Managing orders (the Sales screen)

Updated Oct 17, 2026 Orders & Fulfillment

Every order a customer places lands on the Sales screen. It’s where you review what was bought, move an order through your workflow, keep notes, issue refunds, and cancel orders when you need to. Order management is built into TitanCart — there’s nothing to install or switch on. Open it from Sales → Orders.

Note: Orders are created by your customers when they check out — this screen is for managing them after they arrive, not for creating orders by hand. The contents of an order (the items, quantities, and prices) are a fixed record of what the customer bought; you change an order’s state here — its status, notes, refunds — rather than editing its line items.

1. Finding your orders

The Sales menu groups everything order-related:

Orders — the order list and the screen this article covers.
Returns — customer return requests (RMA), when that feature is enabled (TitanCart Pro).
Revenue Reports — sales figures over time.
Fulfillment — a Needs Fulfillment queue of every paid order with items still to ship, and the shipments you create from it with carrier and tracking.
Active Carts — carts in progress that haven’t checked out yet.

Click Orders to open the list.

2. The orders list

The list shows every order, newest first, with the order number, the customer (name and email), the date, the total, and a colour-coded status. To find what you need:

Filter by status — the tabs across the top (All, then one per status) narrow the list to, say, only Processing orders you still have to ship.
Search — type an order number or a customer’s name or email to jump straight to an order.
Page through longer lists with the pager at the bottom.

Click any row to open that order.

3. Inside an order

An order opens on a single page that gathers everything in one place:

Order items — each product with its image, product code, any chosen options, quantity, unit price, and line total, followed by the totals breakdown (subtotal, any discount, shipping, tax, and the grand total).
Customer — who placed the order, with a link to their full customer profile.
Addresses — the billing and shipping addresses.
Payment — for an order paid through a gateway, every transaction TitanCart recorded for it (charge, authorisation, refund, void) with its amount, gateway, time and the gateway’s own transaction id, so you can look the payment up at Stripe, PayPal, Square or Authorize.net by that id or by the order number, which every TitanCart payment carries. When a card payment is authorised but not yet charged — Square delayed capture, Authorize.net Authorize Only, or a payment held for review — this card also carries the Capture and Void buttons; see Capturing and voiding authorised payments.
Payment & shipping — the payment method used, the shipping method, the order’s currency, and the IP address it was placed from.
The customer’s note, if they left one at checkout.

The actions you take on an order — status, notes, refunds, cancel — are covered next.

4. Updating an order’s status

An order’s status tracks where it is in your process. TitanCart ships with the usual set — Pending, Processing, On Hold, Completed, Cancelled, Refunded, and Failed — and you can add your own under Settings → Order Statuses, where each status also carries its colour, whether it notifies the customer by email, and its Stock Action (none, reduce, or restore).

To change it, use the Update Status card on the right: pick the new status, optionally add a note explaining the change, and decide whether to notify the customer by email. Then Update Status.

Every change is recorded in the order’s activity timeline (see section 5), with your note, the time, and who made it.
If you tick Notify customer via email, TitanCart emails them about the change. Some statuses are also set to notify automatically, so a customer can be told even if you don’t tick the box.

Note: Stock is reduced once, when an order is placed and paid for. After that, whether a status change returns items to stock depends on each status’s Stock Action (set on the Order Statuses screen). The built-in Cancelled and Refunded statuses are set to Restore, so moving an order into either one automatically returns its items to your inventory — once. A full refund moves the order to Refunded for you, so it restores stock too; a partial refund leaves the status unchanged, so it doesn’t. Statuses set to None (the default for the rest) never touch stock. Stock is only returned for items that were actually taken, and only once. A customer return restores the specific items sent back.

One status you cannot set by hand. An order whose card payment is authorised but not yet charged waits in On Hold with its stock reserved. Update Status refuses to move it anywhere except back to On Hold or to Failed (“This order’s payment is authorised but not yet captured. Capture or void it from the Payment panel first.”); choosing Cancelled voids the authorisation first and then cancels. Capture it from the Payment card to take the money and move it to Processing — Capturing and voiding authorised payments has the details.

Two things happen to orders without you. Under Settings → General Settings → Order Automation: Cancel unpaid orders automatically cancels orders still Pending with no completed payment after the set hours (24 by default) — what a declined card or an abandoned checkout leaves behind; and Complete paid orders the checkout page never finished asks the payment gateway, once an hour, about orders that were placed and paid but never completed because the shopper’s tab closed, and commits them when the gateway confirms the money. The same hourly check watches authorised-but-uncaptured card payments for as long as Keep checking authorised payments for (days) says (31 by default): a payment captured at the gateway completes the order, a declined or expired one cancels it. Offline-payment orders start On Hold, so the first job never touches them.

5. Order activity and notes

The Order Activity timeline shows the order’s status history — each change, what it moved from and to, any note attached, when it happened, and who did it. It’s your audit trail for the order.

Below that, Order Notes let you record anything useful. When you add a note you choose its type:

Staff Note — an internal note only your team sees. Use it for anything you don’t want the customer to read.
Customer Note — visible to the customer on their order page. Use it to pass on information like a tracking remark or a delay explanation. The editor warns you before you post one.

You’ll also see System notes that TitanCart writes for you — for example when a status changes or a refund is issued — so the order’s story stays complete without any effort.

6. Issuing a refund

When an order qualifies for a refund, a Refund Order button appears in the Actions card. (It’s hidden for orders that can’t be refunded — ones that are still pending, already cancelled or refunded, or that failed.) Clicking it opens the refund window:

Refund amount — pre-filled with the full order total. Use the Full button for the whole amount, or type a smaller figure for a partial refund. You can’t refund more than the order total.
Reason (optional) — recorded with the refund for your own records.

TitanCart sends the refund straight back through the original payment gateway — the same card or account the customer paid with — and records an internal note with the refund ID and reason. What happens to the order’s status depends on the amount:

A full refund automatically moves the order to Refunded and notifies the customer.
A partial refund is recorded against the order but leaves its status unchanged — so you can refund part of an order and still ship the rest. You can issue more than one partial refund up to the order total.

Note: Offline payment methods (such as Check, Cash on Delivery, or Bank Transfer) don’t move money electronically. For those, the refund is recorded for your books and you arrange the actual repayment yourself. After any refund, it’s good practice to confirm it appears in your payment provider’s own dashboard.

7. Cancelling an order

To cancel an order, use Cancel Order in the Actions card (shown for orders that aren’t already cancelled or refunded). You’ll be asked to confirm; the order then moves to Cancelled and the customer is notified by email.

Because the built-in Cancelled status is set to Restore stock (see section 4), cancelling an order that had been paid for returns its items to your inventory automatically — you don’t have to adjust quantities by hand. Cancelling is a status change, so it also appears in the activity timeline.

8. Invoices and packing slips

Two print buttons sit at the top of an order:

Print Invoice opens the order’s branded invoice — your company details from Settings → Company, the order items, totals, addresses and payment method — and starts the browser’s print dialog, where “Save as PDF” gives you a file. The customer has the same invoice: their order confirmation email carries a View invoice link, and it is linked again from the order in their My Account.
Packing Slip opens a price-free pick list for the warehouse: items, quantities and the ship-to address. It is for signed-in administrators only; customers never see it.

What managing orders does — and don’t

Note: This screen manages orders that customers place — you don’t create orders by hand here. An order’s items, quantities, and prices are a fixed snapshot of what was bought and aren’t edited after the fact; you respond with status changes, notes, partial/full refunds, or a cancellation. Refunds move real money through the original gateway (offline methods are recorded for your records). Changing status restores stock only when the new status’s Stock Action is set to Restore — which the built-in Cancelled and Refunded statuses are, so those return items to inventory automatically (a partial refund doesn’t, since it leaves the status unchanged). Customer notes are visible to the customer; staff notes are not.

Troubleshooting

A Pending order was cancelled by itself. Order Automation cancels unpaid Pending orders after the set hours (section 4). The customer never paid; if they did pay through a card gateway and the order still read Pending, the hourly check completes it instead.
I need the gateway’s transaction number for a payment. It is on the order page’s Payment card, one line per transaction. Every TitanCart payment also carries the order number as its description or invoice number, so the provider’s dashboard finds it either way.
An order is stuck On Hold with an amber “Authorised … not yet charged” banner, and I can’t change its status. Its card payment was only authorised. Click Capture on the Payment card to charge it and move it to Processing, or Void to release the hold and cancel; see Capturing and voiding authorised payments.
I can’t find a “create order” button. There isn’t one — orders come from customers checking out on your storefront. This screen is for managing those orders after they arrive.
I can’t edit the items or quantities on an order. An order’s contents are a record of what the customer actually bought, so they’re not editable afterwards. To adjust what the customer pays, issue a partial refund; to undo the whole order, cancel or fully refund it.
The Refund button isn’t showing. It only appears for orders that can be refunded — not ones that are still pending, failed, already cancelled, or already refunded. A refund also needs a completed payment on the original gateway to send the money back to.
The refund failed. The original payment must still be refundable through its gateway, and that gateway must still be connected with valid keys. For offline methods (Check, Cash on Delivery, Bank Transfer) the refund is only recorded — you make the actual repayment yourself.
A partial refund didn’t change the order’s status. That’s expected — only a full refund moves an order to Refunded. Partial refunds are recorded (you’ll see a system note) and leave the order open.
The customer didn’t get a status-change email. Tick Notify customer via email when you change the status (some statuses also notify automatically). Email also needs a working outgoing mail server — set one under Settings → General → Emails — and test with a real inbox, since placeholder addresses like name@example.com are rejected by mail servers.
I cancelled/refunded an order but my stock didn’t go back up. Stock is returned when an order enters a status whose Stock Action is Restore — Cancelled and Refunded are set that way by default, so first check the status actually changed (a partial refund doesn’t change status, so it won’t restore). Stock is only returned for items that were taken in the first place, so an order that was never paid for has nothing to give back. You can always raise a product’s quantity by hand, and a customer return restores the specific items sent back.