Understanding LiteCommerce order life cycles

Every customer's order placed through LiteCommerce shopping system goes through a life cycle comprised of several order statues.

When a visitor places an item into his shopping cart, a 'Temporary' order is created to accommodate the contents of his cart. Orders with the 'Temporary' (or just 'T') status do not appear in the Administrator zone in the order list. Temporary orders are stored for the default period of 2 hours, and if their status does not change during that period, they expire from the database. Keeping shopping cart contents for a certain period of time allows store customers to return to the store after some time and complete their orders without having to repeat product selection process again.

After a customer selects shipment and payment methods and completes corresponding information, the order acquires an' Incomplete' (or 'I') status. Typically an order remains in this status until a customer presses the 'Submit order' button, at which time an order using an offline payment method is assigned the 'Queued' status and the invoice is displayed to the customer. Orders with interactive payment methods selected remain in 'Incomplete' status while being processed by the payment gateway and then acquire an order status according to results received from the payment gateway (either 'Processed' for successful transactions or 'Failed' for unsuccessful ones).

If your shopping system has AntiFraud add-on module installed and configured to perform order checkups, upon successful payment gateway processing the 'Processed' orders are being analyzed by anti-fraud service. If fraud checkup finds the order to be suspicious, the order is marked for manual processing by changing its status to 'Queued'.

'Queued' orders are the orders that require attention from the store administrator. These can be the orders using offline shipping methods or the orders found to be suspicious by the fraud protection service. Once the order details are reviewed by the administrator, and the necessary actions are taken, the administrator would typically change the order status to either 'Processed' or 'Declined'.

'Declined' orders are essentially the same as the orders with the 'Failed' status. Similarly they do not affect stock amounts, do not take up gift certificates, bonus points or discount coupons and are kept in the order database for book-keeping purposes. While 'Failed' status results from payment processors rejecting the payment, 'Declined' status can be set by the store administrator for a number of reasons.

'Complete' orders are the orders that have been paid for and shipped out and thus do not require further attention. LiteCommerce system treats such orders just like the 'Processed' orders, except for that they do not appear in the list of recent orders available in the 'Orders' section of the 'Management' menu.

'Failed' orders remain in the database for book-keeping records. They do not affect stock amounts (if you have the Inventory Tracking module enabled), neither do they take up gift certificates (introduced by the Gift Certificates module), bonus points or discount coupons (introduced by the Promotion Tools module).

Described above is a standard order life cycle of a LiteCommerce-based online store. You can adjust it according to your business needs by defining and utilizing additional order statuses, which are the subsidiary statuses of the predefined (primary) statuses discussed above.