Order Statuses and Telling the Customer

The statuses

Every embroidery order moves through these statuses:

1. Awaiting payment — The customer submitted their design at the kiosk and the order is waiting for payment. (Older submitted orders show the same status.)
2. Paid — Payment received.
3. In production — Being stitched.
4. Ready for pickup — Stitched and waiting at the counter for the customer.
5. Picked up — The customer has collected it. This closes the order.

Any open order can also be Cancelled. Saved orders are drafts that were never submitted.

Orders from before this lifecycle keep their place: orders that read Ready for production now read In production, and Completed orders read Picked up.

Moving an order along

Orders can only move forward along this path, one step at a time (or be cancelled, including while waiting for pickup). On the order page the Status card has one button for the next step: Mark paid, then Start production, then Mark ready for pickup, then Mark picked up. Cancel order sits beside it. Marking an order picked up and cancelling it both close the order, so each asks you to confirm first. A notification confirms each change, and when you opened the order from the queue a Next … link takes you to the next order in the same tab.

While an order is awaiting payment, the Status card shows the amount to collect (for example Collect $22.00) and an optional POS / ticket number field. Fill it in before pressing Mark paid to save your register's receipt number with the order; it appears in the order summary and in the audit trail entry for the payment.

You can also move an order as you scan its receipt (see Receipts and barcodes), and an integration can move it through the API (see Order API). Both follow the same steps.

Stale orders. An order that has been awaiting payment for 7 days or more shows a Stale tag in the queue. Nothing happens to it automatically: if the customer isn't coming back, cancel it yourself. (If you take orders from customers' phones, you can have unpaid phone orders cancelled after a number of hours: see Orders from customers' phones.)

Cancelling an order

Any staff member (members, admins and owners; not viewers) can cancel an order, including one that's paid, in production or ready for pickup. When the order has been paid, the confirmation asks why and won't cancel without a reason; the reason is kept in the order's audit trail. ThreadReady doesn't take payments, so refund the customer at your POS. Cancelling an order that was never paid doesn't need a reason (you can still add one). Through the API, send cancelReason with the cancel; a paid order without one is refused.

Changing the status freely (owners and admins)

Owners and admins can override the flow, for example to reopen a picked-up order or to mark an order picked up straight from In production: press Change status… on the order page and pick any status. Every override is recorded in the order's audit trail.

If someone else changed the order

If someone else changes an order's status while you have it open (in another tab, on another device, or by scanning its receipt), your update is not applied. You'll see a message that the order changed, and the page reloads with its current status so you can decide again.

Team members with the Viewer role can see an order's status but can't change it.

Telling the customer it's ready

Once an order is ready for pickup, the Status card offers Let the customer know, with Email (a ready-to-send "your order is ready for pickup" message) and Call links when the order has an email address or phone number. Above them it says what happened to the automatic Ready for pickup email: sent (so there's no need to email again), failed (resend it under Customer emails), preview only, still sending, stuck (it started sending more than 10 minutes ago and never finished, so resend it), turned off for your shop, or not possible because the order has no email address or an incomplete one (correct it under Staff Updates, see Correcting an order after approval).

The Email and Call links open your own email app or phone; ThreadReady doesn't send or log them.

Automatic customer emails

When the customer gave an email address, ThreadReady emails them for you, using your shop's templates in Settings → Email templates:

• Order received (the "Order Confirmation" template) — when the customer places the order at the kiosk.
• Ready for pickup — when the order moves to Ready for pickup, whether you press Mark ready for pickup, scan the receipt, or an API client moves it.

Each email goes out once per order: pressing a button twice, a retried submit, or moving an order back and forward again never sends a second copy. Nothing is sent when an order is paid, cancelled or picked up, or when the customer left the email blank. The email comes from your shop's name and fills in the customer's first name, the order number and the order's status.

To get customers' replies, set a Customer reply-to email at the top of Settings → Email templates (owners and admins). We recommend your shop's front-desk inbox. When a customer hits Reply, their message goes there. Leave it empty and the emails go out with no reply-to address, so replies don't reach you. The same address is shown on the customer's proof page ("Something not right? Email … with your order number"), along with your shop phone and address if you chose to show them (Settings → General → Contact details for customers, see Kiosk Configuration). With none of these set, the proof page asks the customer to tell you their order number instead. ThreadReady never uses your billing email or anyone's login email for this.

Both emails are on by default. To change the wording, or to stop one, open the template and edit it or turn off Send automatically (owners and admins). Every email sent, and any that failed, is listed in the order's history; a failed email never stops the status change. While your workspace is locked for billing, the Ready for pickup email still goes out, because finishing orders customers already placed keeps working.

The order page shows a Customer Emails card once an email was tried: whether each one was sent, and why one failed. Owners, admins and members can press Resend on an email that failed (or that has been stuck sending for more than 10 minutes); an email that was sent is never sent twice. A template that uses a variable ThreadReady can't fill in (only {{customerName}}, {{orderNumber}} and {{orderStatus}} work) is not sent: the order shows why, so you can fix the template and resend.

In the demo workspace nothing is emailed: the order's history records what would have been sent.

Each template's page shows a Preview of the email filled in with example values as you type. Send me a test emails the wording on screen (saved or not) to you, with "[Test]" in the subject; in the demo workspace it only shows the preview. Reset to default puts back ThreadReady's wording for the built-in templates; save to keep it.

Templates marked Not sent, such as "Status Update" and any you create yourself, are never emailed by ThreadReady. They're wording you keep to copy into your own emails.