How to look up orders and check your fulfilment backlog

The Recent orders card at the foot of Store › Analytics is where a specific order gets looked up, and the Waiting to ship figure above it is the backlog. Together they cover "what is going out and what is stuck". See How to read your store dashboard for the rest of the page.

Before you start

Opening an order's detail needs the view orders permission, which is its own dial rather than part of general store access.

That means you can be able to read the dashboard and still be refused an order's details. The card says so explicitly rather than showing you a blank, and How to work out who can do what in your workspace explains how to ask for the right one.

How do you read the orders table?

Each row carries the order number, the customer, the total, a fulfilment status pill, a payment status pill and the date.

Fulfilment status is Shopify's shipping state: unfulfilled, partially fulfilled or fulfilled. Financial status is the payment state: paid, pending, refunded and so on.

Page through ten at a time with the numbered pages, or the arrows on a phone.

How do you see an order's full detail?

Rest your mouse on the row, or focus it with the keyboard. On a touch screen, tap it.

A detail card opens with the customer's email, every line item with quantity and line total, the subtotal, shipping, tax and total, the shipping address, and any order note or staff comment your team left in Shopify.

Those staff notes are the reason this card is worth knowing about. "Customer asked us to hold until Friday" lives in Shopify and is invisible from a status pill.

The card loads when you rest on the row rather than in advance, and it is remembered for a few minutes afterwards. If a load fails it asks you to hover again rather than showing part of an order.

How do you check the backlog?

Waiting to ship on the top row of the dashboard counts paid orders that are unfulfilled or partly fulfilled, as of right now.

It deliberately ignores the date picker, because a backlog is a present-tense fact. See How to change the date range.

For what is behind the number, the analyst's Stuck orders button asks what is sitting in the backlog, how old the oldest is, and whether anything is blocked on stock. That last part is the question a status pill cannot answer. See How to use the one-click digest buttons.

How do you turn a problem order into a conversation?

Click the speech-bubble button on the order's row. Name the thread, choose the channel, and you land in a new chat thread with the order attached as a chip.

This is how a fulfilment problem becomes something the team can pick up rather than something one person is looking at. Everyone in the thread can open the order from the chip.

The channels offered are the ones you can post in, and starting a thread needs the same view orders permission as reading the detail.

How do you get from an order to the customer?

Click the customer's name on the row. Their panel opens beside the dashboard with their history, their value and their recent orders.

That is the same panel the customer directory uses, covered in How to find a customer and read their history.

Why can I not jump to an old order?

Because the orders card holds a batch of the most recent orders and pages through them in your browser, rather than paging your whole order history.

When you are after a specific old order, search for it in Shopify, or ask the analyst about the period it fell in. This card is built for "what has just come in", which is what it is next to on the page.