Managing Orders In Magento

The “Orders” section is a common place you may find yourself in your Magento admin panel if you manage a Magento eCommerce website. The more successful you become the more orders you will have, therefore understanding the order functionality within Magento is important to becoming successful within a Magento website.

Viewing Orders

You can find your orders in Sales => Orders left of the Dashboard tab in the Magento admin panel. Here you can view all previous orders. You can sort them by status in the right column so if you want to bulk update or just view all your pending or processing orders you can easily find them quickly.
You can also do actions to an order such as hold, cancel, or print packing slips for an order. There is also the ability to export orders via CSV in the top right of order section if you want to see all your order information in an excel sheet.
The first order will come in as 1000000001, and goes to 1000000002 and up from there. This makes it easy to figure out how many orders you have received in Magento.

Status and State Of Orders

Your orders will be grouped into two types, in which they have a state and status.
State => The state of an order such as New, Pending Payment, Processing, or Complete.
Status => The status is the status of an order in a state.
This explanation is obviously a bit redundant, but it is the simplest way to explain it. Essentially, the status is applied to the state, and you will notice that if you go to System => Order Status you can apply a status to a state because a status is literally  the status of an order state.
Orders in the New State will be in the pending status, until you go in and close them out. Orders you have closed out will be processed. We will discuss how to close out orders in this tutorial.


Default States: 

• New = A new order has been made
• Pending Payment = Payment is pending but not received
• Processing = Payment is complete but order not shipped
• Complete = Order is shipped and payment has been made
• Canceled = A canceled order
• On Hold = An order on hold, not shipped
• Payment Review = Payment under review

Default Statuses:

• Canceled
• Closed
• Complete
• Suspected Fraud
• On Hold
• Payment Review
• Paypal Canceled Reversal
• Paypal Reversed
• Pending
• Pending Payment
• Pending Paypal
• Processing

You can create new statuses and states if you want to create your own custom order management workflow in Magento. This might apply if you have a special type of payment gateway, shipping method, or other type of eCommerce product that needs a special order workflow.

Viewing Orders In Magento:

There is a wealth of information in the default Magento install about an order. When you click on the order in the orders section of the admin panel you will be brought to the individual order page. Here you can see the order information itself, invoices, credit memos, shipments, comments history, and transactions associated with the order.

Order Information:

Order #:
Here you can see the order date, order status, and purchased from information. The purchased from information will tell you what website it was purchased with, from what store within the website it was purchased, and what store view it was purchased from. Remember you can create multiple websites, stores, and store views in the Magento System => Manage Stores area of the admin panel which is how you would create multiple websites, stores, and store views.
Account Information:
This will tell you the customer name, customer email and customer group of the person who made the order.
Billing Address:
This is simply the billing address of the person making the order. Notice you can edit the billing address in the order in case something needs to be changed.
Shipping Address:
The shipping address may very well be the same as the billing address and can also be edited in the order information section.
Payment Information:
Here you can see what type of payment method was used to place the order as well as the currency used to make the transaction.
Shipping & Handling Information:
This section tells you the cost of the shipping and handling fee and what shipping method was used such as freight, UPS, USPS, or flat rate.

Items Ordered:
This tells you the product name, sku number, item status, original price, price of the sale, qty with order / invoiced / shipped, subtotal, tax amount, tax percentage, discount amount, and row total for each item that was ordered. This is the default information that is presented in the order because it is generally the most important information for the store owner. However, because Magento is open source and customizable, it is possible to customize the data that is presented here in Magento with programming knowledge.
Comments History:
Here you can see the times and dates of the order statuses that the order has been through. You can also submit a comment and send an email with a status update to the customer. You can even make the comments visible on the front end so when they login to their account they can see the comments.
Order Totals:
Here is simply the subtotal, shipping & handling fee, grand total, total paid, total refunded, and total due. This gives you a quick summary of where the monetary side of the order is at.

Invoices:

Here you can see the invoices associated with your order. You can also click on the invoice to see the individual invoices themselves.

Credit Memos:

Credit memos are basically the invoices associated with a refund. Therefore they alert the customer that their order has been refunded (credited). You can see your credit memos associated with each order just like invoices.

Shipments:

Here you can see all the shipments associated with you order. You can click on the shipment information to see the information in more detail.

Comments History:

The comments section will tell you all the statuses of the order and any comments that were submitted to the customer during those status updates.

Transactions:

The transactions are the payments that are made and associated with the order. You may see one as a credit card, or Paypal express checkout, depending on the type of transaction or payment method the customer used.