Order management: every status change, and the email it should send
Following every order from checkout to delivery, and through any edit, cancellation or refund after it. Each change of status is a reason to send an email, or to stop one.
- 098Order Management
- The administration of business processes related to orders for goods or services, including order placement, processing, tracking, and fulfilment.
- Usually lives in
- Shopify admin, until you sell in several places
- Grows into
- An order management system (OMS) that routes orders between stock locations
- Feeds your email
- Placed, fulfilled, cancelled and refunded order events
The life of an order, from checkout to refund
An order isn't one event. It's a short life, and plenty can happen in it.
- Placed and paid, or held while a fraud check runs
- Edited: a new address, a swapped size, an extra item
- Fulfilled: packed and handed to a carrier, sometimes in two parcels
- Delivered, or stuck, or sent back to you
- Cancelled before it ships, or returned and refunded after
Order management is keeping track of all of that, so the customer, the warehouse and your customer service team are looking at the same version of events.
When Shopify admin stops being enough to manage orders
If you sell on your own site from one warehouse, Shopify admin is your order management system, and a good one. It starts to creak when orders come from several places, or stock sits in more than one building.
That's when an OMS earns its place. It pulls in orders from every channel, decides which location ships each one, and keeps one stock count across the lot.
One warning before you add channels. Marketplace orders rarely bring a customer you're allowed to email, so that revenue doesn't build your list. Here's how to get customer emails from Amazon buyers the honest way.
Each order status should start an email, or stop one
| When the order is | Start | Stop |
|---|---|---|
| Placed | The order confirmation | Abandoned checkout reminders |
| Fulfilled | The shipping confirmation, with tracking | Anything saying it's still being prepared |
| Cancelled | A cancellation confirmation | Thank-yous, cross-sells and review requests |
| Refunded | A refund confirmation | Anything asking how they're getting on with it |
The stops are the ones that go wrong. A flow that started when the order was placed carries on regardless, unless something tells it otherwise. In Klaviyo that's a flow filter removing anyone with a cancelled or refunded order since they entered. A small job, and nobody gets asked to review a product they sent back.
Related terms
FAQs
What is an order management system?
Software that collects orders from everywhere you sell, decides which stock location ships each one, and tracks it through delivery and returns. If you only sell on your own Shopify site from one warehouse, Shopify already does this job, and a separate system would just add another sync to go wrong.
Why did a customer who cancelled still get our review request?
Because the flow started when the order was placed, and nothing told it about the cancellation. Add a filter that removes anyone with a cancelled or refunded order since they entered the flow, then check your cross-sell and replenishment flows for the same gap.
Should order confirmations come from Shopify or from Klaviyo?
Either works. Shopify's notifications come with your plan and they're reliable. Klaviyo's let you match the rest of your email and add something useful, once each message is approved as transactional. What matters is that only one of them sends each email, so nobody gets two confirmations.
Rather we explained it on your own account?
Bring your Klaviyo account to a growth consultation. We'll walk through what this means for your numbers, in plain English, and what we'd fix first.
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