The manual order approval function allows you to upload custom designs after your customers place an order. This is the perfect feature if you are selling customized designs through your store!
For instance, if you need time to create an original design based on your customer's input, this will be helpful for you.
Only the orders for products that have been connected to Gelato will go through this flow. Please ensure that your store is connected and that your products are added to Gelato (if you don't have any products) or migrated to Gelato (if you already have products).
Setting up manual order approval
Go to the Stores section
Select your store and then Edit store details
Change order approval from Automatic to Manual
Remember to click Save changes
By selecting Manual, each and every order will need to be approved before it is sent to print, which means that orders can be edited (e.g. you can upload your customer's customized design) before they are sent for fulfillment.
Approving an order
All orders for connected items sent through to Gelato will be in the 'Pending Approval' status.
In order to approve an order, please follow the steps below.
Find your order in the Orders section, you will see the order's status is 'Pending approval'. Click on the order to enter the order detail page.
On the order detail page, review the details and click on "Approve" to proceed to the next step.
In the next step, just click on the 3 dots next to the file you need to customize and then select "Change file" or "Edit design" (the option displayed depends on if the original file was created with the design editor) and follow the steps to add your customized design. Alternatively, you can choose to add a new product.
Click on "Continue to shipping" and follow the rest of the steps to complete the order. You can review the steps on how to place orders via the Dashboard, in the article Getting Started with Manual Orders.
If you are using the manual approval for custom designs, please make sure to edit the original products, instead of adding new ones as this might negatively impact our capability to update the status of the order directly in your store. This is particularly important for Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, and BigCommerce stores - if the original product is removed, we won't be able to mark the order as fulfilled.
If you want to use an Automatic approval workflow, please make sure that your company details are added to the Company Information page in the Gelato Dashboard (Settings > Company), otherwise, the orders will still default to "Pending approval" rather than being fulfilled automatically.
Automate the Approval of Manual Workflow Orders
If you are a Gelato+ subscriber and are an advanced user, you can arrange to automate the process of manually approving these orders. This will allow your orders to be automatically approved when you upload your prepared design file. You can read more about it in the article Preparation For Automation Process.