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Updating Completed Order Timestamps in Drupal Commerce

One of the things I'll miss about Louisville, KY when I move my family to Greenville, SC next month is the buying club we're a part of that sources raw / organic foods and other products from local farms and other good companies. It was put together by a genius I knew through college and church (John Moody, who writes and speaks about food clubs and co-ops), and last year another college buddy (Kane Holbrook) started working with him to help manage the club and oversee deliveries and pick-ups. Among the many yummy things we get through the club are a variety of raw milk cheeses from Welsh Mountain Farms, an Amish farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

It just so happens that this farmer, yea, though he has no internet access himself, understands the advantages of selling online and asked Kane last year about starting a website to sell his cheese. Kane floated the idea by me, and it quickly became a business plan and partnership to start selling his cheese using Drupal Commerce. Not only did it help the farmer and open a door for Kane and I to do some business together, but it also finally gave me a chance to experience using Drupal Commerce as a site owner and administrator. After two years of planning and development, I finally started eating my own dog food when we launched RealMilkCheese.com in November.

I'll have more to write about the site in the future, as I learned a lot through it and contributed a lot of code from the project to drupal.org. It became the driving factor behind my development of the flat rate shipping module and UI improvements for on-site order management in Drupal Commerce 1.2. It's also the primary example I use to demonstrate multiple flat rate shipping options with conditional availability (think free shipping on orders over a certain amount) and custom discounts to products through an integration with quicksketch's Facebook OAuth module. It was my second foray into theming with Omega and turned up a few tips that I need to pass on to other theme developers with respect to Drupal Commerce components. Finally, it gave me my first experience launching a site on Acquia Dev Cloud using one of those handy coupons they give out at Drupal events.

But the primary purpose for this blog post is to highlight one specific difficulty we encountered while administering orders and the simple solution I put in place to resolve it. In Drupal Commerce, the shopping cart is simply an order in a special status that indicates it's "in progress" and therefore needs to be continually updated to reflect current product prices and availability. By default an authenticated shopping cart order (i.e. for a logged in user) may exist indefinitely until the user finally completes checkout for the order. (There's an issue to expire them through Rules if you're interested in reviewing it. )

We encountered a scenario where a customer added a product to his shopping cart the first week of December but didn't actually purchase the cheese until we sent out a special offer over the holidays for a free 8 oz. cheddar for orders placed in a certain timeframe. It was great to see the immediate effectiveness of the offer (recovered cart sales are a big deal), but because the Orders View on the back-end sorted orders in reverse order by creation timestamp, his order appeared down the page below orders that had already been shipped and marked as Completed. It's not a huge problem, because a filter on the View to only show Pending orders by default would highlight orders needing attention, but it still isn't an ideal user experience.

The thought occurred to me that for our scenario, it would be fine for the creation timestamp of an order to be reset to the current timestamp on checkout completion. As far as we're concerned, that's when an order has been "created" that we actually need to respond to. It actually existed before then, and we'll retain that data in the order's revision log, but we really want to know when the order was finally submitted through a complete checkout process. I started imagining where I would put code to do this when I realized I wouldn't do that at all... a simple Rule would do the trick!

This Rule reacts to the event "Completing the checkout process" and includes a single "Set a data value" action to update the created timestamp to the current time. Because every order save triggers a new revision, we'll have the historical creation date if we want it, but the date that matters to the customer and to administrators (i.e. the date of checkout completion) will now appear properly. If you need the same behavior, you can import the following Rule:

Now, I should be used to the level of flexibility we achieved in Drupal Commerce by now, but it still tickles me to no end that it really is that simple to change even obscure aspects of your e-commerce system through the user interface. When I communicate the strengths of the project as an eCommerce framework, concrete examples like this make the approach come to life for merchants and store administrators. It's a clear case of the software conforming to your business needs instead of forcing you to work within its constraints, and I look forward to seeing how else we can trick it out to grow our little cheese business.

hehe Thanks, Chris. I hope to post up a few more posts with simple practical ways to improve the customer / administrator experience in Drupal Commerce... and I'll definitely remember the cheese at the events I attend this year.

If I understand you right, you're talking about the gap in order numbers that results from shopping carts that never complete checkout. I have a solution forthcoming for those, too - basically on checkout completion I'm just going to start manually setting the order number to the next in a sequential list of numbers. I just haven't decided yet how to make sure it plays well with orders created via the admin interface.