Understanding WooCommerce Order Statuses
When a new order is created in your WooCommerce store, it will always be marked with a status relevant to the payment stage it currently is. Understanding these statuses is important as it can be the difference between a successful or failed transaction, among other things.
Order statuses are also often utilized for troubleshooting failed orders and they can be utilized to send specific email notifications to your customers.
Namely, the default order statuses generated by WooCommerce are:
Pending payment: In this state, the order has been created but the payment hasn't started yet. Orders with this status are considered unpaid.
- Failed: Orders that have failed (e.g. technical issues, declined by the customer's bank, etc)
Note: It's possible that an order won't change to the Failed status immediately and remain as Pending until it has been verified by the payment processor.
- Processing: Orders with this status are paid, but awaiting fulfillment (e.g. shipping products). All products except those that are both Virtual and Downloadable will remain in this status unless you manually change them to a different one.
- Completed: Payment is successful and the order has been fulfilled.
- On hold: When an order receives this status, the stock has been reduced but you need to confirm the payment.
- Canceled: The order is manually cancelled either by the admin or the customer. No further action is required.
- Refunded: Order refunded by the admin.
- Authentication required: This status is used for orders where the customer needs to authenticate the transaction and complete all the needed requirements (e.g. SCA).
More info
- To find out more, WooCommerce has documented what's the flow of an order and which status is considered expected for every stage.
- Check the following article about configuring WooCommerce settings.
- View and edit orders in WooCommerce to find more information about your customers.
