An introduction to the Magento order management system

On the e-commerce systems, the sell process is one of the most important features of every online business, providing a good e-commerce life cycle.

Some processes will be triggered when a customer confirms his order. Magento collects all the customer data and processes the request turning it into an order. This book will only cover the basic concepts of this process, but it's very important to understand them to develop consistent Magento extension solutions (we will see about this in Chapter 6, Write Magento 2.0 Extensions – a Great Place to Go).

Let's take a look at the Magento sales operations basics.

Sales operations

Let's play with the Magento admin area. In your favorite browser, enter the URL http://localhost/packt/admin-packt. Now, enter with your login credentials to access the admin area:

In Magento 2.0, you can manage sales operations by accessing the Sales menu in the admin area. Magento gives you the possibility to configure the following Sales options:

These options give you the power to manage your sales system as you want. Though it's, it's important to explore some Magento tools, extensions, and techniques to take full advantage and make improvements on your sales system to gather techniques to develop your own solution:

We have many options to make improvements on sales operations. You can configure up-sells and cross-sells features, for example, to give your customer more ways to order on your store. To do so, take advantage of a search engine optimization, work with a multilingual store, a geo-targeting, responsive design, and a simplified checkout process.

A simplified checkout process

In this section, we'll see how to implement a simplified checkout process on our store.

Orders

As a system administrator, you can access the admin area (http://localhost/mymagento/admin) to get all the customer order information, generate the product tracking code, invoices, and send a message to your customer. Magento stores all the order data on the admin area | Sales | Orders.

As an admin, Magento gives you the option to order products directly for your customer. On Magento, we have a persistent cart, print invoices, credit memo, and transactions.

Payments

You have a few options of payment methods in Magento. Magento has a native support to Google Checkout and PayPal. They both are payment gateways that provide the entire sell transaction environment to your store.

Basically, you choose your payment method and choose how you will pay for your product: credit card or deposit.

Promotions

With the products prices defined, you can set up promotions in advance. Promotion systems are very useful to establish a solid relationship with the customer.

In Magento, it is possible to define catalog price rules and shopping cart rules. Basically, you can define price behavior according to your promotions and customer defined rules, such as postal code, and certain value of discount.

You can provide coupon codes for your customers to raise Magento sells.