Orders

Everything your customers buy comes through here: find any order, see exactly what was paid (card, wallet credit or a mix), issue refunds and cancellations, chase stuck payments, create free entries, and keep an eye on the refund queue.

Where to find it: Admin → Orders (/admin/orders)

The page has two tabs: Orders (every order on your site) and Refunds (the refund queue — the tab shows a badge counting the pending refunds currently in view). Above the tabs, stat cards show Total Orders, Completed and Last 24 Hours. A fourth card, Card Revenue, only appears if your admin role has financial analytics access — and note it excludes wallet credit, so it is what actually went through your card gateway, not total order value. Wallet top-ups are included for that reason: the customer's card really was charged. This is why the figure will not match the revenue reports, which count the wallet credit spent on tickets and leave top-ups out. The two are answering different questions, and both are right.

Find an order

Use the search box to look up an order by the customer's name, email address, the order number, or a payment ID from your gateway. That last one is handy when a customer disputes a charge — paste the reference from your gateway portal straight into search.

You can narrow the list with five filters:

• Status — Pending, Processing, Completed, Failed, Abandoned, Refunded or Cancelled (see Understand payment statuses).
• Source — type the marketing source that drove the order (e.g. facebook, google, email) and press Enter. Matching ignores capitalisation and finds partial matches, and it combines with the other filters. Orders with no tracked source show as "Direct". Source tracking now also recognises ad clicks from Facebook, Google, TikTok and Bing automatically, even when the link wasn't tagged with campaign parameters.
• Device — Mobile, Tablet or Desktop.
• Channel — Installed app (PWA) shows only orders placed from your site once the customer has installed it to their home screen; Browser shows only orders placed in an ordinary browser tab. Handy for seeing how much of your revenue comes through the app. Some orders have no channel recorded at all — older orders placed before source tracking existed, and orders you created manually in the admin — so they appear under neither option and the two options won't add up to your total. Use All Channels to see everything.
• Competition — only orders containing tickets for a specific competition.

The table columns are Order #, Customer, Source, Amount, Status, Date and Actions. You can sort by Amount, Status or Date by clicking the column headers.

A few things to read off the table at a glance:

• A star badge under the customer's name means the order included instant wins, with a count (e.g. "2 Instant Wins").
• A wallet icon next to the amount means wallet credit was used — hover it for the total/card/wallet split. If it also says Partial, the customer paid with a mix of card and credit.
• A green upward-trend icon means the customer accepted a roundup upsell at checkout (hover for the added amount); a blue circular-arrows icon means the order is a "Play Again" replay of a previous order.
• On the Source column, a small phone icon marks orders placed through the installed web app (hover shows "Progressive Web App").
• On Pending orders, an info icon next to the status shows when the ticket reservation expires and notes that the tickets will be released if the customer doesn't complete payment.

Each row has a View Details action that opens the order panel, and — if your admin role allows order updates — an Update Status action (see Manually change a payment status).

Other admin screens can link directly to an order here; when they do, the order panel opens automatically as the page loads.

Understand payment statuses

Status	What it means	What to do
Pending	The customer started checkout; tickets are reserved but payment hasn't completed.	Usually nothing — if payment never completes, the reservation expires and the tickets are released automatically. The status tooltip and the order timeline show the expiry time.
Processing	The payment is mid-flight with the gateway.	Leave it alone. You cannot change a Processing order's status — wait for it to resolve to Completed or Failed.
Completed	Payment succeeded and the tickets are allocated. Instant wins and bundle offers land a few seconds later, and the confirmation email goes out once they have.	Nothing — this is the happy path. If the row also shows an amber Awaiting prizes chip, the prizes are still being awarded; it clears on its own.
Failed	The payment didn't go through. The order shows a failure reason (see below).	Nothing needed for genuine declines. If tickets or instant wins were somehow issued in error, use Cancellation Options to revert them.
Abandoned	The customer walked away from checkout — the reservation timed out or was replaced by a newer checkout attempt — or they took a break while the order was still going through.	Nothing. Tickets have already been released back to the pool, and no payment was taken.
Refunded	The order has been refunded.	Check the Refund Information section of the order for the history.
Cancelled	The order was cancelled by an admin.	Cancelled lines show struck through with their cancellation date. If a refund was processed, the reason and notes are in the order's Refund History; for a cancel-without-refund only the date is shown.

Failed orders carry a plain-English failure reason, shown under the status badge in the order panel and in the timeline:

• Checkout abandoned – reservation timed out
• Checkout abandoned – the payment page timed out
• Checkout abandoned – replaced by a newer order
• Payment was declined by the card issuer
• An error occurred during payment processing
• Customer cancelled the order
• Cancelled automatically – customer took a break while this order was in flight

Read an order's details

Click View Details on any row (or View Order on a row of the Refunds tab) to open the order panel. From top to bottom:

Header — status (with failure reason if failed), total amount, and the customer's name and email. Orders placed since the platform started awarding prizes separately also carry a Prizes field: Awaiting prizes while the instant wins and bundle offers are still being handed out (with a "x of y tickets checked" count under it), Completed with the number of wins once they have, or Prizes halted if the platform stopped the check itself — see An order says prizes halted. Click the customer's name to open their profile in a read-only panel on top of the order — useful for checking their history mid-investigation. For full account actions, go to User Management.

Payment Breakdown — appears whenever money or credit moved. Shows Wallet Credit Applied and the Intended Card Charge (hover the info icon: for completed orders with a payment reference this is the amount actually charged; otherwise it's what the checkout intended to charge). Badges flag orders Paid Entirely with Wallet Credit or with a Partial Wallet Payment — critical to check before refunding (see Refund to card vs wallet credit).

Order Source / payment references — one of:

• Admin Created (Free Entry) — you created it from the Create Order panel.
• Postal Entry — a free postal entry recorded by an admin.
• A prize award — tickets given out free rather than bought. The line names what earned them, so you can tell them apart at a glance:
  • Instant Win Prize — tickets won as an instant-win prize.
  • Main Prize Winner Tickets — tickets awarded to a main prize winner.
  • Bundle Offer Free Tickets — the free tickets from a "buy 20, get 2 free" style offer. Underneath, Earned by order #… opens the purchase that earned them.
  • Points Redemption — tickets a customer bought with points. Named after whatever you call your points, so if you've renamed them to Carp Coins this reads "Carp Coins Redemption". Underneath it shows how many points they spent and on which store item, which is the only trail back to the redemption — unlike the other three, a points order has no purchase behind it to link to.
  • Prize Award (Free Tickets) — an older award from before the platform recorded which of the above it was.
• A paid order shows the gateway references — Cashflows (Job Reference and Payment Reference), Viva Wallet (Order Code and Transaction ID) or DNA Payments (Transaction ID and Payment Reference) — plus a View in … Portal link that opens your gateway's own dashboard, where you can look the payment up by its reference. Viva Wallet and DNA orders always have the link; on Cashflows it only appears when the order captured a portal address, so on older Cashflows orders you may need to search the portal by reference yourself.

If a completed card order shows its payment reference as Missing, the panel warns "Cannot process refund (contact support)" — a card refund can't be sent to the gateway without it, so raise it with support rather than retrying.

Order Timeline — a chronological history of the order: Order Created, Tickets Reserved, Payment Initiated, Payment Completed, Tickets Purchased (with the ticket count), Payment Failed (with the reason), each Refund Requested and Refund Completed, and — for Pending orders — a future Reservation Expires entry so you can see exactly when the tickets will be released.

Refund Information — appears once anything is refundable or refunded. Before any refund it's a single compact line — "No refunds processed" plus the refundable amount. Once a refund exists it expands to show Total Order / Total Refunded (with percentage) / Remaining, a FULLY REFUNDED banner when nothing is left, and a full Refund History: each refund's amount, status, reason, notes, requested/completed times, and the gateway's refund ID for reconciliation.

Chargeback Tools — see Send a chargeback evidence pack.

Source & Attribution — the marketing campaign that produced the order (source, medium, campaign, term, content), the device and platform used (with a Progressive Web App badge where relevant), the checkout IP address and browser details, and the referring site. Orders with none of this show "Direct traffic (no referrer or campaign)". The IP and browser details are also useful evidence when investigating suspected fraud or shared accounts — cross-check against User Management.

Upsell Information — whether the order was boosted at checkout:

• Roundup Accepted — the customer topped up their basket: upsell value, target amount, tickets added, which competition, and a New Competition Discovery badge if the roundup put them into a competition they weren't already entering.
• Play Again — the order is a one-click replay of a previous order, with a link to open the original order.

Items Ordered — each competition line with quantity, price per ticket and line total, plus a link to the competition's public page. A summary line above shows total tickets (marked "(reserved)" on pending orders), competitions entered, instant wins, and any bonus tickets. Cancelled lines appear struck through with a red CANCELLED badge and the cancellation date, and the header counts active vs cancelled items.

If the order earned a bundle offer, a green Bundle offer box under the lines shows the offer, how many free tickets were awarded out of how many promised, and which competition they went into. If fewer arrived than promised, it says why. View order #… opens the separate order that holds the free tickets. See Check a customer got their free tickets.

Discount sections — if the customer got money off, dedicated sections show exactly how:

• Early Bird Pricing — regular vs early bird price, the discount, and total early bird savings.
• Quantity Discounts — which tier applied (e.g. "Tier 10+"), the tier price, and total tier savings.
• Promo Codes Applied — the code used, discount per ticket, and total savings. Manage codes on Promo Codes.

Tickets — the panel heading tells you which state the tickets are in:

• Tickets Reserved (pending orders) — the ticket numbers are deliberately hidden until payment completes, to protect draw integrity. You'll see the count, not the numbers.
• Tickets Allocated (completed orders) — every ticket number, grouped by competition. Instant-win tickets appear first as starred, colour-coded chips — hover one to see the prize type, prize title and its fulfilment status. Bigger wins (physical prizes, cash) sort ahead of ticket and site-credit prizes. Free tickets from a bundle offer are listed underneath as +N bonus tickets in green, with a link to the order that holds them. They are not part of the count in the heading, which covers the tickets on this order only.
• Failed orders show "No Tickets Allocated — payment failed, tickets were reserved but released back to the pool".

Cancel and refund an order

All cancellations and refunds go through one flow. There is no separate "Refund" button — the Cancellation Options… button at the bottom of the order panel opens the Cancel & Refund modal, and nothing happens until you confirm inside it.

1. Open the order and click Cancellation Options….
2. If the order contains more than one competition, choose Entire order or Specific items — with Specific items, tick the competition lines you want to cancel. Granularity is per competition line: you can't refund individual tickets within a line. On an order that used a promo code, each line shows what it is worth back with its original ticket price struck through beside it — see Orders with a promo code.
3. Check the Refund Amount box. It shows what the customer will actually get and how it will be returned — To card and/or To balance (wallet credit). See Refund to card vs wallet credit.
4. Decide whether to tick Process refund now (ticked by default). Untick it to cancel the tickets without returning any money — for example when the money is being handled another way.
5. If the cancelled items include instant wins, a warning lists each prize and its fulfilment status: those instant wins will be cancelled too. Any site credit or cash a listed win has already paid out is taken back from the customer's wallet automatically (see What a cancelled instant win takes back). A physical prize that has already shipped is not: check the fulfilment status before you proceed.
6. Pick a Reason (required): Customer Request, Duplicate Purchase, Cancelled Competition, Payment Error, Fraudulent, or Other. Add Notes if useful — they're optional and are stored on the refund for later reference.
7. Click Cancel & Refund £X (or Cancel Order / Cancel N Items if not refunding) and confirm. The figure on the button is the money that will actually move, so it is the number to check against what you have promised the customer. This cannot be undone.

What happens next: the cancelled tickets are removed from the draw, any instant wins on them are cancelled and their payouts reversed, any free tickets those wins awarded are taken back too, cancelled lines show struck-through on the order, and if you processed a refund it appears in the order's Refund Information and on the Refunds tab where you can track it to completion.

What a cancelled instant win takes back

When a cancelled ticket had won an instant prize, the prize goes back on the board for the next owner of that number, and whatever the win paid into the customer's wallet comes back out:

• Site credit and cash prizes are debited from the matching wallet, boost uplifts included. The entry shows as Instant Win Reversed (credit) or Cash Prize Reversed (cash) in the customer's history, linked to the order. If they have already spent or withdrawn the money, the balance goes negative rather than stopping short, exactly as a chargeback does.
• Free tickets the win awarded go back to their competition, along with any instant wins those tickets landed, however many levels deep. Any credit paid because part of a ticket prize could not be awarded is taken back too.
• Physical prizes are not touched. Nothing was paid into a wallet, so there is nothing to reverse: if the item has shipped, recover it by hand.

The reversal never takes back more than was paid out, so cancelling one line of an order and then the rest of it is safe. Every reversal is listed in the Wallets report as Cancelled instant wins.

The Cancellation Options button is available on Pending, Processing, Completed and Failed orders that haven't already been fully cancelled or refunded. It works on Failed and £0 orders too — useful when a free entry was completed by mistake and its tickets need returning to the pool.

Refund to card vs wallet credit

The split is automatic and mirrors how the customer paid — you don't choose the destination:

• Wallet credit is refunded first. Any part of the order paid with wallet credit goes straight back to the customer's balance ("To balance"). They can spend it again immediately or request a withdrawal — see Wallets & Withdrawals.
• The remainder goes back to the card ("To card") through your payment gateway, tracked on the Refunds tab until the gateway confirms it.

Consequences worth knowing:

• Orders paid entirely with wallet credit refund entirely to the balance. There is no card transaction to reverse, so money cannot be sent to a card from this screen. If the customer wants it as cash, that's a withdrawal — see Wallets & Withdrawals.
• A card refund needs the gateway payment reference. If it's missing, the modal warns "Cannot process card refund – missing payment reference" — you can still cancel the tickets, but contact support to get the card portion returned.

Orders with a promo code

A promo code that takes money off the whole order (rather than off a single competition's ticket price) is held against the order, not against any one line. The ticket prices you see on the order are therefore what the tickets cost before the code was applied, and the customer paid less than their total.

Refunds return what the customer actually paid, so on these orders the refund is smaller than the ticket prices suggest, and the modal shows you where the difference went:

• Refunding specific items — each line is worth its ticket price minus its share of the code's value, worked out in proportion to the line's size. The line shows that figure with the original price struck through, and the summary adds a Promo share deducted row. A £5 line and a £15 line under a £4 code are worth £4 and £12, so refunding the £15 line returns £12.
• Refunding the entire order — the summary shows a Promo discount (not refundable) row, and the Refund Amount is what the customer paid rather than the order total.

This matters most when you refund part of an order and the customer keeps the rest: the code's value stays with the tickets they keep, which is where it was spent. Refunding a line at its full ticket price would hand back money that was never paid, and on a large enough code the kept tickets would end up free.

Manually change a payment status

The Update Status action on a table row (visible only if your role allows order updates) opens the Update Payment Status modal. This is a repair tool, not the normal way to manage orders — the modal itself warns you:

• Setting Completed creates the tickets now and awards instant wins and bundle offers in the background; the confirmation email goes out once those have landed. The order will show an amber Awaiting prizes chip for a few seconds in between. Only do this when you've verified in your gateway portal that the payment genuinely settled, otherwise you'll issue tickets that were never paid for.
• For an order that took payment but issued no tickets (status Failed with "Payment taken but no tickets were issued"), don't set it to Completed here. Open the order and click Retry fulfilment instead — see A customer paid but their order shows Failed.
• Setting any other status (Pending, Failed, Refunded) just relabels the order — it does not move money, release tickets or send emails. Use Cancellation Options on the order panel for real cancellations and refunds.
• Processing orders are locked — the dropdown is disabled and you must wait for the gateway to resolve the payment.

Create an order (free entry)

Use Create Order (top right) to give someone tickets without payment — competition prizes, goodwill gestures, or postal entries. Admin-created orders are always free: there's no way to take payment here.

1. Click Create Order.
2. Choose a mode:
   • Existing User — search for the customer by name or email.
   • Manual Entry (Postal) — record a postal entrant who may not have an account: first name, last name, email and date of birth are required; phone and address fields are optional.
3. If the entrant told you they want to hear from you, tick the boxes under Marketing preferences. You'll see an email option, plus an SMS option if your site collects SMS marketing. Only tick these if they actually agreed — you're recording their consent on their behalf, and it's logged against your name.
   • For an existing customer who has already opted in, you'll see "Already opted into email marketing" in place of the tick box, so you can tell at a glance where they stand before you ask.
   • Ticking a box can only ever add a preference. It never removes one, so you can't accidentally undo a choice the customer made themselves. To turn a preference off, open their record on the Users page.
4. Search for a competition (only active competitions are offered) and set the number of entries. Once a competition is selected the panel shows its ticket price, how many tickets have sold, its end date, and an "Instant wins" flag when the competition still has unclaimed instant win prizes a free entry could land. It also shows each competition's limits (e.g. "Max 50 per order, 100 per user") and caps the quantity accordingly.
5. Click Add Another Competition to put multiple competitions on one order.
6. Check the Total value line above the button — the combined ticket value of everything you're giving away — then click Create Order.

Tickets are allocated immediately and the confirmation shows how many tickets were created — and whether any of them landed instant wins, which are awarded exactly as if the entry had been purchased. The order appears in the list (its Source column reads "Direct", since there's no marketing source); open it and the panel's Order Source line identifies it as Admin Created (Free Entry) or Postal Entry.

To bulk-issue entries for a single competition to many users at once, use the Add Entries tool on that competition's Entries tab instead — see Competitions.

Work the Refunds tab

The Refunds tab is your refund queue. The badge on the tab counts the pending refunds on the page of results you're currently viewing (with your filters applied) — it's a working cue, not a site-wide total. To see everything outstanding, filter the tab by Pending and page through.

Each row shows the order number, customer, amount (with its Wallet/Card split underneath), reason (hover a truncated note to read it in full), status, and when it was requested. Filter by status: Pending, Approved, Completed or Failed.

• Pending — requested, not yet confirmed. If a refund has been pending for more than 10 minutes, an orange clock badge appears showing how long — treat that as your cue to investigate.
• Approved — accepted and being returned.
• Completed — done; the money is back with the customer (balance immediately, card once the gateway and bank finish).
• Failed — the refund didn't go through. Open the order, check the payment via the gateway portal link, and contact support if the money never reached the customer.

Click View Order on any row to open the underlying order with its full refund history.

Send a chargeback evidence pack

When a customer disputes a card payment with their bank, you can generate an evidence pack to fight the chargeback:

1. Open the order. The Chargeback Tools box appears in the Refund Information area — only on completed orders with a real card charge and a payment reference (wallet-only and free orders can't be charged back, so they don't get the button).
2. Click Generate Evidence Pack and confirm.
3. A PDF containing customer, order and delivery evidence is generated and emailed to the site admin address.

Pair it with what's already on screen: the gateway references, the checkout IP and browser details in Source & Attribution, and the order timeline all help demonstrate the purchase was legitimate.

Export order data

There is no export button on the Orders page itself. To export the entry list for a specific competition (for an off-site draw or an audit), use the Export CSV option on that competition's Entries tab — see Competitions.

Check a customer got their free tickets

When a customer says they didn't get the free tickets from a bundle offer:

1. Find their paid order and open it.
2. Look for the green Bundle offer box under Items Ordered:
   • Awarded means every free ticket arrived. The ticket numbers are listed at the bottom of the panel under +N bonus tickets.
   • Partly awarded or Not awarded means fewer arrived than promised, and the box says why: usually the competition sold out or the customer reached its per-person limit. Nothing is owed. See When the free tickets can't be given.
   • Taken back means the order was refunded or cancelled, which returns the free tickets too.
3. Click View order #… to open the £0 order that holds the free tickets.

If there is no box, check the Prizes field at the top of the panel first:

• Awaiting prizes: the free tickets are still being handed out. The box appears within a few seconds.
• Prizes halted: nothing has been awarded yet, including the bundle offer. See An order says prizes halted and click Retry prizes.
• Anything else: the offer didn't apply to that order. Check the customer bought at least the offer's threshold in one order, and that they hadn't already used up the offer's Limit per customer.

If the box says some free tickets are no longer held, the free-ticket order itself was cancelled or refunded, which sends its tickets back to the competition.

The free tickets are on their own order, so Tickets Allocated on the paid order shows only what they bought. A customer who bought 200 and got 100 free has 200 on the paid order, 100 on the free-ticket order, and 300 in the competition.

Troubleshooting

A customer says they paid but their order shows Pending. Open the order and check the timeline: if Payment Initiated is there but Payment Completed never arrived, check the payment in your gateway portal via the panel's portal link. If the gateway shows the payment settled but the order didn't complete, use Update Status → Completed to trigger fulfilment (tickets + emails). If the gateway shows no settled payment, do nothing — the reservation will expire and release the tickets, and the customer can simply buy again.

An order is stuck in Processing. Wait. Processing means the gateway hasn't given a final answer yet, and the platform deliberately blocks status changes until it does. If it stays stuck for a long time, check the payment in the gateway portal.

Why did this payment fail? Open the order — the failure reason sits under the status badge and in the timeline. "Declined by the card issuer" is the customer's bank, not your site; "reservation timed out" and "replaced by a newer order" just mean the customer abandoned or restarted checkout, and usually a completed order from the same customer exists moments later. "Customer took a break while this order was in flight" means the site cancelled it for them: they set a Take a Break exclusion with an order still at the payment page, so it was cancelled before any money could be taken, and nothing is owed. In the rare case where the customer had the payment page already open and paid anyway, the site refunds them automatically rather than issuing the tickets, and the order shows as Refunded instead. Either way there is nothing for you to do.

A customer wants their refund on their card, but it went to their wallet balance. The refund mirrors how they paid: whatever they paid with wallet credit returns as wallet credit. If they want it as cash, they can request a withdrawal from their balance — see Wallets & Withdrawals.

The refund I just processed still shows Pending. Card refunds wait on the gateway. Under 10 minutes is normal; past that the orange duration badge appears on the Refunds tab — open the order, follow the portal link and check the refund's state at the gateway.

I can't find a Refund button on the order. There isn't one — refunds live behind Cancellation Options… at the bottom of the order panel. If that button is missing, the order is already fully cancelled or fully refunded (look for the FULLY REFUNDED banner).

A customer paid but their order shows Failed. If the reason under the status reads "Payment taken but no tickets were issued", the payment went through and the platform could not finish issuing the tickets. Open the order and click Retry fulfilment. It re-runs the same process the payment would have started, keeps the payment reference so the order can still be refunded later, and the panel shows progress. If the customer had wallet credit on the order and has since spent it, you'll be asked whether to credit the difference back before retrying. Refund only if the retry cannot succeed, for example because the competition has since closed. Don't use Update Status → Completed for these orders any more.

An order says prizes halted. The sale is fine — the order is Completed and the customer holds every ticket they paid for. The platform stopped the instant-win and bundle-offer check itself because the order holds more paid tickets than it was billed for, and it will not hand out prizes on tickets nobody paid for until someone has looked. Do not refund or re-complete the order. Open it, reconcile the ticket count against what was charged, then click Retry prizes; it picks up from where it stopped rather than starting again. Sometimes the panel says the halt is on a prize order awarded from this one rather than on the order itself — Retry prizes covers that too, so use the same button. The halt has already been reported to support automatically. The customer's confirmation email still goes out listing their tickets and any prizes that did land.

An order has been showing "Awaiting prizes" for a while. A few seconds is normal, and a very large order with a lot of instant wins can take longer. The panel refreshes itself while it waits. The check keeps retrying on its own and never gives up on a paid order; the platform re-checks stalled ones every few minutes, and emails you if one has been waiting more than ten minutes, so leave it. There is nothing for you to press.

A customer says they never received their order confirmation email. Since instant wins are awarded just after the sale, the confirmation waits for them, so on a very large order it can arrive a little after the tickets appear on screen. If the order shows Awaiting prizes, that is why. If a refund landed before the prizes finished, no confirmation is sent at all — the refund email is the right one and the order is reversed. Otherwise, first confirm the order is Completed — Pending and Failed orders don't send confirmations. If it is, check the email logs to see whether the send failed or the address is suppressed — see Logs. There is no resend button on the platform, so if the email never arrived, reassure the customer that the email is only a receipt — the tickets shown on the order are theirs regardless — and fix whatever blocked the delivery so future emails get through.

I refunded an order with an instant win the customer already claimed. The cancellation modal warns you before this happens — it lists every affected instant win and its fulfilment status. Cancelling the tickets cancels the wins. If a prize has already been fulfilled (e.g. credit paid out or an item shipped), resolve that separately before refunding — check the customer's balance in Wallets & Withdrawals.