Why is it important to promptly reflect shipping progress?
When an order requires you to ship out products, you must promptly reflect the order's shipping status to keep your customers updated.
Swiftly processing orders will help you earn your customers' trust and this will in turn translate into more sales.
Cash in advance vs. Cash on delivery (COD)
Though most online stores use advance payments, COD remains widely used in certain countries.
What is the difference?
There are mainly two types of payments used by online stores.
First, there are orders that are paid in advance, before the goods or services are shipped.
For example, customers can choose to pay by credit card on your online store during the checkout stage.
Orders are imported to your admin page as paid and you can immediately prepare for shipment if there aren't any further issues.
For bank deposits, you will have to manually confirm the payment before preparing for shipment.
Second, there are orders that are paid once the goods or services are received.
For instance, customers can pay for their order upon delivery by giving cash to the courier.
In this case, the orders come in to your admin page as unpaid but you must ship the order out.
Go to Payment settings to learn how to change the COD settings.
How do I confirm payments for orders paid in advance?
There are different options for different payment methods.
- Bank deposit
- Search for unpaid orders in Orders > Fulfillment > Awaiting payment.
- Go to your pay-in bank website and check the deposits and their details, including the account holder, deposit amount, etc.
- In your admin page, select the order that matches the bank statement and click Confirm payment to move the order to its next status.
- Other payment methods
- The order status will automatically be updated once the payment is confirmed by the payment provider.
- When the status is updated, the order will appear in either Orders > Fulfillment > Order in progress or Orders > Fulfillment > Preparing for shipment.
When are orders displayed in Order in progress or Preparing for shipment?
- If you have enabled the Order in progress status in My Store > Store setup > General settings > Orders (Tab), paid orders will appear under the Order in progress menu.
- You can use the Order in progress menu when you wish to have an extra step to check the inventory or process anything else before moving your orders to Preparing for shipment.
- If you do not use Order in progress, paid orders will automatically appear in Preparing for shipment.
Shipping your orders
You can ship both paid orders and COD orders as below.
- Search for the orders you want to mark as Preparing for shipment in Orders>Fulfillment>Order in progress.
Select the orders and click Mark as Preparing for shipment.
The orders will be moved to Orders > Fulfillment > Preparing for shipment. - Search for the orders you want to mark as In transit in Orders > Fulfillment > Preparing for shipment.
Select the orders and click Mark as In transit.
The orders will be moved to Orders > Fulfillment > In transit.
Customers will be able to check their tracking number in My Account on your storefront. They can click the tracking number to find their tracking details. -
Search for the orders you want to mark as Delivered in Orders > Fulfillment > In transit.
Select the orders and click Mark as Delivered.
The orders will be moved to Orders > Fulfillment > Delivered.
When should I use the Awaiting shipment status?
- If you connect your Cafe24 admin to a third-party shipping carrier, you can simply place your orders in Awaiting shipment and the shipping carrier will automatically process the orders from In transit to Delivered.
- This service, however, is only available for local shipping carriers in certain regions.
You may realize that checking whether each order is delivered and manually updating their status can get quite tedious.
- To fix this, you can use a feature that automatically marks orders that are in transit as Delivered after a selected amount of time.
- Go to Orders > Store setup > General settings > Orders (Tab), select Yes for Automatically mark as Delivered and select when you want to activate these settings in Apply settings to orders shipped from.
- (i.e., If you apply the settings to orders shipped out from January 1 and you choose to automatically mark orders as Delivered 3 days after the shipment date, all orders shipped out starting January 1 will be changed to Delivered 3 days later.)