Held Orders

One of the more challenging tasks when dealing with orders that users place on the website, is ensuring that appropriate taxes are being estimated.  If this isn't correct, it can create issues with your tax reporting long after the order was placed.

When users select a Ship To during checkout, the Ship To will have the appropriate taxes assigned in your ERP.  However, if a user manually enters an address, the appropriate taxes will not be estimated, as the address will be an unknown variable.

This tool will put all orders where the user has entered a manual address into a Held status on the site.  Holding orders will allow you to create a ship-to in your ERP with the appropriate tax jurisdiction and assign that ship-to on the order before it is sent to your ERP.   This will ensure the order will have the appropriate tax amount assigned on import.

If you have the Avalara third-party tax integration, this tool will not be available or necessary.  In that case, Avalara will handle the tax estimates to your specifications.

Held Order Details

The Held Orders tool is easy to use.

  1. Orders with manual addresses will be set to a Held status.  You will receive an email for these orders and they will appear at the top of the order list on the Admin page.
  2. At this time, you will create a Contact ID\Customer Code\Ship to ID in your ERP and assign the appropriate tax jurisdiction to the Ship to ID based on the address the user entered.
  3. On the held order, you can now search for or enter the Contact ID, Customer Code, or Ship to ID that you created.
  4. Click the Update & Release Cart button to send the cart to be picked up by your ERP's scheduled import.

There is also the option to "Release Cart As-Is" this will release the cart without making any changes.

If you click the Update & Release Cart button but there still seems to be an error, such as if the contact ID doesn't seem to be associated with the Customer Code you will be alerted with a dialog box letting you know what information needs to be changed.

If you are interested in using Held Orders on your site please contact Aldrich Web Solutions Customer Support for more information.