Order and shipping lists

Six buttons of the settings open the pick lists of an order: Order Status, Payment Methods, Payment Status, Shipping Methods, Shipping Status and Delivery Times. You reach all six through the Settings navigation entry.

How an order carries these entries is described under orders. Two of the six are picked not only on the order but on the product as well: the shipping method and the delivery time.

Overview

All six lists are built the same way. Three buttons sit above each of them: New creates an entry, Edit opens the selected one, Delete removes it after a confirmation. The latter two require a selected row. In all six cases the detail view carries a single Common section, and the Name in it has to be unique within its list.

Three of the lists come with a new client, three are yours. Order status, payment status and shipping status are there from the start with four entries each. Payment methods, shipping methods and delivery times are empty, because only your business knows which ones you offer. That holds with an online shop connected too: a channel maps its payment methods to yours, it does not create them.

Sorting differs, and there is a reason for it. Payment methods, shipping methods and delivery times are sorted alphabetically by Name. The three status lists are sorted by their Status Level and only within a level by name, because a status is a sequence and alphabetical order would tear it apart.

The three status lists

Order status, payment status and shipping status are built alike and carry the same three fields.

Field	Meaning	Note
Name	The designation the status appears under on the order	Has to be unique within its list
Status Level	What the entry means to TRADElube, see below	Four values to choose from, several entries may carry the same level
Description	An explanatory text for the entry	Can be left empty. Appears in the list and in the detail view

You choose the designations freely, and that is exactly why the level exists. TRADElube cannot tell from an entry named Done that it means the end of a process. Another business calls the same state Dispatched or Closed. The Status Level is what TRADElube reads that from, and it is the only reason a status is more than a word on the order.

Level	What it means	Counts as
Initial	The process has started	open
Pending	The process is running	open
Finalized	The process is done	closed
Canceled	The process is not carried on	closed

Three things hang off it:

• The order of the list, as described above.
• The payment time. Once the payment status of an order reaches a closed level, TRADElube fills in the Payment Time. Should it fall back to an open level, the entry is cleared again. A payment time on an unpaid order would otherwise be exactly the kind of entry nobody ever straightens out.
• What still gets transferred. Several tasks that reconcile orders or order statuses with a connected system take only orders whose order status is still open. A completed or canceled order does not change any more, and an execution that picks it up every time regardless grows longer over the years without achieving anything.

Completing an order pulls its products along. Once a task reports to an online shop that the order status has reached a closed level, TRADElube marks the products of that order as changed, so the shop gets their stock afresh with the next transfer.

Order status

The order status says how far the order has come as a whole.

TRADElube writes the four supplied entries in German, whatever language the client works in. Each of them can be renamed like any other entry, and in the image that has been done.

Of the three status lists the order list shows only the order status in color, and the color comes from the level, not from the name: Initial shows black, Pending orange, Finalized green and Canceled red. An order that has not been released shows it in gray, and that is the only place where the list reveals the release. Both are described under orders.

Payment methods

The payment method says how payment is made. It is picked on the order.

The list shows two columns, Name and Description. The detail view carries one field more.

Common

Field	Meaning	Note
Name	The designation the payment method appears under on the order	Has to be unique
Default Payment Status	The payment status a new order with this payment method receives	Can be left empty
Description	An explanatory text for the payment method	Can be left empty

The Default Payment Status only applies while the order is being created. Where a new order gets a payment method but no payment status, TRADElube fills in the one held here. On an existing order, switching the payment method no longer changes the payment status. That is deliberate: by then the status is part of the process, and overwriting it afterwards would mean silently declaring a payment open or settled.

Payment status

The payment status says how far payment has come, independently of the order status. It carries the same three fields as the order status.

The supplied entry carrying the level Finalized is the one that sets the payment time of the order. In the image that is Paid.

Shipping methods

The shipping method says how delivery is made. It is picked on the order and on the product.

The list shows the same two columns as the payment methods, and the detail view is built alike: one field more, and that one points at another list.

Common

Field	Meaning	Note
Name	The designation the shipping method appears under	Has to be unique
Default Delivery Time	The delivery time a new product with this shipping method receives	Can be left empty
Description	An explanatory text for the shipping method	Can be left empty

The Default Delivery Time takes effect on the product, not on the order. Where a newly created product gets a shipping method but no delivery time, TRADElube fills in the one held here. On an existing product it no longer applies. On an import through a transfer plan that saves a column: the file supplies the shipping method, the delivery time follows from it. Details under stock.

Shipping status

The shipping status says how far the delivery has come. It is built like the order and the payment status.

Payment, shipping and order status do not run in step: a paid order may still be in progress, a completed one may still carry open payments. That is exactly why there are three lists and not one.

Delivery times

A delivery time is a named period, Short term for three to five days for instance. It is picked on the product, and the shop shows it to the customer on the article.

Common

The list shows four columns, and the detail view carries exactly those four fields.

Field	Meaning	Note
Name	The designation the delivery time appears under on the product	Has to be unique
Unit	The time unit the two durations are meant in	Minute, hour, day, week, month or year. A new entry starts on day
Min. Duration	The shortest duration of the period	Must not be smaller than zero
Max. Duration	The longest duration of the period	Must not be smaller than zero and not smaller than the minimum duration

Why it is a range and how a delivery time differs from a stock figure is described under stock.

What a connected system sees of this

Each of the six lists has a counterpart on the far side, and none of them carries the same identifier there. That is why they are mapped: you set up once per channel which entry there corresponds to which one here. A Shopware channel carries such a mapping for all six.

Where the execution cannot map a value, it enters that value into the mapping list itself, with an empty counterpart. The value is not taken over, but you find it in the list afterwards and fill the counterpart in. The effort otherwise sits not in the entering but in working out which value is missing in the first place. What a mapping is and how it is maintained is described under mappings.

Further reading

• Orders: the order these lists are picked on
• Maintaining the order status: how a status is moved on in day-to-day work
• Products: the Shipping Method and Delivery Time fields on the article
• Stock: what distinguishes a delivery time from a stock figure
• Mappings: how an entry here is connected to its counterpart in the connected system
• Settings: the remaining buttons