Shipping an Order
Booking a courier, printing the paperwork, tracking the parcel, and what happens when delivery fails. All of this lives in the Shipping & Fulfillment card on the order page.
Setting up carriers in the first place is covered in Shipping.
The three statuses on an order
The order page shows several statuses and they mean different things. This trips people up.
- Delivery status — where the parcel is: Pending, Processing, Shipped, Out for Delivery, Delivered, RTO. This is the one you control and the one couriers update.
- Payment status — Paid, Pending or Failed.
- Order banner — a coloured banner appears when the customer has cancelled or partly returned the order.
Marking an order Delivered also records the delivery date, and that date starts the customer's return window. It is recorded once and never overwritten, so re-saving "Delivered" won't extend or restart a customer's right to return.
Booking a shipment
- Open the order and find Shipping & Fulfillment.
- Click Create Shipment. Rates are fetched from every carrier you have configured.
- Pick a service from the list. Each row shows the service, price and estimated delivery, and may be tagged:
- Customer's choice — the option the customer picked at checkout
- Cheapest — the lowest price available
- Quote only — this carrier can quote but cannot be booked here
- Check the pickup location shown below the list.
- Click Book with <carrier>.
The Create Shipment button is hidden once a shipment exists, and disabled if the order is cancelled or already shipped, out for delivery, delivered or RTO — booking a courier for goods that already left is money wasted.
What the order must have
Booking fails unless the order has all of these:
- Customer name
- Customer phone — carriers require it
- A street address
- A valid 6-digit pincode (missing city/state are worked out from it)
A COD order with a total of zero is refused — it would tell the courier to collect nothing.
What happens automatically when booking succeeds
- The waybill (AWB) — the carrier's tracking number for the parcel — appears with a copy button.
- Delivery status moves to Processing if it hadn't started.
- The customer is automatically emailed a "ready to ship" notice with the tracking number and link.
- For Shiprocket, the courier pickup is scheduled automatically.
You cannot double-book an order. If two people click at once, the second gets "A shipment was just booked for this order by another request."
Documents
Once booked, the Documents row offers:
| Document | Available for | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| Shipping Label | Both carriers | Print and stick on the parcel |
| Manifest | Shiprocket only | The handover sheet the pickup courier signs |
| Tax Invoice | Always | Your own invoice for the customer |
| Carrier Invoice | Shiprocket only | The carrier's own billing document |
Delhivery doesn't need a manifest from you — they generate it on their side at pickup. Print the label and hand the parcel over.
If the manifest says "not ready", the usual cause is that the pickup was never scheduled for that shipment. Schedule it in your Shiprocket panel and try again.
Cancelling a shipment
Use Cancel Shipment to void a booking with the carrier. You'll be asked to confirm, and the dialog names the waybill.
- It's blocked once the order is delivered — use the returns flow instead.
- After cancelling, the waybill and carrier are cleared and the card shows "A previous shipment was cancelled on <date>."
- You can then book again with a different carrier or service.
A booked shipment also blocks the order from being cancelled. If a customer wants to cancel and you've already booked, cancel the shipment first.
When Shiprocket books halfway
Shiprocket booking happens in two steps: creating the order (free), then assigning a courier (which spends your wallet balance). If the second step fails you'll see an amber warning saying the Shiprocket order exists but no courier is assigned.
This is almost always an empty Shiprocket wallet. Recharge it, then click Retry Courier Assignment — the button label changes to this automatically. Only the courier step is retried, so you won't get a duplicate order at Shiprocket.
RTO — the parcel came back
RTO means the courier could not deliver and returned the parcel to you. It is not a customer return; nobody asked for it. Common causes are a wrong address, nobody home after repeated attempts, or a COD customer refusing the parcel.
RTO appears either automatically from carrier tracking, or you can set it yourself in the Delivery Status dropdown.
Stock is restored automatically when an order goes RTO, and it can't be double-restored.
If the customer paid online, you must refund them yourself — nothing happens automatically. If it was COD, no money was ever collected, so there's nothing to refund. No email is sent to the customer for an RTO either.
Once an order is marked RTO, carrier updates stop changing its status.
Automatic tracking updates
If you've set up carrier webhooks on the Shipping Providers page — a one-time job of pasting a URL and token into your carrier's panel — the order updates itself as the parcel moves.
| What the carrier reports | What happens on your order |
|---|---|
| Picked up / in transit | Delivery status → Shipped |
| Out for delivery | Delivery status → Out for Delivery |
| Delivered | Delivery status → Delivered, delivery date recorded |
| Delivery attempt failed | Flagged, status unchanged |
| Returning to origin | Flagged, status unchanged |
| Returned to you | Delivery status → RTO, stock restored |
Safeguards worth knowing:
- Tracking only ever moves an order forward. It never rolls a status backwards.
- Your manual choice always wins. If you've set a status yourself, carrier updates won't overwrite it — they just record the tracking history.
- Delivered and RTO are final for automation.
- Every scan is recorded, so you have a history even when the status doesn't change.
Which emails the customer gets, and exactly when
| Sent when | |
|---|---|
| Ready to ship | The moment your booking succeeds and a waybill is issued |
| Shipped | When the courier actually collects the parcel — or when you set "Shipped" manually |
| Out for delivery | Only when you set it manually. Carrier updates do not send this one |
| Delivered | On the carrier's delivered update, or when you set it manually |
Shipped and delivered emails are sent once only, no matter how many times the status is touched.
If you cancel a shipment and rebook, the customer gets a fresh "ready to ship" email with the new tracking number. That's intended.
Differences between carriers
Not every carrier can do everything:
- Delhivery and Shiprocket can be booked from the order page — rates, waybill, label, cancellation and tracking.
- FedEx, UPS, USPS and DHL can quote rates but show as Quote only and cannot be booked here. Book them in the carrier's own system.
- Other carriers can be configured for reference but offer no booking.
| Delhivery | Shiprocket | |
|---|---|---|
| Booking | One step, waybill immediately | Two steps, wallet needed for the second |
| Courier shown | Always "Delhivery" | The actual courier Shiprocket picked |
| Pickup | Arranged at warehouse level | Scheduled automatically per shipment |
| Manifest | Not needed — done at pickup | Download from Documents |
| Rebooking after cancel | Normal | Books under a slightly different reference |
There is no Shiprocket sandbox. Every Shiprocket booking is real and spends real money from your wallet. Delhivery does have a staging environment, controlled by the production flag on the provider.
Common questions
"No shipping rates available for this destination." No shipping zone covers that address and no live-rate carrier could quote it. Check your zones and providers under Shipping settings.
"No bookable shipping provider is active." You have no active Delhivery or Shiprocket provider. The other carriers can't be booked from here.
A warning says no pickup location is set. Add the pickup location or warehouse name to that provider on the Shipping Providers page. Shiprocket falls back to your account's primary pickup address.
"Order has no customer phone" or "Could not find a 6-digit pincode." The order's delivery details are incomplete. Fix the customer's address, then book.
"Label not ready yet. Try again in a minute." The carrier hasn't generated it. Wait and retry.
Delhivery says it doesn't issue carrier invoices or manifests. That's expected, not an error. Use your own Tax Invoice, and hand the parcel over with just the label.
"The provider that booked this shipment is no longer configured." The carrier was deleted after this shipment was booked. Labels, manifests and cancellation all need those credentials — re-add the provider.
Tracking updates never arrive. The webhook token is wrong or missing in the carrier's panel. Re-copy the URL and token from the Shipping Providers page. That page also shows when the last webhook was received.
Tracking scans arrive but the status doesn't move. Either you set the status manually and your value takes priority, or the order already reached Delivered or RTO.
Can I cancel an order from the dashboard? There's no cancel button on the order page today. Customers cancel from their own order page while the order hasn't shipped. See Orders for what happens to the money.