Admin Menu Category: Orders

The menu category holds pages dealing with existing orders, and individual order items contained in those orders.

The main difference: Manage Orders is for money, while Manage Items is for screening things before they go live.

If you want to make sure you received payment for an order, you want Manage Orders. If you want to make sure a listing is not Spam, or that a listing does not contain inappropriate materials, etc, you want Manage Items.

If you don't like something in an order, don't cancel the order since it may have more than just that item in it. Instead, you approve the order on Manage Orders, then go over to Manage Items and decline the actual item in the order. Likewise, if you never received payment for an item, don't decline the item, instead set the order the item is in to canceled or other appropriate declined status type. An order that is set to a declined status type will have all order items in that order declined as well.

Are you needing to approve things and you are not sure why? Or do you want to force approval of something?

To force admin approval of orders, meaning you want to verify whether you received payment or not, that is done for each individual payment gateway in Payments > Payment Gateways. For most gateways, you would click configure, then check the box for needs admin approval.

To force admin approval of order items, meaning you want to screen new/edit/renew/upgrade listings, that is set on a per "price plan item" which is per price plan, per category basis. Those settings are in Pricing > Price Plans Home > Edit Price Plan > Cost Specifics at the bottom of the cost specifics page. Note that these settings apply even if you have charge for listings? turned off¹⁾.

If a user on your site gets a message saying they cannot perform a listing renewal, listing upgrade, listing edit, subscription renewal, etc. because there is already something in the system that is pending admin review:

1. Look in Manage Orders to see if there are any pending orders. If you do not see any pending orders for the user, change the filters at the top of the page to view pending payment orders.
   • If you find any pending orders, and have received payment for the order already, then change the status to active to allow the items in that order to be processed.
   • If you do not find any pending orders for the user, proceed to the next step.
2. Now, look in Manage Items to see if there are any individual order items for the user that need to be approved.
   • If you find the pending order item for the user, either approve the item or decline it.
3. The user should now be able to complete whatever it was that the system was blocking them from doing before.

Note that any orders, and any order items you see during step 1 or 2 that are set to pending, can potentially be blocking a user from doing something (depending on what the item is). Below are a few scenarios to illustrate this further.

This specific scenario is just one of many that can lead to a something being blocked due to another pending item in the system. This is only meant for illustration purposes, for instructions on what will work in any scenario where the user is being blocked from doing something, see the main Something Pending in System, help! section.

1. User purchases a subscription, and uses a manual payment type. The order is then set to a status of "pending".
2. The user forgets he already purchased a subscription, or is perhaps impatient, and tries to purchase another subscription.
   • This time, the user is not allowed to purchase a subscription, because the order the subscription is in is still "pending".
   • You can allow further subscriptions to be purchased by that user, by setting the status of the order the subscription is in, to be either active, or one of the declined status types (such as Canceled).

This specific scenario is just one of many that can lead to a something being blocked due to another pending item in the system. This is only meant for illustration purposes, for instructions on what will work in any scenario where the user is being blocked from doing something, see the main Something Pending in System, help! section.

This scenario would be very similar for Renewing or Upgrading a listing as well.

1. In the admin, under Pricing > Price Plans Home > Edit Price Plan > Cost Specifics you have checked the box for "requires admin approval" for listing edits.
2. A user with that price plan, edits a listing.
3. The edit does not go "live" right away, since you have elected to require admin approval for a listing edit.
4. The user thinks something went wrong²⁾, so they edit the listing again.
   • This time, the user is not allowed to edit the listing, because they already have another edit listing in the system that is waiting for admin approval.
   • In this case, to allow the user to edit that listing again, go to Manage Items and you will see a pending listing edit. Either approve or decline the listing edit, and the user will be able to edit the listing further.