Online Channel: After the Order

Ship, cancel, return and dispute marketplace orders

Steps 3 to 6 of running an online channel: what happens to an order after it arrives, and who acts when BigLedger does not. On a marketplace, the platform sets the ship-by date, rules on returns and disputes, and keeps a scorecard on you that BigLedger cannot see; on your own storefront a card chargeback is yours. Each step says what BigLedger does and who does the rest. It follows Step 2, the stock each shop shows.

Step 3: ship by the platform’s date, not yours.
Step 4: handle cancellations and returns, and correct the books.
Step 5: answer disputes and chargebacks with evidence kept at packing time.
Step 6: keep the platform’s scorecard healthy.

Step 3: Ship by the platform’s date, not yours

A marketplace sets the ship-by date. Miss it and your late-shipment rate rises, which can cost you ranking or, eventually, the account. BigLedger stores Shopee’s ship-by date on the order, but no screen shows it, so the date cannot be your work list.

Who: the packing lead, at the start of each packing round.
What they use: the seller centre’s to ship list, sorted by deadline. That list is the platform’s own view of what it will count as late. Pack from it, then update the status from BigLedger’s bulk-update listing or from the seller centre.
How you know it is right: the seller centre shows no order past its ship-by date. Over a week, the late-shipment rate on the platform’s scorecard stays below its threshold.

Some orders cannot make the date. There are three choices, and on a marketplace the platform’s policy, not you, sets what each one costs. Make the choice before the date passes, not after:

Ship late. The buyer waits. The late shipment counts on your scorecard (Step 6), and some platforms cancel an order themselves once it passes their limit.
Split the shipment, where the platform allows it. The buyer gets part of the order on time. You pay for the second delivery.
Cancel. The platform refunds the buyer, and the seller cancellation counts against you (Step 6).
Who: the packing lead reports the order the moment it cannot make the date. The channel manager decides the same day.
How you know it is right: every order the packing lead reported has a decision written down before its ship-by date, and the seller centre shows none of them past the date undecided.

A failed delivery comes back as a status, not as stock. When the courier returns a parcel, the goods are yours again and they are in your warehouse. BigLedger’s stock balance does not know that until somebody records it (Step 4).

Step 4: Handle cancellations and returns: the platform decides, you correct the books

What BigLedger does with a cancellation depends on the marketplace:

Shopee: the cancellation job writes the channel’s status onto the order, and that is all. The order stays FINAL and nothing is voided.
Lazada: the Lazada cancellation job writes nothing at all, because of a product defect reported to engineering. A Lazada order is marked cancelled only when Lazada’s order-status notification reaches BigLedger, or when you cancel the order from BigLedger, and then it reads canceled. Either way the order stays FINAL and nothing is voided. So do not read a Lazada order’s status in BigLedger as proof it was not cancelled: check the seller centre.
TikTok Shop: the order job writes the new status, and when it reads CANCELLED it also sets the sales order to VOID. An order that is already cancelled when the job first sees it is never created.

Whether a cancelled order goes on holding stock back from the shops (Step 2) depends on the marketplace. The deduction reads the order’s channel status, not whether the order is voided, and we have not found a screen that stops a cancelled order counting.

Shopee: an order Shopee cancelled reads CANCELLED and goes on being counted. An order you cancel from BigLedger, or whose buyer’s cancellation request you answer from BigLedger, is written canceled in lower case instead, and is not counted. So orders Shopee cancelled build up in the held-back figure. The channel manager allows for them: every week, and before each campaign, run the held-back check (Step 2) on your best sellers, its hand-over to support included.
Lazada: the statuses Lazada sends are in lower case (canceled, shipped, delivered), and so are the ones BigLedger itself writes when it sets an order to cancelled, packed or ready to ship. None of them is counted, so a cancelled Lazada order holds nothing back. BigLedger’s API also has a call that marks an order delivered by your own fleet (we found no screen that uses it). Whether an order marked that way holds anything back depends on what its lines carry. So do not allow for such orders in the buffer until support has confirmed what they hold back. Other shops' orders can still lower a Lazada shop’s figure: under ACTIVE with no branch ticked, every counted order on every branch does (Step 2).
TikTok Shop: the job compares the status with CANCELLED in capitals, the spelling the list holds, so a cancelled TikTok order matches it. Whether it actually holds stock back depends on what its lines carry, and that was not settled from the code. TikTok’s other statuses are not covered here. BigLedger’s stock jobs send nothing to a TikTok shop (Step 2), so the TikTok buffer changes nothing the shop shows.
Shopify: BigLedger writes Shopify’s fulfilment status on the order, or unfulfilled when there is none, and unfulfilled is not in the list. The other values Shopify sends, and what BigLedger does with a Shopify cancellation, are not covered here.

If an invoice was already raised for an order that is then cancelled, the invoice stays too, on TikTok Shop as well: its job voids the sales order only. Accounts raise a credit note for it, and the monthly check below covers cancellations as well as returns.

What BigLedger does with a return: nothing arrives except the status. No job brings a return, a refund or a return-to-sender into BigLedger as a document.

So the correction is a person’s job. It happens in two places, in this order:

The goods, when they physically arrive. The stock keeper inspects the parcel. Decide whether the unit goes back to saleable stock, to refurbishment, or is written off. For a phone or laptop, check the serial number against what was shipped before anything else.
The books, when the goods have been inspected, not when the platform approves the refund. The accounts clerk raises the sales return or credit note against the invoice, as for any other sale (Returns and exchanges). A refund the platform gives after it has paid you out is taken back from a later payout. That half is on Reconciling Marketplace Payouts.

How you know it is right: once a month, export the platform’s list of returned and refunded orders. Every one should have a credit note on that marketplace branch, and every returned unit should be back in stock or written off. An order with a refund and no credit note means your sales are overstated by that amount.

Separate the two duties. The person who approves a refund in the seller centre should not also raise the credit note and reconcile the payout. Put approval with the channel manager and the credit note with accounts. Then a refund that nobody can explain shows up as a gap between two people’s records, rather than disappearing into one person’s.

Step 5: Answer disputes and chargebacks with evidence you kept before you needed it

On a marketplace, the platform decides disputes. When a buyer says the box was empty or the item was different, the platform rules. BigLedger has no part in it. Your only defence is evidence, and it must be collected at packing time: a photo or short video of the unit and its serial number going into the parcel, and the parcel’s weight at hand-over.

Who: the packing lead collects it. The channel manager submits it inside the platform’s window, which is short and set by the platform.
How you know it is right: for any disputed order, you can produce the packing record in minutes. Keep a monthly count of disputes lost for lack of evidence.

On your own storefront, a card chargeback is yours, not the platform’s. A marketplace absorbs card disputes. Your own website does not. BigLedger receives the gateway’s payment result and receives nothing about a chargeback. It also sends no refunds to the gateway.

Who holds the money at each stage:

The sale. Your payment gateway collects the money and pays it to you on its own settlement schedule, less its fee.
The dispute. The card-holder’s bank takes the money back through the card network, and your gateway recovers it from you, by deducting it from a settlement or debiting your account.
The outcome. Contest and win, and the money comes back the same way. Do not contest, or lose, and it stays with the card-holder.

The deadline to contest is printed on the gateway’s dispute notice. It is set by the card network and your gateway, not by you, and it runs from the day the dispute is raised.

The storefront’s Request Refund widget does not refund anything either. It sends an e-mail, with the invoice number, reason and the shopper’s contact details, to the address set on the widget in CP Commerce Admin.

Who: whoever holds the gateway’s merchant portal login watches it for dispute notices. Whoever receives the Request Refund e-mail refunds through the gateway, then asks accounts to record it.
When: check the merchant portal weekly, and daily around sale periods. The contest window starts when the bank raises the dispute, not when you notice it.
How you know it is right: every chargeback and refund in the gateway’s report for the month has a matching credit note or refund voucher in BigLedger. The Request Refund mailbox has no request older than your promised response time.

Step 6: Keep the platform’s scorecard healthy, because BigLedger cannot see it

Every marketplace scores your shop on its own measures:

late shipment
seller cancellation
return rate
chat response time
rating

Slip too far on any of them and you lose visibility, campaign slots, or the account. None of these numbers exists in BigLedger. The seller centre is the only place to read them.

Who: the channel manager, weekly, and daily during a campaign.
What BigLedger can help with: Steps 2 and 3 are the inputs you control from here. An accurate buffer keeps seller cancellations down, and working from the to-ship list keeps late shipments down.

Reviews and buyer messages. BigLedger has jobs that pull Shopee and Lazada reviews and send the replies you write from its Reply To Review screen, and one that syncs Shopee conversations. They run only if they are scheduled for your shop (Scheduler). None of them writes a reply. A public reply is written for the next buyer, not only this one: say what you did about the problem, and stay inside the platform’s response window. The channel manager, or someone they name, replies daily. You know it is right when no review in the reply queue is older than the platform’s window.

Campaigns are a stock and margin commitment. Joining a platform sale day usually means a price cut, sometimes a voucher you part-fund, and a promise of stock. BigLedger will push whatever price you set (and, to a Lazada or Shopee shop, whatever stock figure your settings give), and has no view on whether the campaign pays. Before you join, the channel manager and finance should agree three things:

The margin after the campaign discount and the platform’s fees (Reconciling Marketplace Payouts).
The stock you are committing.
The buffer for the day (Step 2).

After the campaign, finance compares the margin agreed with the margin the next payouts show. That is how you know whether to join the next one.

A suspension or payout hold stops new orders or new money. It does not cancel what you already owe: open orders still have to ship by their dates.

Who: the channel manager keeps the to-ship list moving (Step 3). The same day the hold starts, they tell the accounts clerk who books that platform’s settlement reports.
How you know it is right: during the hold the seller centre shows no order past its ship-by date. The accounts clerk keeps a list of the orders shipped during the hold. For the books, the hold is over when every order on that list has appeared in a settlement report and been booked (Reconciling Marketplace Payouts, Step 2).

Next: Steps 7 to 9, buyer data, silent feeds and channel profit.

What success looks like for this part

No order in a seller centre is past its ship-by date, each return or refund the platform recorded this month has a credit note in BigLedger, and the late-shipment and cancellation rates on each scorecard are inside the platform’s thresholds.

Common mistakes in this part

Mistake	How you find out	What to do instead
Waiting for the platform’s refund to raise the credit note	Refunds with no credit note at month end; sales overstated	Raise it when the goods are inspected, and reconcile monthly (Step 4)
Relying on the Request Refund widget to refund	A shopper who asked twice	It only sends an e-mail; someone refunds through the gateway (Step 5)