Orders & Fulfillment
Orders & Fulfillment
An order is created when a shopper checks out. ZingaShop gives every order a full record: line items with prices captured at the time of sale, snapshotted billing and shipping addresses, taxes, applied discounts, payments, shipments, and a complete status history. Because amounts and addresses are snapshotted, historical orders never change when you later edit products, prices or tax settings.
The order lifecycle
An order tracks three independent statuses so you always know where it stands:
Order status
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pending | Placed but not yet confirmed (for example awaiting payment) |
| Confirmed | Accepted and being processed |
| Cancelled | Cancelled in whole or in part |
Payment status
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Unpaid | No payment captured yet |
| Paid | Fully paid |
| Partial | Part of the total has been paid |
| Failed | A payment attempt failed |
| Refunded | Payment has been refunded |
Fulfillment status
Fulfillment moves from unfulfilled to partially fulfilled to fulfilled as you ship the items on the order.
The order operations console
Each order opens into a single working view where you can see and act on everything:
- Line items — products, quantities, prices, discounts and taxes as sold.
- Payments — attempts, captures and refunds against the order.
- Shipments — create a shipment, pick the items and warehouse, and record carrier, service, tracking number and tracking URL.
- Documents — issue an invoice or delivery slip; a print-friendly view opens for printing or saving.
- Status history — a timeline of every status change and who made it.
You can also flip an order's status, mark it paid, add internal notes, and record a cancellation reason.
Payments
Checkout collects payment through the gateways you connect (such as Stripe, PayPal, Razorpay, PayU, and 2Checkout). Each gateway runs in test or live mode, and you can restrict a gateway to specific storefronts and specify the currencies and countries it supports. Payment events from the gateway update the order's payment status automatically, and refunds are recorded against the original payment.
Fulfillment and shipping
To fulfill an order you create one or more shipments from it. A shipment draws from a warehouse, references a shipping method, and captures carrier, service and tracking details, so the customer can be notified and can track delivery from their account. Digital items skip shipping and are delivered to the customer's account instead (see Customers & Accounts).
Cancellations
ZingaShop supports a flexible cancellation policy resolved across three levels, with the most specific "no" winning:
- Product — a product can allow or block cancellation.
- Category — a category can allow or block cancellation for its products.
- Storefront — a storefront sets the base policy.
Where cancellation is allowed, customers can partially cancel an order, cancelling individual line items until those items are fulfilled, rather than the whole order. When a cancelled item was already paid, its amount becomes refund-pending: the order records what the customer is owed, and you issue the actual refund from the back office through the refund flow. This keeps money movement deliberate and auditable rather than automatic.
Returns
Customers can raise return requests against delivered orders. Each return has a number, a reason, a status from open through closed, and a refund amount, so you can process returns and track the refund owed alongside the original order.
Carts
Open and abandoned carts are visible too, including their totals and when they were last active. This supports abandoned-cart follow-up and gives you insight into shopping behavior before checkout.
Manual and API orders
Most orders come from checkout, but you can also build an order for a customer from the back office (for phone or quote-first sales). Orders can additionally be read and updated through the public API, covered in the Developer API Reference chapter, so you can push order status to a fulfillment system or pull orders into your accounting.