Orders: the fulfilment queue
Before you start, open this page: Sales / Orders.
Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.
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 say who it is for.
An order can be taken from somebody who is not a contact yet. That matters when a stranger orders from your website at midnight.
- Order items are what they want.
- Order number identifies it.
- Notes carry everything else.
- Source and referrer code record where the order came from. Your shop, a partner page, a campaign.
Those last two tell you nothing if they are blank. Filled in, they are how you find out which channels actually bring you sales.
An order can also point at an offer, so a package ordered as a package stays recognisable as one.
Collection or delivery
For collection there is pickup location, pickup date and pickup time.
For delivery there is home delivery, with a delivery date, a GPS location and a landmark, the recipient name and phone, a delivery fee, the distance, and a delivery code.
The landmark field is not decoration.
In much of the world an address is a description, not a line on a form. The driver needs the description. The GPS point plus the landmark is what turns an order into a delivery that actually arrives.
Status is what has happened, not a dropdown to tidy
An order moves through: processing, packaged, ready for pickup, dispatched, out for delivery, delivered. Or cancelled, with a reason.
Treat these as a record of what happened, not a field to keep neat.
Mark it packaged when it is packaged.
The whole value of the queue is that it matches reality. An order marked dispatched because somebody 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 payment it came from.
Paying against an order is not the same as paying against an invoice. The invoice is where money is formally settled, and the next lessons cover that.
What the order gives you is the practical 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 the way a customer would. Then find it in the app and walk it through to delivered.
Doing it from both sides once is worth more than reading the field list twice.