Orders

Every order Lodsted has pulled from your store: where it is in the process, which wave and bin it is in, what shipped and when, and everything that happened to it.

The list

Filters

Chips along the top select statuses; several can be on at once. The default view is Downloaded, In Wave, Printed and On Hold, the orders that still need something. Two chips are not statuses: Priority (orders flagged as rush) and Backordered (open orders short on stock). A chip with your store's name limits the list to that store.

Search

The search box matches order numbers, customer names, tags and store names. Three prefixes make it exact:

Columns

Click column headers to sort. Click a row to open the order.

Statuses

Downloaded → In Wave → Printed → Shipped is the normal path; Complete, Cancelled and On Hold are the side exits. The full table with who sets each one is on How an order flows. Shipped, Complete and Cancelled are final: the store cannot reopen them. On Hold is not final; held orders keep being refreshed from the store.

Tags

Every tag on the Shopify order comes with it. Whatever you or your apps tag an order with in Shopify (wholesale, gift, fragile, vip, a campaign name) is on the order in Lodsted, shown in the Tags column, and refreshed from the store on each sync until the order is on a wave. That makes tags the easiest way to track a particular kind of order through the warehouse:

• Find them: type the tag in the Orders search; it matches tags as well as names and numbers.
• Wave them separately: a wave definition with the condition "Order tag has wholesale" puts those orders on their own wave, printed and picked together.
• See them on paper: tags print in the order's header on the packing slip, so a packer sees gift or fragile before closing the box.
• Hold them: tag an order in Shopify to mark it, then put it On Hold in Lodsted until someone has looked at it.

One tag changes behavior: split. An order tagged split in Shopify (or in Lodsted) is allowed to ship in more than one shipment. A wave takes the lines it can fill from stock, the rest wait, and after the first shipment the order drops back to Downloaded until the remaining lines are waved; each shipment gets its own packing slip and shipment id. Without the tag an order is all-or-nothing: it waits until every line is in stock. Use it for a customer who would rather have most of the order now than all of it later. Details under Split orders.

Lodsted adds a few tags of its own and writes some of them back to Shopify, so store staff can see warehouse progress on the Shopify order (which wave and bin, whether it is printed, whether it is backordered).

Order detail

Click a row. The detail has two tabs.

Details

• Header: order number, store, status, payment status, dates, shipping method, totals, tags.
• Bill To / Ship To: addresses as they came from the store ("Same as shipping" when identical).
• Line items: SKU, description, quantity, price, extended. A quantity of 0 means the line was removed or refunded at the store; it is kept for history and ignored for picking.
• Shipments: one row per shipment with date, method, tracking and charge.
• Waves: every wave the order is or was on, with a Remove from wave button.

Activity

Time, user and action for everything that happened: status changes, wave assigned or removed, shipped, tags added or removed, store changes detected. This is the first place to look when someone asks "what happened to this order".

Buttons

Holds

The hold button next to the order number (only while Downloaded) sets the order On Hold; waves skip held orders. Restore puts it back to Downloaded. Shopify fulfillment holds arrive as On Hold with the shopify-hold tag and release themselves when the store releases them; a manual hold is never released by the store. Held orders are still refreshed from the store each sync, so line changes made while on hold are picked up. A line fulfilled in Shopify while the order is held drops to what is still unfulfilled, so it is not picked again after the release. A held order that is fulfilled in Shopify becomes Complete.

Ship-to address holds

Lodsted buys domestic US labels only, with no customs form. An order whose ship-to cannot go on one arrives On Hold with the ship-to-hold tag instead of Downloaded:

• the address is outside the US, or names a country Lodsted does not recognize;
• a US territory (Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau), which needs a customs form;
• a military APO, FPO or DPO address (state AA, AE or AP), which also needs a customs form;
• a US address with no zip code.

The Shipping alert list gets an email naming the order and the reason, and the order's Activity shows it. Check the address with the buyer. Correct it in Shopify and the next sync releases the hold by itself (unless a Shopify fulfillment hold also holds the order); Restore releases it as is; or cancel the order in Shopify. The check runs again on every update from the store, so a Downloaded order whose address is changed to one of the above is held the same way.

Cancellations

Cancel or fully refund at the store; Lodsted sets Cancelled on the next sync. If the order was already In Wave or Printed, its stock is released when the wave completes and the packing slip for the bin should be set aside. There is no cancel button in Lodsted.

Changes after waving

Once an order is In Wave or Printed it is frozen in Lodsted. The picker may already have it in a bin, so edits made in Shopify after that point (a new address, a different shipping method, lines added, removed or re-quantified, a changed total) are not applied to the Lodsted order. Instead, on the next sync Lodsted:

• adds the changed tag to the order and writes an Activity line listing exactly what differs;
• sends an Order changed alert email to the Shipping alert addresses, naming the order, its wave and bin and the changes, at most once per order every four hours;
• shows the order's current lines at the pack station with a confirm step before a label can be bought.

Someone has to act on the email. For an address change, the pack station buys the label with the current address once the packer confirms. For a change to what was ordered, remove the order from the wave (it goes On Hold and its stock is released), restore it, and let the next wave take it with the new lines; the packer pulls the old bin. Orders that are Downloaded or On Hold are not frozen; they are refreshed from the store every sync.

Backorders

After each sync Lodsted walks the Downloaded orders oldest first and, for every shippable line, checks whether the units available at active locations (on hand minus allocated) cover that order and every older order ahead of it. An order that comes up short on any line is backordered: Lodsted adds the backordered tag, writes the same tag to the order in Shopify, and counts the shortage in the Inventory page's Backordered column.

The tag is permanent. Stock arriving does not remove it; it stays on the order, in Lodsted and in Shopify, as a record that the order waited for stock, until the order ships or is canceled. What stock arriving does change is eligibility: the order is taken by the next wave like any other, tag or no tag. So:

• The Backordered chip and the dashboard count show every open order that is short right now plus every open order carrying the tag.
• An order under the Backordered chip may be waveable already; the wave preview is the test. The Inventory page's Backordered column is the live shortage.
• Waves skip an order only while it is actually short (unless it is tagged split, in which case the lines that can ship are taken).

Split orders

Tag an order split and a wave may take only the lines it can fill. The rest stay on the order; after the first shipment is processed the order returns to Downloaded until the remaining lines are waved. Each wave produces its own packing slip with its own shipment id (-1, -2…), and the slip shows lines already shipped as SHIPPED and lines still waiting as BACKORDERED.