LemonStand Blog

Order routes explained

5 Comment(s) | published by Aleksey B. on Friday, September 11, 2009

Order routes are a unique feature of LemonStand. It allows LemonStand administrators to implement existing business processes of a company, or develop a new order processing approach.

What is an order route

Order routes are formed using order statuses, transitions between them and user roles. You can define any number of statuses, suitable for your store. After defining statues you define possible transitions between the statuses. For each transition you can choose whether LemonStand should send an email notification to a customer or to a LemonStand user, responsible for sending the order to a next status.

Each order status has a color code, which enables you to quickly recognize an order status in the order list.

The user roles feature enables you to split duties among the company staff. Each user in LemonStand belongs to some role, which you define on the System page. For each transition in the order route you can select a user role, responsible for the transition.

Example of an order route

We will illustrate the order route concept using an example of a small computer store. The company has an accounting and a delivery department. Customers pay for orders with credit cards. Before delivering an order, an accountant manually checks the transaction in the payment gateway interface, to avoid payment frauds. If the transaction is valid, the accountant marks the order as Paid and it can be delivered to the customer.

The order route for this case can have 4 statuses: New, Pending, Paid, Delivered. The statuses and transitions are displayed in the diagram below.

The order processing consists of five steps:

1. A customer creates an order, and it gets to the New status.
2. The customer pays the order using a credit card and LemonStand sends the order to the Pending status. This is accomplished by configuring the payment module correspondingly.
3. The accountant receives the email notification from LemonStand when the order gets into the Pending status. The email notification is configured in the New to Pending transition in the order route.
4. The accountant validates the payment transaction and sends the order to the Paid status. 
5. The courier gets an email notification from LemonStand, and carries the order to the customer. After that he sends the order to the Delivered status.

Order routes can be adapted for any company of any size. You can define dozens of statuses, transitions and user roles, and configure email notifications, making the order processing smooth and simple.