Fulfilling an "Unconfirmed Order" at Your Store: What are the steps?

Fulfilling an "Unconfirmed Order" at Your Store: What are the steps?

What is an "Unconfirmed Order"?

Emerge2 is able to configure your ecommerce catalog for what is called "Unconfirmed Orders." Unconfirmed Orders are submitted to the merchant without payment. The merchant then contacts the customer to confirm the order details including delivery or pick-up, the resulting final price, and the payment details.

Overview

You will probably receive the following types of orders from your online catalog:
  • Valid orders
  • Fraudulent orders
  • Test orders where someone or a bot is experimenting and/or filling in random text in the checkout form

Order Handling Process

When each order is submitted by a customer in your online catalog, the catalog will email a notification message to a predetermined email address to inform the merchant (you) about the new order.

When you, as the dealer, receive such order notifications, you need to login to your catalog Admin area to review the order.

Find the order in the ORDERS section under Process Orders. Click the order number beside the desired order to view the order's information.

Review the order information to determine if you will accept or reject this order. Consider all of the information provided such as does the "Fraud Score" raise any red flags (e.g. a Fraud Score of 1% is usually okay, however higher percentages are progressively questionable, see Warning section below), does it look like someone just entered random or bogus text in the checkout form for name, address, etc. In other words, does it look like a valid order that you wish to accept?

Rejected Orders

For orders which you decide to reject, refer to the "Canceling an Order" article for details.

Accepted Orders

When viewing an order's information, click the "Details" heading near the bottom of the page. This will display the products (SKUs) that the customer has requested.


You will need to contact the customer to:
  1. Verify the order details
  2. Determine if they want the order shipped to them (you will need to calculate a shipping fee) or if they will pick-up the order at your store
  3. Add any shipping or taxes to the order total
  4. Obtain the customer's payment details and process the payment
You will need to determine if you will fulfill this order from inventory that you already have in-stock, or if you need to order any of these products from the vendor/supplier (e.g. from Orgill).


If you do need to order any products from a vendor/supplier, then you will need to use your normal ordering mechanism to do so before you can fully process this order.


Once you have all of the ordered products on hand, then check to see if the customer selected in-store pickup or shipping.

For in-store pickup, use the customer's email address (or phone number) in the order information to inform them when the order is ready for pickup.

For shipping, package the order for shipping according to the courier's requirements. When ready to ship, either drop-off the order at your local courier outlet or if the courier periodically picks up at your store, queue this order for such a pickup according to your internal processes.

Remember to:
  1. Update the order's Status as things progress (Order Status Changes)
  2. Process the customer's payment
Note: If you determine that you cannot fulfill the order and need to cancel it, then refer to the "Canceling an Order" article for details.

When you are done with every order, the order record in your online catalog should either be marked as complete or cancelled. Don't leave orders in the system with an interim status. It will be confusing over time and it will mess up your reporting stats.

Warning

The Volusion system sends an email notification to the merchant for each new order. Be forewarned: Do NOT fulfill the order solely from the email message. The email only contains minimum information about the order and does NOT include the results of the Fraud Score which was done against the customer details including their address, their IP address, and other details. Do not begin fulfilling an order until you login to the Volusion Admin area and review the details of the order including the Fraud Score results.

If the Fraud Score is above "1%" then carefully review all of the details to determine if you wish to accept or cancel the order.

We have heard many stories of merchants who had fulfilled orders solely from the email notification message, only to be scammed by the use of fraudulent customer information or stolen credit cards, etc.

Other Methods of Order Fulfillment