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Order Timeline Section

The Timeline is the record of everything that has happened to an order, listed newest first, and it is where you and your team post internal notes about the order.

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The Timeline is the record of everything that has happened to an order, listed newest first. It logs the order's own events, such as when it was created, paid, fulfilled, and archived, and it is also where you and your team post internal notes. Reading it is the quickest way to reconstruct what happened to an order without having to ask anyone. This article explains the note box and the event history below it.

You find the Timeline in the left column, below the payment card, when you open an order under Orders.

Before you begin

  • Your role includes View orders.
  • Open Orders in the admin sidebar and open the order you want to work on.

The Timeline

The Timeline on an order: a box to add a note about the order with emoji, mention, tag, and attach icons and a Post button, then the event history under a July 8 date heading, with a confirmation email entry that has a Resend email action, an entry for the order being archived, and an entry for the order being fulfilled, each with a timestamp. (opens full size)

At the top of the Timeline is a box to post a note. Below it, the events are listed under the date they happened, newest first, each with a timestamp on the right. Some entries carry an action of their own, such as Resend email on a confirmation-email entry, and some can be expanded with the arrow to show more detail.

Posting a note

The Add a note about this order box lets you leave context for your team. You can add an emoji, mention a teammate with @, tag with #, or attach a file, and then Post. As the box says, only you and other staff can see comments, so a note is internal to your team and is never shown to the customer. Order Notes Section covers the single standing note that stays at the top of the order.

The event history

Below the note box, the events appear newest first, grouped under the date they happened, each with its own timestamp. The Timeline records the order's own actions as they occur. On this order they include the order being created from a draft, a confirmation being generated, the order being manually marked as paid, notes being added, the order being fulfilled, the order being archived, and a confirmation email being sent to the customer. An entry can carry an action of its own: the confirmation-email entry has a Resend email action, which sends the email again if the customer says they did not receive it.

Best practices

  • Read the Timeline first when investigating an order, since it shows what happened and when, in one place.
  • Post a note when you do something unusual, so the next person to open the order understands it.
  • Use Resend email from the Timeline when a customer says they did not receive their confirmation.

Common mistakes

  • Treating a Timeline note as customer-facing. Notes are internal to staff, so do not use one to try to tell the customer something.
  • Asking a colleague what happened to an order instead of reading its Timeline, which already records it.

Next steps

Still stuck?

More in Orders

  • Create Draft Order

    Create an order yourself for a phone, email, or in-person sale, then send an invoice, mark it paid, or save it as a draft.

  • View Orders

    Find and manage your orders from the Orders overview: metrics, status tabs, search, and a sortable table you open orders from.

  • Refund an Order

    Refunding an order returns money to the customer for the items you choose. On the Refund page you pick how many of each item to refund, write a reason for your own records, and set the refund method and the amount, up to the amount still available. Refunded items are removed from the order, and the refund is recorded on it. To change prices or quantities instead of returning money, edit the order rather than refunding it.

  • Fulfill an Order

    Fulfilling an order marks its items as shipped once they have gone out. On the fulfillment card you select Mark as fulfilled, tick the items you are shipping, optionally print the packing slip for the parcel, and confirm. The order then moves to Fulfilled. This article walks through marking an order fulfilled from its fulfillment card.

All 39 articles in Orders

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