Cancel or change an order
Orders change. A buyer calls to add a line, corrects a delivery address, or cancels four of ten because the machine they were for was scrapped. What you can do depends entirely on how far the order has travelled.
What can still be changed
| Order state | What is possible |
|---|---|
| Not yet acknowledged | Addresses, buyer details, references and free-form data can be edited. Positions cannot be added |
| Acknowledged | Frozen. Changes go through the fulfilling system — unless your tenant allows late modification |
| Anything shipped | Full cancellation is refused. Cancel the open quantities instead |
| On hold | Shipping is blocked; cancellation may also be blocked, depending on your setting |
Cancel the whole order
Cancel order on the order detail page cancels every open position at once. It is only possible while nothing has shipped.
- Open the order.
- Select Cancel order.
- Enter a reason. Your tenant may require one — if it does, a cancellation without one is refused.
- Confirm.
The lifecycle moves to cancelled and cancelled_at is stamped. This is final:
there is no un-cancel. A buyer who changes their mind again places a new order.
cancelled / paid is a customer owed money — check for
that combination deliberately.Cancel part of an order
Cancel positions on the Overview tab takes a quantity per position: cancel 4 of 10 on position 20 and leave the rest open.
This is the everyday case, and it is what closes a backorder that will never
arrive. The cancelled quantity counts as settled — so when every position is
either shipped or cancelled, the order becomes fulfilled and completes rather
than sitting open forever.
Cancel everything position by position and the order cancels itself.
Each cancellation is recorded on the Fulfilment tab with its scope (whole order or specific positions), its reason and who did it.
Change an address
Until acknowledgement, addresses can be corrected on the order. After it, they cannot — the fulfilling system has the order and the delivery is being planned against the address it holds.
If the goods have not left, phone the warehouse. If they have, the change is a carrier matter, not an order matter. Record what happened as a comment on the order so the next person to open it knows why the delivery note and the reality differ.
Hold instead of cancelling
A hold is the right tool when the order might still go out. Credit checks, unresolved disputes, a customs question, a buyer who said "wait, I need to check with purchasing" — all of these are holds, not cancellations, because a hold is reversible and a cancellation is not.
Put on hold with a reason; Release hold when it clears. Consider setting your tenant so that a hold blocks cancellation as well: while a credit check is running, you do not want the order cancelled out from under it either.
What to check
After a cancellation:
- The cancelled quantity per position is right on the Overview tab.
fulfillment_statusreflects the new arithmetic — a fully-shipped-or-cancelled order should befulfilled.- The cancellation record on the Fulfilment tab carries the reason.
- If stock was reserved for the order, the hold was released — check under Order Management › Stock › Reservations.
- If a payment was captured, a refund is in progress.
Next
- Returns and credit notes — cancelling after delivery is a return, not a cancellation.
- Orders that get stuck — when an order refuses to move at all.