Order Processing Back to Front

Does anyone know when this will be fixed

It doesn't look like it is prioritised at all. Vote for it here if you haven't already http://nopcommerce.codeplex.com/workitem/10392

I am developing a new site now and and I am not starting to regret that I based this on NopCommerce rather than an alternative platform as this issue will cause a lot of problems for meg.

In my current website I cancel all orders where the user does not complete payments. In the last three months this constitute 37% of all orders in my database. I have a conversion rate of 3% now, but I am quite sure this would have been higher if I this functionality had been better. The latest versions of NopCommerce has a functionality where registered users can restart payment on aborted orders, but this does not help for guest registrations.

In my new site I expect a lot more traffic and if a get 200 orders a day I would, with the current solution, have to manually cancel 74 orders daily. Clearly this is not viable for a larger e-commerce site. Also if you are selling products with limited quantities the aborted orders will hold inventory until you cancel them.

In a previous post the reason for NopCommerce design was explained like this:

"Managing product quantity. You have 5 items of "product 1". And it doesn't allow negative quantity. Two customers are simultaneously redirected to a third-party site. Both of them have "product 1" in the carts and the quantity set to 4. So after orders are paid (on a third-party site) they're redirected back to a store site and then orders should be placed. The first customer will be able to place order (total product quantity will become 5-4=1). But the second customer will not be able to do it (if case if the negative quantities are not allowed). But both of them completed have the payments" https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/11419/nop-20-order-of-steps-in-checkout.aspx?p=2#46859

In  my view this is attacking the problem from a wrong angle. What happens if you have 1 product in stock and two customers try to check out at the same time. The first customer to hit the checkout button get the product, while the other one gets notified that it is now out of stock. Result is a very unhappy customer.

For sites with limited products and high turnover you need to ensure that items put into the shopping cart are available for the user when he checks out. Then you will also remove the "paid order but no product left in stock" issue described above. Due to this we are now developing functionality (for a flash sales site) that will reserve inventory in 45 minutes after you put it into the shopping cart. After 45 minutes of inactivity the shopping cart is deleted (after warning to the user). We are however still stuck with the aborted payment issues as this also will reserve stock and we probably need to implement a functionality where unpaid orders are cancelled after 20 minutes or so to release stock to other customers. The customer will only get an order confirmation when the order is paid. A administrators we are however stuck with a massive number of cancelled orders in our database.....

Not a perfect solution, but it might work untill we see that our business is a success and we can defend to change platforms to a more mature one.

I think the confusion starts with having 3 different sets of "status".

i.e.
Order status
Payment status
Shipping status

I don't see the point on this. Why not have only one set of "status"? We have been using the same eCommerce system since 2004 (yes I know well outdated) but we have been able to tweak here and there to keep it up with the trends. Below is our current order status and processing and I wish the Nop had the same structure. (We are thinking of switching to Nop)

Statuses:
Unfinalized- No Details Written to DB, No Emails
Saved - Details Written to DB, No Emails
Pending - Details Written to DB, Email Sent (Email 1)
Paid - Stock figure/DB updated, Email Sent (Email 2)
Shipped - DB Updated, Email Sent (Email 3)
Complete - DB Updated, Email Sent (Email 4)
Cancelled - Stock figure increased/DB Updated, Email Sent (Email nfinalized)

Lets say; There are 8 items in stock for "product A"

1.Customer adds product A to shopping cart
2. Customer fills out name, tel, email, billing address and shipping address and selects payment method in one page
3. Customer then selects shipping methods and if needed enter some notice on the order such as "If not in Leave in the Garage"
4. Customer checks all order details and clicks on "Submit Order". After the click following takes place;
4.1 - Order details are written to the DB and order status is set to "Pending" (there are still 8 items in stock)
4.2 - An "Order Acknowledgement" email is sent to customer & store admin saying an order has been placed giving details of the cart items.
4.3 - Customer is presented with payment page and enter card information and clicks on "Submit Payment"
5. Once the payment details are submitted it can only go two way. Payment is either successful or failed
If Successful;
5.1 Customer is presented with "Thank you for your order" payment page
5.2 Total number of stock for "product a" is reduced to 7 (8-1)
5.3 A "Payment Confirmation" Email is sent to customer and store admin
5.4 Order status is changed from "Pending" to "Paid"
If Payment Failed;
5.1 Customer is presented with "Payment failed page" with a link to payment page to enter the credit card details again
5.2 Order is still "Pending" & Shopping cart is Empty
5.3 Order can be found under "My orders" link to view or re-submit payment information.

Up to this point change of order status and change of inventory numbers are handled by the system

Here is the next part;
6. Store staff process all "Paid" orders and ship the actual goods. They can also contact customers with "Pending" order to see if they wish to go ahead and make a payment.
7. Once the goods are shipped, store staff "manually" change the order status from "Paid" to "Shipped"
8. Next day or couple of days letter store admin receives an email from UPS to confirm delivery
9. Once email is received from UPS, store staff manually change order status from "shipped" to "Complete"
10. As far as store admin is concerned this order is fully processed and order status is left as "Complete"

With regards to point 9 above, I understand if you have 100's "Shipped" orders every day, changing the status on those can be time consuming but for those type of high volume stores "Shipped" status can be merged with "Complete" in other words once you ship the goods you can mark them as "Shipped & Complete" only deal with those where the item is not delivered, missed by UPS and so on.

Yes we do not have any "Return Request", "Partial Refund", "Full Refund", "Shipped in Full", "Partial Shipped" but those kind of issues quite rare and each of these can be noted by simply adding an admin note to the order. Something along the line of; "Customer returned 1 item, £108.50 refund given" or "1 out of 4 item is lost. Replacement sent on 25/05/2008, filed a lost claim with UPS.

Still,

As soon as I get the grip on Nop Order Status and Nop Product vs Variant, we will probably switch to Nop and hope for the best.

roger99 wrote:

Most of our clients follow these orders up and convert them into payments. Seems a bit weird to just throw orders away?

Hello,

I was just wondering how long it takes for an order to be processed after the customer has paid for it using credit card and chosen the shipping method as "In-store", and how long would it take to process if the shipping method is by ground or air.  Cause for some reason its taking a long time to process.  I am just waiting for it to be completed under the dashboard of nopcommerce.

Thanks! :)

The problem with your flow, is how will it work for COD orders?

Where you first make order, then delivery, then payment.



volkanozer wrote:

The problem with your flow, is how will it work for COD orders?

Where you first make order, then delivery, then payment.



volkanozer wrote:

No, if client does not want it, that means he does not want it. And harassing him with sale speech is actually bad practice.
Unless your system is broken and the reason your orders was not paid for related to system issue.


daveb wrote:

d1m4 wrote:

I agree with you, giving the customer a sales speech is bad practice. However the customer does want to make a purchase - they have pressed the confirm order button. I would be against pursuing abandoned baskets - however I do know of clients who have asked for reporting tools to be authored to enable this.

What the customer has failed to do is complete a payment. Customer services may be able to help the customer out in this respect. It may be that the customer had second thoughts about the purchase at the payment stage but assuming that, is going to cost the shop owner some sales. There are many reasons why a payment may not be made.

But you are free to run your business model how you like, I just thought it weird to throw confirmed orders away is all.

I guess I will agree you with that he has pressed "Confirm Order", so he did make decision to buy. So then it would be good idea to check if he is not attended to paying for order with lets say 24 hours.

That's why I did got with route of creating order before payment and letting client attend to unpaid orders (actually scheduled task creates lead in our CRM).

I also made task that releases stock if customer has not paid within 10 minutes (it is configurable but that how my client wanted). Then if he tries to complete order at later stage, if there is still stock available, it relocates it back to that order again. The reason for that, is low stock products really suffer from customer cleaning on to the order, by ordering, but not paying for the order.

daveb wrote: