SKULabs has a built-in system to protect your team from mis-ships. This system enabled fulfillment certainty in an uncertain ecommerce climate. In 2014/2015 it was not uncommon to see an order be deleted or disappear then get replaced with another order number immediately after with no transactional record. Our answer to this problem common WooCommerce/Walmart at the time was to offer something called "archived" orders. These were orders we didn't know the state of and separated from your order processing view to avoid mistakes in fulfillment.
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Today however, there are "eventual consistency" databases which are making certain orders disappear temporarily and we're aware of very few platforms which fail to offer a fully stateful order flow that avoids any requirement to ensure an order that disappears still needs to be fulfilled - they will now typically show up as explicit payment holds, cancellations, etc.
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Today, SKULabs launches a new opt-in option "Disable automatic order archiving". For most stores, this introduces little to no additional effort. In exchange for manually processing obscure cancellations that were not correctly filed on your sales channel, you can guarantee reserves won't be released when orders temporarily disappear from sync.
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After this setting is enabled, we'll continue to hold your reserves and shift the order to the "Archived" tab with a tag "Hold - Archived" avoiding mistaken fulfillment. As soon as the order re-appears we will remove the tag and the order will re-appear as processing.
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We believe this new manual process for cancelling archived orders will help eliminate a major point of frustration while still eliminating any risk of late or mis-shipment. No more in-stock notifications for temporarily released inventory!
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While we continue to revise our financial status, fulfillment status, split-routing, reserve-holding, archived, and order status model for the future; we hope you find this update useful. Keep an eye out for upcoming revisions to our order status model which will enable more powerful capabilities like:

Head to your store settings and click "Choose warehouses" next to your stock sync setting. From here, enable "Manually cancel implicitly archived orders" and you're opted in.

Note: Once opted in, be sure to check your "Archived" tab for orders which are holding reserves and decide if you need to manually cancel them using "Modify status" or remove the "Hold - Archived" tag to return them to the processing tab.
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​Note: Purchasing will still count these orders as reserved as will stock sync. Batches will not auto-select "Hold - Archived" orders. The processing tab will not show "Hold - Archived" orders.

Note: Orders explicitly cancelled or archived on your sales channel will still be directly archived as before this update - no action required.
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​Note: If you find large numbers of "Hold - Archived" orders and you believe they should be automatically handled please let us know with a few example order numbers and reference this article. This setting is available for all stores but your store may not sync vital statuses to SKULabs such as "Cancelled"/"Shipped"/"Refunded", your store may require slight configuration changes in SKULabs to import these statuses and avoid manual effort.

Thank you for reading this update and we look forward to hearing your candid feedback about this optional new workflow for archived orders.
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June 2024 Update: This feature was renamed from "Manually cancel implicitly archived orders (prevent reserve releases for intermittently missing orders)" to "Disable automatic order archiving when orders disappear from sync".

- Brent