One order, one lifecycle, every step connected

A message becomes a real order

However it arrives — typed in WhatsApp or built on a personal web catalog link — a customer's order goes through the exact same engine. Products, quantities and units are read from ordinary phrasing or a tap, matched against your real catalogue and its aliases, never invented. While it's still a draft, products can be added, changed or removed freely — nothing is committed yet.

• WhatsApp and the web catalog create the exact same kind of order, under the exact same rules — not two systems bolted together.
• Every order gets its own reference the moment it's confirmed — FB-1164, for example — so a customer or your team can always point at one specific order.

Confirm is the only moment anything becomes real

Nothing is reserved, charged or promised until the customer taps Confirm. That single tap reserves the exact stock needed — atomically, so two customers can never be sold the same last bag — and freezes every price on the order, so a catalogue change next week can't quietly alter what they already agreed to.

• If stock falls short partway through, the whole reservation rolls back rather than leaving a half-reserved order.
• Once an order is waiting on payment, it's locked — an unrelated new order can't silently change or duplicate it.

Every status, honestly tracked

An order moves through a real, controlled lifecycle — draft, awaiting payment, under review, paid, packing, out for delivery, delivered — plus the paths for cancelled, expired, rejected and partially paid. Order status and payment status are tracked separately on purpose: OrderAgent never assumes an order is paid just because it's moved through fulfilment.

Paid, however they chose

A submitted receipt is verified against the order automatically, then handed to the owner to approve, reject or record as a partial payment — the evidence stays attached to the right order throughout. Where cash on delivery is enabled, an order can go straight to fulfilment without waiting for a bank transfer, but delivering it is never mistaken for being paid — cash collected is recorded on its own, separately from delivery.

Then the invoice, automatically

The moment a payment settles, a numbered PDF invoice is generated from the order's own frozen prices — never today's catalogue — and delivered the same way everything else was: on WhatsApp. No separate portal to retrieve it from.

Packed, shipped, delivered — by whoever's allowed to

Your team advances an order through fulfilment with plain commands — PACK, SHIP, DELIVERED — from WhatsApp or the dashboard, whichever's at hand. What each person can do is controlled by their role; a delivery driver can mark an order delivered without ever being able to approve a payment.

Cancelled, expired, or just asked about

An unpaid bank-transfer order doesn't stay open forever — past its deadline it expires and the stock it held comes back. Customers and authorised staff can cancel an order through the same conversation, and a customer can ask about any of it directly — “where is my order?”, “what happened to FB-1164?” — answered from their real order history, current and past, not just what's active right now.

Notes stay with the order, not lost in the chat

A delivery instruction or a timing note written alongside a product list isn't mistaken for a product and isn't dropped — it's kept as context on the order itself, where your team can actually see it.

A complete, honest record

Every important decision — an approval, a rejection, a cancellation — is recorded, so there's a traceable history of what happened and when. Customers are kept updated at each real step by WhatsApp notification, and your team gets a dashboard view of every order without scrolling back through a conversation to find it.