An order from Amazon, Flipkart, Meesho, a quick-commerce app or your own Shopify or WooCommerce store arrives on its own, and then somebody has to actually do something about it. Online orders is where that happens: read what was bought, hold the stock, and hand it to the warehouse to be picked.
Read its lines first
Until you read an order's lines, Finocket only knows the total. Reading them takes the SKUs the channel sent and matches each one to an item in your catalogue — first by the id your published listing used, then by the item's own SKU, then by its barcode.
A SKU that matches nothing is shown as unmapped, and stays that way. It is never guessed at by name: a wrong guess would take the wrong item out of stock, and nothing downstream could tell. Add the SKU to the right item, then read the lines again.
Holding the stock
Accepting an order and then holding its stock means the same goods cannot be promised to somebody else — not at the counter, not on another channel. What a channel is told is available already has these holds taken off it, which is what stops an oversell.
An order is held whole or not at all. If one SKU is unmapped, or one line is short, nothing is held and the refusal names the SKU. Holding part of an order would drop your available stock for a sale that still could not be picked, and the problem would only surface later, in the warehouse, to somebody with no way to know which line was wrong.
Sending it to the warehouse
Sending an order to the warehouse raises a pick list for it and moves the hold onto that list, so the stock stays spoken for exactly once. From there it is an ordinary warehouse job: pick it, pack it, dispatch it. Each of those steps comes back and writes itself onto the order's history.
The history is the record
Every order carries the list of what has happened to it and when — read, accepted, held, picked, packed, dispatched, delivered, returned, refunded. Nothing in it can be edited or deleted afterwards, by anyone. That is deliberate: it is what you show a marketplace when it says you missed a dispatch deadline.
When it comes back
Record a return against the order and Finocket opens a return receipt against the bill that order became — the same receipt a parcel returned by post would get. Inspect the goods on Returns: what condition each item is in and what happens to it. Posting it issues the credit note.
A refused delivery that comes straight back to you is the same flow, recorded as returned to origin rather than a customer return, so your returns figures keep the two apart.
An order has to have been turned into a bill before it can be credited. If it has not been, convert it on the marketplace orders report first.