notifications are enabled. Then check the content of these notifications, they should have this code:

 <#if order.trackingUrl?has_content>                     <tr>                         <td align="center" valign="top" style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;font-size: 14px;line-height: 24px;padding-top: 16px;color: #333333;">                             <a href="${order.trackingUrl}" style="text-decoration: none;"><b>Track your package</b></a>                         </td>                     </tr>                 </#if>

When you use user-defined shipping, Ecwid actually doesn't know what shipping carrier you use for it and doesn't include a tracking URL in emails. Only a tracking number is included. So, you will need to add such a URL to your notifications manually.

Find  ${order.trackingUrl} variable in the code above and replace it with the tracking URL. You will also need to remove opening and closing <#if order.trackingUrl?has_content> ... </#if> tags from this part of the template. Here is an example of how it will look:

                    <tr>
                        <td align="center" valign="top" style="font-family: Arial,sans-serif;font-size: 14px;line-height: 24px;padding-top: 16px;color: #333333;">
                            <a href="http://wwwapps.ups.com/tracking/tracking.cgi" style="text-decoration: none;"><b>Track your package</b></a>
                        </td>
                    </tr>
                

Feel free to replace the UPS tracking URL with any other one.

How do I print the order information

If you need to print the order information, you can do that from Ecwid control panel → Sales. You can do that either for each sale individually - by pressing "Print invoice" button next to each product in the sales list - or for a few orders in batch, by putting the checkmark next to each order you want to print and pressing "Print selected" button

You may also want to consider the following apps for editing and printing invoices, packing slips, sales receipts and shipping labels: Useful apps

How can I generate sales reports based on my orders in Ecwid?

Please refer to this article: How can I get sales reports based on my orders in Ecwid?

Can I import my orders into QuickBooks?

Yes, it is totally possible. Please refer to this article for instructions: Quickbooks Online

 Alternatively, you can export your orders from Ecwid:

• Open the sales section in your control panel: Sales → Orders
• Click the 'Export All' button at the bottom of the list or tick the orders you want to export and click 'Export selected'
• In the export settings dialog, select delimiter (what is it?) and the columns you want to get in a file and press 'Download CSV file'
• Save the CSV file on your computer

After that, you will be able to import this file to Quickbooks.

Can a customer return to the shop and re-initiate an unfinished order by himself?

In Ecwid, the contents of customer's cart are preserved for 30 days in their browser. The cart contents are only erased upon successful order placing. Moreover, the addresses put in the completed checkout steps are remembered. So the customer is able to re-initiate the checkout process for the same order again. If, however, your customer is not able to re-initiate an order the said way (for example, if their browser's data has been cleared somehow on their computer), you can find it in the Abandoned carts page of your Ecwid control panel and restore it.
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How can I decrease the number of abandoned carts and enhance checkout conversion rate?

In order to increase the conversion rate in your store, please follow these general recommendations:

• Make sure all payment methods in your store are properly configured (you can find an exact instruction on the configuration of each payment method available in Ecwid here).  
• Ask your customers whether your payment methods are convenient for them. First of all, your customers should be available to use them (e.g. national payment gateways may be a trouble for international customers). Second, your customers may sometimes be confused as to how exactly to pay online. In order to make the checkout more clear and understandable, provide more payment methods in your store, name them accordingly (e.g. 'Credit card' is not the most appropriate name for PayPal - instead, 'PayPal or Credit cards' would be a bit better) and don't forget to accompany each of them with a good instruction. 
• Having the generally appealing, well described and well-illustrated products and overall confiding website also helps to lower the rate of abandoned carts, but this is the least important part, affecting the sales only after the aforementioned typical roadblocks in the checkout are removed in your store.