I am considering offering back orders on some items which go out of stock but usually come back in again quite quickly.


When a customer places an order, how would I know that this is a back ordered item as opposed to an in stock item?

How do you manage orders with some in stock and some back order items?
Is there some way to allow the customer to choose to have the the in stock items shipped now and pay extra shipping to have the back order items shipped later?
How do you manage the order status to let the customer (and the admin) know which items are shipped and which are not?

Hi Gem
When you receive an order there isn't anything that marks the back order items differently but I guess this is really determined by having or not having stock for an item. In v7.5 however if you go to the admin orders page and list the orders, then choose the Order Lines from the Status menu on the right you will see that you can set tracking numbers for each item separately and have a shipped status for each item there.

Vince

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I'd be worried in case the stock wasn't 100% correct, in which case the customer might order thinking that it's in stock and I'd have no way to know whether I need to contact them and tell them that there will be a short wait (if I know it has been ordered as a back order I wouldn't need to do that as the messages would be displayed during the order process).

Also, with lots of items available, I might not know whether it's in stock or not until I go to look for it. So that would be time wasted looking for an item that potentially isn't there. At the moment, I don't allow back orders so I know everything is in stock (and if it isn't, that means there's been an issue with the inventory). I was really hoping I'd be able to see somewhere on the order that an item was backordered.

That's handy to know about being able to make off individual items as shipped, I will look into that for split orders. I guess I'd have to contact the customer and collect the additional shipping amount separately if they want to have the in stock items shipped straight away and the back order ones later.

I feel your pain, Gemma. May I suggest you go to the product in the order to see if it has a negative inventory value? If it does, and the inventory isn't available, then you keep the order on backorder. If there is inventory, then the customer will be happy that the item is shipping sooner than anticipated. As for the shipping on split orders, you could put something in your Terms & Conditions about that, and then email the customer asking them if they want to wait to ship the items together or ship separately and quote them the additional cost.

Vince, it would be a good idea to know if someone agreed to go ahead with placing an order for an item that was out of stock and on backorder. Also, it would be a good idea to have a field to enter an estimated ship date for a backorder in the product admin. I currently use discount code fields to do this, but it's a hack. You can make a product available for backorder, but we constantly have customers contacting us wanting to know how long it would be, so they feel more confident going ahead with the order.

Just my two cents.

Kelley