Why merge orders?
When you receive multiple orders from the same customer, merging and shipping them as one package helps you reduce costs on shipping and packaging. It also makes it easy for a customer to track one delivery and receive all orders at the same time.
Multiorders automatically recognizes different orders placed by the same customer according to order delivery address and allows you to merge them quickly.
Which orders can be merged
You can only merge orders which have the status New and are Paid.
If you want to be able to merge orders placed on different sales channels or merge unpaid orders (partially refunded orders are shown as unpaid in Multiorders), you have to enable this in Settings - Shipping under the Order Merge section:
How to merge orders
Go to the Orders page. If you have multiple orders that can be merged together, you will see a notification with the exact number of them as per below:
Click on Open Merge.
You will get a popup with the list of orders. Here we can see that we have 7 customers who have made multiple orders each - we can click on each order to check its details. In case we don't want to merge particular orders, we can simply remove the green checkmark.
When you are ready to proceed, click on Merge:
That's it - orders have been merged. Instead of a bunch of separate orders above, we now have 7 orders instead. Let's open any of the merged orders to see what's inside:
The orange letter M on top and the blue text on the bottom indicates that this is a merged order. You can also see the order numbers which were merged and an option to Unmerge Orders.
Instead of two orders with one product per each, we now have one order with two items inside.
If we go back to the main order table, you can identify merged orders by the orange tag M which allows you to filter them by it:
NOTE: Once you reach a limit of 500 New orders, the system stops automatically identifying orders for merging. You have to find and merge orders manually following the steps in the paragraph below.
How to merge orders manually
In case you prefer to merge orders manually without the system automatically matching the orders for merging, follow these steps:
Go to Orders and select at least two orders by check-marking them.
Click on Merge Selected
That's it - your orders have been merged.
NOTE: same rules apply for merging manually as they do for merging automatically matched orders.
How order merge works with shipping automation
If you have shipping automation rules created, all your orders appear under the Prepared tab from where you can merge them.
Once you complete the merge, the system considers it as a new order which goes through the automation rules again.