How to Manage WooCommerce Orders with Filters (Step-by-Step)
Do you struggle with managing your WooCommerce orders efficiently? That’s definitely no surprise because, despite its many useful features, one crucial component this eCommerce platform lacks is advanced filtering capabilities.
Managing orders in WooCommerce effectively can have a great impact on your business, regardless of whether you’re managing a small online store or an enterprise-level business with hundreds of thousands of products. You need to keep track of stock and ensure the successful fulfillment of every single order. Otherwise, your customers will quickly find another place to go.
Thankfully, there is a solution – Admin Columns, a powerful data management plugin that can quickly transform the WooCommerce order management experience. By providing smart filters, better bulk editing tools, and customizable order overviews, this plugin is the smart solution for eCommerce professionals looking to advance their order management system.
Let’s see how!
Introduction to WooCommerce order management
Efficient order management leads to operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and business growth. However, without a strong system in place, store owners may face delayed order processing and inventory mishaps, leading to disgruntled customers and impacted sales.
WooCommerce offers several native features that aid in managing orders:
The Orders dashboard
The Orders dashboard in WooCommerce is where you can track and manage customer purchases.
Through this dashboard, store owners can quickly see and manage new orders as they come in. The dashboard also provides useful information like the order status, customer details, products ordered, and order value. Yet, as order volume grows, the default dashboard may become less efficient, requiring additional tools to handle the increasing complexity and data.
Individual order overview
The individual views provide more details about each order, including the purchased items, price per item, additional costs (like shipping), customer information, status, and more. This is also the view from which you can issue a manual refund.
Default order statuses
WooCommerce offers several default order statuses to help store owners track and manage their orders:
- Pending payment: Placed orders awaiting payment completion.
- Processing: Orders where payment is confirmed, and items are being prepared.
- On hold: Awaiting further actions for payment or confirmation.
- Completed: Orders that are successfully processed and delivered.
- Canceled: Orders that the customer or vendor has canceled.
- Refunded: Orders that have been returned and refunded.
- Failed: Payment attempts declined or reversed.
These statuses provide store owners with a bird’s eye view of where orders are up to and are also used to power WooCommerce’s built-in order notification emails.
Built-in searching and filtering capabilities
WooCommerce has basic search and filter functions from the Orders list table, allowing order segmentation only by date (month and year) or customer.
Another way to filter orders is to go to the Analytics window, where you can filter by a date range and several other criteria.
However, even these seemingly “advanced” filters still miss crucial information, such as custom fields and order notes.
Editing orders, both individually and in bulk
Order editing – whether adjusting quantities or altering status – is straightforward in WooCommerce, but the bulk actions are limited – you can only bulk delete or change statuses.
Challenges in WooCommerce order management
As we’ve seen, managing orders in WooCommerce using its default functionality presents a few common problems that can impact store efficiency and customer satisfaction. The platform’s limited filtering capabilities make it challenging to sift through orders based on specific criteria such as products, categories, or custom fields. This limitation can negatively impact the speed and precision of order processing.
Dealing with orders in bulk becomes inconvenient due to these constraints, leading to time-consuming manual adjustments. The default order dashboard, while functional, cannot provide admins with a comprehensive and customizable overview necessary for efficient order tracking and management.
Another significant challenge is exporting order data for external use. There are two ways to do that with core WooCommerce:
- Export all orders as an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file from the Export screen.
- Export order data in a Comma-separated Values (CSV) file from the Analytics area.
The XML export can be useful when migrating an entire website, but it’s unsuitable for sales analytics. CSV is a better format for this purpose, but the Analytics area doesn’t allow for more advanced filtering, and the export process becomes very slow because you have to re-apply filters every time the data sets differ.
These challenges collectively lead to inefficient order processing, potentially resulting in decreased customer satisfaction and revenue loss. To effectively navigate around these limitations, you need to look beyond the default WooCommerce capabilities to a solution that offers a more sophisticated and adaptable approach to managing your WooCommerce orders.
Mastering WooCommerce order filters with Admin Columns
Admin Columns is a powerful solution that streamlines the order management process with advanced filtering options. It ensures that store owners and managers can focus on what matters – keeping customers satisfied and sales figures healthy.
Here are some of the extended order management capabilities offered by Admin Columns:
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Smart Filters: With Admin Columns, finding the exact order data you’re looking for has never been easier. Use smart filters to dive into your orders, whether it’s to view all orders from the last month that are awaiting shipment or to pinpoint specific products that are frequently purchased together. Once created, these filters can be preserved and shared, promoting efficient and collaborative management.
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Bulk and inline editing: The bulk editing functionality allows you to easily edit multiple orders directly from the Orders table, including columns with custom fields, significantly expanding what you can do with the default WooCommerce feature set. With inline editing on the other hand, you can directly edit specific fields without having to visit the individual order view.
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Export order data to CSV: Admin Columns enables the exporting of orders in CSV format directly from the Orders list view. When combined with Smart Filters, you can ensure you only get the data you need.
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Customize the order table display: Create custom Table Views to bring forward the data that matters most to you and add new columns for almost any field type, including custom fields, to further customize your views. If the field isn’t included in the list, you can even build your own custom columns!
With Admin Columns, you’ll elevate your WooCommerce order management to new heights, ensuring you can dedicate more time to growing your business. It’s the ideal tool for converting order management from a necessary and annoying task into a streamlined and efficient process.
How to filter your WooCommerce orders with Admin Columns (step-by-step guide)
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Download and install Admin Columns to your WordPress site.
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From your WordPress dashboard, go to the Orders list table.
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Click on Add Filter and include as many filters as you need to segment your data. Remember, you can filter by almost any field type or condition, making it easy to pinpoint the exact data you want.
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If you want, you can save this combination of filters for future use. Just click on Save Filters.
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You can also sort the results by clicking on the little arrow in the column: Up for ascending order and Down for descending.
Get more out of your filtered data with the following actions:
Exporting a filtered segment
When your data needs to journey beyond the WordPress dashboard for further analytics or to weave into a report, Admin Columns has you covered. Just apply your filters and click Export.
Creating a new table view
Different table views can be customized according to your specific business needs. For example, if you want to export a specific data set regularly, you can create a custom Export view and easily access it whenever you need.
Here are the steps:
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Go to the Table View settings by clicking on Edit columns.
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Click on Add View, name your view, and select whether to transfer columns from an existing one.
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Add as many columns as you need by clicking on Add Column. You can include columns with custom fields and adjust the individual column settings.
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Adjust the Table View settings. For example, you could make this view available only to certain team members or user roles.
Quick- and bulk-edit order data directly from the list table
Bulk editing with Admin Columns is much easier than with default WooCommerce and a lot more powerful. You just need to select the orders you want to edit, and an action bar will appear.
You can edit a specific number of orders or all of the orders at once – not just the ones that appear on the page. Just click “Select all X items.” After that, click the Bulk Edit button on the column you want to edit, save your changes, and you’re done.
Inline editing is also very easy:
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Go to the table settings from the Orders list table.
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Scroll down to the main settings and enable the Inline Edits feature.
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Go back to the Orders list table and click on the little pencil icon on the field you want to edit.
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Make your changes, save them, and you’re done!
Take your WooCommerce order management to the next level
Efficiently managing your orders is fundamental to the success of any WooCommerce store. Establishing a system that is both responsive and reliable can profoundly influence customer satisfaction and ensure profitable operations.
Admin Columns addresses the gap in what WooCommerce offers by default and allows you to create a bespoke order management system tailored to your business and teams. Besides its advanced filtering capabilities, this data management plugin allows you to edit columns in bulk and inline, create custom views, and export important data with just a few clicks.
Admin Columns is a great solution for WooCommerce store owners, but also for agencies and developers that want to create a more intuitive experience and data views for their clients.
Discover a better way of managing your WooCommerce data: Try out Admin Columns today!
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