Order Cancellations and Returns Handling
Authors:
Nandha Balaguru, Esma Tuzovic, Cille Schliebitz, Anita Gu
Changed on:
3 Feb 2025
Overview
Order management in Fluent includes handling cancellations, revisions, and returns. Cancellations can be for entire or partial orders. Order revisions allow modifications to in-progress orders before dispatch, and returns handle customer issues with delivered items. Depending on the business' needs, these processes can be managed manually by customer service or automated within workflows.
Key points
- Order Cancellation: Cancels entire or partial orders, resetting inventory.
- Cancellation Timing: Configurable to specific workflow statuses.
- Order Revision: Allows changes to in-flight orders before dispatch.
- Return Workflow: Manages customer-initiated returns for various reasons.
- Action Modes: Supports both automated and manual (self-service and customer service) actions.
- Refund Handling: Automatic refunds are processed if payment is taken.
Order Cancellation
'Cancellation' is the ability to cancel a whole order that is in progress usually as a result of a customer requesting to cancel their order. There may also be system events that require an order to be cancelled.
Understanding the 'standard workflow'
As a reference, Fluent Order Management has a ruleset that contains logic for Order Cancellation.
When a whole order is canceled, all of the associated fulfillments for the order will be canceled, and the inventory reservations will be reset with available-to-sell (ATS) updates in order to free up the available stock for future orders placed.
There will be a status/es that the Order can be in for Cancellation to be allowed. In most businesses, they would allow the customer to cancel the order before the order has been sent down to a location to be picked, however, it is possible to configure the cancellation logic for any specific statuses in the workflow.
Fluent Order Management also has the capability to manage partial order cancellation, where one (or more lines) of orders need to be canceled.
Let's take a look at some business scenarios.
1 - Fluent has the capability to support businesses that implement cancellation logic in different ways: e.g., The Customer Services team for luxury retailers would often be involved in supporting a customer in canceling their order. The customer may contact the team who will search for the order within the Fluent Platform, and then cancel the order using the Cancel Order user action.
2 - In another scenario, the above process can be automated: e.g., For fast fashion retailers, the customer may have self-service features in the e-commerce system that allow a customer to trigger a cancellation. This event would be sent into the Fluent Order Workflow and the cancellation ruleset would be executed.
If payment has already been taken for the order, Fluent has the ability to calculate the refund amount and trigger the payment provider to issue a refund, and trigger an email to the customer to notify them of their cancellation and refund due.
Order Revisions
'Order Revision' refers to the ability to make changes to an 'in-flight' order.
An example of this is adding or removing of line items before it's been dispatched to the customer.
Order Revisions are usually triggered if / when a customer has changed their mind about their order. There is often a cut-off time when a retailer will permit changes to an order — this can be orchestrated within the workflow using statuses.
Order Returns
Order Returns is the process of returning items by the customer after they've received the order because of an issue with the item(s) — many reasons exist for customers wanting to returns items, but the most common issues are:
- due to an incorrect product ordered
- damages to product
- product quality issues.
Fluent Order Management has a Return Order workflow to support this capability.
Returns can be triggered:
- from an external system sending a return into Fluent Order Management via an event into the workflow,
- by Fluent Order Management which can create returns from the Fluent OMS and the Fluent Store Web Apps.
The most common use case for using OMS is from a retailer's customer service team wanting to assist a customer to return their items by creating a return on the customer's behalf.
