A Better Workflow for Fulfilling In-Store Pickup Orders in Lightspeed eCom

Lightspeed eCom has quickly become one of our favorite platforms to recommend to our brick and mortar clients. The all-in-one system between in-store and online sales is one of the best out there.

As with any platform, nothing is perfect and Lightspeed eCom has a few limitations that we’ve had to find workarounds for: in particular, the workflow for fulfilling orders selected for store pickup.

This is an essential omni-channel feature for people selling in a physical space and online, because it adds another level of convenience for customers that live close by and don’t want to bother with shipping.

But the feature hasn’t yet matured enough on the back-end to allow for an intuitive fulfillment workflow.

If you’ve sought out this article because you are running into the same problems, then you know where things fall apart. The two main issues are this:

1. Pickup orders are tied to the same notifications and triggers as shipped orders, which can present some confusion with communicating with your customers. So whether you mark an item as “shipped” or “picked up”, the same email (Order Shipped) goes out. This forces you to either adapt the messaging in the email to reflect both scenarios of an order being shipped or confirming the pickup of an order or turn off the Order Shipped notification altogether.
2. When a pickup order clears payment, it automatically is labeled with the default order status “Ready for Pickup“. But some retailers are not able to fulfill a pickup order immediately. It may take a day or multiple days to get the products and have it ready for the customer. So this adds some confusion to the fulfillment process and forces you to manually add a custom status to every pickup order that differentiates between “in process” and “ready for pickup”. There is not currently a way to change what the default status is.

This can certainly be frustrating and we hope to see these changes in future updates, but here is a workaround that has served us well in the meantime.

Warning: it does come with more manual work, but it allows you to keep the Order Shipped email active, which can be really helpful at keeping customers in the loop on the progress of their order.

A Better Workflow for Fulfilling In-Store Pickup Orders in Lightspeed eCom

1. 1. When a pickup order is made, the customer will get the Order Confirmation email. If products are not available for pickup right away, it’s important that you mention that specifically in that email template to let your customers know when they can expect it to be ready and how you will notify them.

1. 1. For each pickup order that comes in, someone from your team should go to Admin > Orders to change the status from “Ready for pickup” to a custom order status, titled “Pickup order in process”. This is only if you do have a delayed turnaround time for getting products ready for pickup. To create the custom order status, go to Admin > Settings > Workflow, and scroll down to the Order Status section at the very bottom.

1. 1. When the order is prepped and ready for pickup, change the status back to “Ready for pickup”.

1. When a pickup order is then collected by the customer, change the order status to “Collected + Complete” (another custom status you have to create). Important: If you mark the order as having been picked up, it will trigger the Order Shipped email which may cause some confusion.

A variation of step #3 that is a little less manual and may work better for you is to edit the messaging in the Order Shipped email to address both shipped and pickup orders. Here’s an example:

Subj: Your [[shop_title]] order [[orderid]] has Processed!

We’re just letting you know that we’ve processed your order!

*If you selected pick up in store at your time of order, you can now pick up at the [[your store name]] [[store address]]*

So when the order is prepped and ready for pickup, you simply mark the order as ‘Picked up’, which will then mark it as complete and send the Order Shipped email. With this, you would then have orders that say “Complete” even though the order hasn’t been picked up by the customer. If that is a problem, then you would need to change those orders to a custom status to show that it hasn’t yet been picked up.

Again, I know this is less than ideal, but the Lightspeed team has been great about hearing our feedback and relaying that to development. We are hopeful that this article will become irrelevant sooner than later.