Orders that end up the Pending status usually require some investigation for issues. The main concern with this status on an order is that inventory is not removed for the items on it which can lead to overselling. The majority of the time this status will indicate some kind of issue occurred with the order and below we'll cover the following three of the most common causes:

This is the most common reason an order will end up in Pending status. This is usually caused by some aspect of the order having too high or low of a value. i.e. the payment, the taxes, the items, shipping or discount. Alternatively, this can happen if any of these elements are missing entirely.

Heartland's custom fields have the option to be set as required. This can cause issues when a custom field is required on some part of an order. Depending on the field and where it appears, this can lead to a Pending status order due to missing information (payment, shipping, items, etc).

This issue will continue to impact orders until the requirement for custom field that caused the disruption is turned off.

Location: Heartland: Setting > Custom fields



If an Open status is refunded or partially refunded in Shopify, Accumula attempts to edit the order in Heartland (as opposed to creating a ticket for the refund). Certain types of refunds performed in Shopify can result in a Heartland order ending up in the Pending status.

Example: If the product is restocked in Shopify, but the payment is not refunded, Accumula will remove the restocked items from the Heartland order. The total will not match the payments and the order will be in Pending status.

Unlike previous issues mentioned in this article, this scenario may not need any manual intervention. Depending on your business practices, the pending order can be left as is.

Heartland requires that a shipping and billing address is listed on an order. When a Shopify order does not have a shipping and billing address listed, the Heartland order will go into pending status. This often happens when Shopify POS is used during a pop up shop or an event. The shipping and billing address is tied to a customers profile, so when a customer does not have that info listed on Shopify, or no customer is added to the transaction at all, it will not populate on their order.

An address will have to be added to both shipping and billing fields in Heartland on the order. Once those have been added the order can be opened and then invoiced. The customer profile in Shopify can also be edited to avoid future occurrences.

A 'placeholder' customer profile with an address can be created in Shopify and then used during checkout on Shopify POS. This 'placeholder' customer can have a generic address, such as the store's address. A Default Customer can also be created and set in Accumula to be used when no customer is added on an order. This is particuarly useful when Shopify POS is in use, however, it does not protect against a customer profile that is missing an address. Default Customer Setting requires customer's id to be added into the setting which can be found in the Shopify URL of the customers profile.