Orders: the fulfilment queue
You’ll need: Orders — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.
An order is a customer’s commitment. It is also the busiest screen in most businesses, because it is where the work actually queues up.
What an order holds
Customer name, phone and email identify who it is for — an order can be taken from someone who is not yet a contact, which matters when a stranger orders from your website at midnight.
Order items are what they want. Order number identifies it. Notes carry the rest.
Source and referrer code record where the order came from — your shop, a partner page, a campaign. Left blank they tell you nothing; filled in, they are how you find out which channels actually produce sales.
An order can reference an offer, so a package ordered as a package stays recognisable as one.
Collection or delivery
Pickup location, pickup date and pickup time cover collection.
For delivery there is home delivery, with delivery date, a GPS location and landmark, recipient name and phone, a delivery fee, the distance and a delivery code.
The landmark field is not decoration. An address in much of the world is a description, not a line on a form, and the driver needs the description. The GPS point plus the landmark is what turns an order into a delivery that arrives.
Status is what has happened, not a dropdown
An order moves through fulfilment: processing, packaged, ready for pickup, dispatched, out for delivery, delivered — or cancelled, with a reason.
Treat these as a record of events rather than a field to tidy. Mark packaged when it is packaged. The value of the queue is that it reflects reality; an order marked dispatched because someone was closing their screen is worse than one left honestly at processing.
Cancelled carries a reason, and it is worth writing a real one. Cancellations with reasons are the cheapest market research you will ever get.
Payment on an order
An order records that a payment was made, linked to the transaction it came from. Payment against an order is not the same as payment against an invoice — the invoice is where money is formally settled, and the next lessons cover that.
What the order gives you is the operational answer: has this customer paid for the thing I am about to hand over.
Try it
On staging.feeprime.com, place an order from your public site as a customer would, then find it in the app and walk it through fulfilment. Doing it from both sides once is worth more than reading the field list twice.