Creating Orders

Depending on your business and use case, creating orders as an admin may be a common occurrence or an occasional necessity for handling special requests, phone orders, or any other non-standard transactions.

With Spree, you can create orders on behalf of customers should the need arise, and even capture payments in some cases (with the customers approval, of course!)

To create an order, navigate to the Orders tab of the admin dashboard.

Click on the blue ‘+ New Order’ button to get started. This will redirect you to the order creation page.

At first, the editor will seem quite bare, but as we add details to the order, new sections will be revealed.

Let’s walk through each step of the process from start to finish.

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Add a Customer

Before doing anything else, you’ll first want to add the customer to the order - if you don’t know who the customer is then there is no order. You can add a new or existing customer to an order.

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Add a New Customer

To add a new customer, click on ‘+ Add customer to this order’ and then click on ‘Create New’. 

This will open a form where you can enter the customer email, phone number, first name, and last name, and a tag if desired, and select whether or not they want to opt in for email marketing.

Once you’re finished, click ‘Save’ and the customer will be added to the order, as well as your customer database.

Now you’ll need to add a shipping and billing address for the customer. Click on ‘+ New Shipping Address’ and enter the correct information into the form the appears.

Click ‘Save’, and then click ‘+ New Billing Address’, and a window appears that allows you to either enter a new address, or use the shipping address.

Once you’ve clicked ‘Save’, you can move on to adding line items to the order.

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Add an Existing Customer

To add an existing customer, click on ‘+ Add customer to this order’ and then select the customer from the dropdown.

The customer, along with their default shipping and billing details, will be added to the order.

If the customer would like to place the order using a different shipping and/or billing address, then you can click the three dots in the upper right corner to update them accordingly.

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Add Line Items

Once you’ve added the customer, you’ll need to add line items (products) to the order.

To do so, click ‘+ Add line item’ at the top of the page.

This will open a small window where you can select the product variants you’d like to add to the order.

Click ‘Add selected variant’ and the line item will be added to the order. Notice that the UI of the page changes to include a shipment section, payment section, and a cost summary.

Note: Line items can only be selected one at a time, so if the customer requests multiple different products simply repeat this step.

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Add a Shipping Method

After adding a line item, the shipment section will be revealed, and a shipping method will be added automatically. To change the shipping method, click the pencil icon (edit button) next to the shipping method.

Select the correct shipping method from the dropdown and then hit ‘Save’ to update the method for the order.

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Add a Payment

Last but certainly not least, you’ll need to add a payment method to the order. To do so, there are three options to choose from.

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Create a New Payment

To manually add a payment , click on the ‘+ New Payment Method’ button. This will redirect you to a page where you can create a new payment for the order.

Here, you can set:

• Amount - equals total order value by default

• Payment Method - a list of payment methods available on your store

• Payment Source - a list of the customer’s saved cards associated with the payment method

Once you’ve verified the information is correct, click ‘Create’ to add the payment to the order. 

Note: Depending on the chosen payment method and its settings, the payment may or may not be automatically captured.

In the above example, we added a Stripe payment method using the customer’s saved card as the payment source.

Note: If the customer has no payment sources (i.e., credit/debit cards) associated with a particular payment method, you will not be able to create a payment using that method.

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Send a Payment Link

Alternatively, you can send the customer a payment link by email. The customer will receive a link that redirects them to a pre-populated checkout where they can choose to pay for the order using any of the payment methods available on your store.

Note: The customer must be logged in to complete the purchase.

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Copy Payment Link

Similar to above, but instead you copy the link and can send it to the customer via the preferred communication channel.