Orders

A typical order includes one or more products, billing and shipping addresses, payment details, and the total cost including shipping charges and taxes. Comments and price adjustments can also be included in an order.

You can continue to process orders as you did using previous versions of WebSphere Commerce. However, if you are using the Payment Plug-in Controller (PPC) or the plug-in for payment processing in certain scenarios, you need an additional step, approve payment. Orders can manage individual order items separately because they have attributes defined individually. An order uses a global status model, Status, that can be searched. With order processing, an order can have multiple ship dates and multiple payment methods. That is, the customer need not split an order manually. A customer can request a future ship date for an order item, request expedited shipping for an order item, and request that order items are grouped to be shipped together. Orders that have no payment amount can be processed without requiring payment information.

Both registered and non-registered customers can place orders at a store.

• A registered customer is one who has provided information to create a profile with the store. This customer has a logon ID and password, which are required when shopping at the store.
• A non-registered customer is one who does not have a logon ID and password for shopping at the store, and is considered a guest.

Customer service representatives can search for orders using advanced search criteria, such as order item status, fulfillment center, payment protocol data, order item status, block status, block reason code, and store name, and category.

Whenever a current order is changed, the customer service representative can specify whether an e-mail notification should be sent to the customer.