The next step after testing your customer workflow is to test your order processing workflow, which is how you would fulfill and process orders after an order has been placed on your Ecommerce platform.

Here’s a basic order workflow of what you might see when you first start out -

#1 Customer goes to your online store and makes a purchase.

#2 Both you and your customer should get some sort of order confirmation via email - we spoke about transactional emails that your Ecommerce platform should send out automatically back on episode 14.

#3 You or someone from your team would log on and go to your order tab, this is basically the hub of all the transactions.

#4 Your shopping cart would normally update the inventory level if that is something you track, otherwise, this is ignored.

#5 Your payment gateway will handle collecting the payment upfront before it hits your order tab.  If you provide other options such as term, COD or checks, you would either hold or release the order.

#6 When you’re reviewing your order, things like billing and shipping information, payment & shipping type is collected during checkout, but you might still want to review it.  Here’s kind of what I look for.

I still review my orders because my carrier or distributor will not ship to PO address and my platform does not prevent a user from entering a PO, though you can state that on your checkout page.

If there are any special customization required, I need to make sure I have proper instructions or artwork before going to the next step.

Look for potential fraud.  There are software out there that can  integrate with your platform to give you some sort of score to determine if its fraudulent.

Read the notes if any on the order.

#7 After reviewing your order, you’ll need to determine if you need can ship it, cancel and issue a refund or maybe even put it on hold.  Test each of these scenarios.

Set it to complete and enter the tracking number to complete the order.  Make sure both you and your customer gets the email shipping notification.

Set it to cancel and refund the order.  Your ecommerce platform might be able to communicate to your payment gateway at the same time so you dont have to manually issue the refund.  If not, you’ll need to manually refund it after you set it to cancelled/refund.

Sometimes you might have to create a partial refund.  Try doing that as well.

#8 If you can ship it, process the order by creating proper shipping labels and packaging.  Or if you dropship, send a notification for your manufacturer to fulfill and send out.

#9 Update the order to the appropriate status, for example, from NEW to PROCESSING or to SHIPPED and enter the tracking number. This would trigger the email notification.

#10 As the store owner, change the status of the order to CANCEL and SHIPPED.  As the customer, you will receive the respective emails for order cancellation and shipped products.    Be able to refund cancelled order from your payment gateway if your platform does not have the ability to do this