Draft Orders?

  • Resolved kfutter

    (@kfutter)


    4 years, 2 months ago

    In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing a new “Drafts” category pop up for orders, with quite a few orders showing up in there on a regular basis – sometimes outnumbering my “Completed” orders. However, I can’t find an explanation for them anywhere. What do they mean? How are the different from “Payment Pending”? I’m sometimes seeing multiple drafts from the same customer for the same product, implying that they’ve been trying to checkout, but somehow failing, and then having to create a new order. I’ve also had customers create a draft order, following by a successful one for the same product, leaving the orphaned draft to just hang around. To this point I’ve simply been deleting all drafts after 24 hours or so, but I have no idea if customers can come back and complete them, and if so, under what conditions.

    Can anybody offer an explanation as to what these draft orders are, how and why they’re created, and what I’m supposed to be doing with them?

    Kevin

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Hi there @kfutter!

    Draft is not one of the default order statuses that WooCommerce supports as you can see all of them listed here: https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/managing-orders/#section-1

    So it must be some plugin on your site that sets that kind of status for your orders. So I suggest that you review the list of plugins you have to determine which plugin is at play here.

    You can use the same approach as the one used for conflict testing to determine which plugin is the culprit: https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/how-to-test-for-conflicts/

    Once you’ve found the plugin, you can either deactivate it or reach out to its developer to check what is the proper way of handling those draft orders.

    While we’re experts on our own products, third-party plugins and themes are best supported by their own respective developers. More importantly, I would rather not give you any incorrect information.

    I hope that’s helpful and points you in the right direction. Let us know if you have more questions.

    Thread Starter kfutter

    (@kfutter)

    Hi @zdenys,

    Thanks for your help!

    According to the developer doc linked below, Draft status for orders is indeed coming to Woocommerce, and being tested now:

    https://developer.woocommerce.com/2020/11/23/introducing-a-new-order-status-checkout-draft/

    I can only assume I’ve somehow fallen victim to it, though I guess this could be referring to something else. The only 3rd-party plugins I’m using for Woocommerce are Blacklister, Free Downloads, and WPC Product Bundles, and I’m not aware of any of those having this kind of integration. I’ll see what I do about testing them in a way that doesn’t break my site or any of its products (only Blacklister can be turned off so easily).

    Thread Starter kfutter

    (@kfutter)

    Actually, I just thought of something: recently, I changed the Checkout page from using the shortcode to using the Woocommerce checkout block. The timing of this change now seems coincidental with my discovering these new draft orders – could they be related?

    I think you are right, Kevin. Given the additional information, you’ve shared and the fact that you are using WooCommerce Checkout Block, the new checkout-draft status is available to you.

    As mentioned in the post you linked:

    Merchants who see these Checkout Drafts don’t need to take any action; there is a scheduled clean-up action that will automatically delete Checkout Drafts every 24 hours.

    So you don’t need to take any actions and can leave those orders as they are. Hopefully, the follow-up post about this new order status will have more actionable information, but I don’t have any timeline for when it’ll get published.

    I hope this helps ??

    Also, I’m going to mark this as resolved – if you have any further questions, you can start a new thread.

    Thread Starter kfutter

    (@kfutter)

    Thanks. I’ll check tomorrow to see if the 24-hour cleanup actually happens.

    Thread Starter kfutter

    (@kfutter)

    Draft orders deleted after 24 hours: confirmed.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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