Pending orders are mandatory to import for tracking accurate available inventory levels.
A pending order's payment process can be extended, but you're on the hook!
Even if you only accept orders if they are paid immediately, pending orders are an important status you should support.
Amazon and eBay Buy It Now w/ immediate payment required permit corrections to payment methods and even after the payment declined, you as a seller are on the hook to ship that item to the customer as soon as they correct their billing issues.
Resolving payment can take several days and you must hold reserves for these orders or you might violate policy if you re-sell the last unit and this buyer corrects their payment method.
Only formally cancelled orders can release inventory for sale to other buyers.
Pending orders & your orders list
The default order views will show these pending payment orders but they are easily hidden from view under the filters menu. You can not mistakenly fulfill these orders in SKULabs - there are multiple layers of protection.
If you're looking at your order list today which includes pending orders, it's important to understand the default view is not a "recommended to ship" view until you set up a view for the orders you wish to fulfill. Ideally, you can even use the batch system which automatically selects orders for fulfillment according to your business logic.
What defines a pending order in SKULabs?
As described above, SKULabs appropriately imports these orders unlike many other solutions out there.
SKULabs considers any order in the following statuses as "pending".
authorized *this means payment is approved but not yet "captured" which is where most declines occur
unpaid
pending
new
awaiting payment
declined
disputed
incomplete
manual verification required
How does SKULabs protect pending orders?
Once an order is declared as "pending" in SKULabs:
the order won't be automatically selected for fulfillment within batches
packers will be warned prior to shipping when they attempt to mistakenly ship
by default these orders are filtered out of your orders list view with the "Show pending orders" checkbox unchecked.
If you have additional orders you'd like to have filtered out as "pending" in SKULabs, please provide an order number by chat.
If I wanted to, could I still process a pending Shopify order and mark the order as shipped on Shopify?
Yes, if you opt to bypass the built in warnings, you can still choose to manually ship a pending order and mark it as shipped.