The Orders table is a great place to track revenue for your site and view purchase history.
In this article:
How to View Your Orders Report
Understanding Orders and Transactions
About This Feature
The Orders report allows you to track your sales and subscriptions. Here, you can see all of the sales that were made on your site and it includes all the information about the purchaser including referral source.
You can easily see new revenue based on the date that payment was made by the student, including seeing payments made for recurring subscriptions or payment plans.
Orders only appear for transactions completed through Thinkific's Built in Checkout using Stripe and/or PayPal. Orders are not tracked for external payment solutions.
How to View Your Orders Report
- Go to Market & Sell
- Select Orders
Here you can view your orders directly in Thinkific or export as a CSV file. CSV (comma separated values) is a universal file type that can be opened by any spreadsheet program.
Using the Orders Table
Here's some tips on how to easily view your data on the Orders table:
- Use the date picker in the top right corner to filter for payments made during a specific time period. Note: transactions displayed in Thinkific are in UTC time zone.
- Click on a heading to sort by that column in ascending or descending order.
- Use the Columns button to hide additional columns from view in the table
- Use the full screen button in the top right corner to view more.
Understanding Orders and Transactions
The Orders table displays individual line items for each transaction that's attempted by students purchasing products on your site. For payment plans and subscriptions, you will see a new transaction listed in the Orders table each time a payment comes through from that student, including any payment attempts that failed.
The Order displayed refers to a purchase the student made for a specific course or bundle. A Transaction is the actual payment that was made, for a specific order. Payment Plans and Subscriptions can have multiple transactions listed under the same order.
For example, in the report below you can see that the recurring monthly payments associated with the same order number.
To help you understand more about each transaction, check out the following:
- Date: when the transaction took place.
- Order: the specific purchase that a student made. Subscriptions and payment plan transactions are all linked to the same order.
- Amount: the value of the transaction on that specific date.
- Status: if a payment is successful, it's marked as complete; if it's unsuccessful, it's marked as failed.
- Type: either a one time, subscription, payment plan purchase or refund.
- Product: the name of the course or bundle the student purchased.
- Name: the student's name.
- Email: the student's email.
- Payment method: how the student paid; either by credit card (Stripe) or Paypal.
- Referrer: if available, displays the name of the affiliate who referred the student.
Important Considerations
When viewing the Orders Report in Thinkific, it will display completed transactions only, it will not show subscription Orders that have a free trial period until the trial period is complete.
For example, if you have a 7-day trial period set on your subscription course, that wouldn't show in Thinkific until the first transaction takes place after 7 days. This only applies when viewing your Orders Report in your browser. You have the option to export your Orders as a CSV for a report that will include these free trial orders before the first transaction is completed.
Exporting Your Order History
If you would like to export that data to use for your marketing or customer service, you can do so by clicking the Export button to get a CSV file emailed to you. CSV (comma separated values) is a universal file type that can be opened by any spreadsheet program, such as Excel, or Google Sheets.
If you have applied any search filters or a date range, or modified the visible columns on your orders table, these will show in the export that you run.
The Orders option will export individual orders that were created during the date range that you have applied while the Transactions option will show each individual line item that occurred during that period. While you may see transactions for a particular order in a date range, if the order was not created in that date range, it will not appear in the order export.
Looking for information about what these exported reports include? Check out: Exporting the Orders and Transactions Report.
Order Details
To view a single order in Thinkific, select the hyperlinked date next to the order you'd like to view in your report. On the following page, you'll see details from the order:
Order ID Setup
If you would like to change the the default format of your Order IDs or the starting Order number, this can be updated within your Orders & Accounts Settings:
- Go to your Admin Dashboard
- Select Settings
- Select the Orders & accounts tab
- Select Order setup
- In the Order ID Starts From field, input where you would like your order numbers to begin from. The new order value will only be applied to orders created after changes are saved.
- In the Order ID Format field, you can define how you want and specific characters and numbers to appear. For example, Order: {{number}} would appear formatted like Order: 100 while ORDER{{number}} would appear as ORDER100. {{number}} is a required variable to ensure your orders populate in ascending numbers.
Important Consideration
Please note that Order ID numbers cannot be adjusted or changed to a number lower than an already existing Order ID number. For example if the first, original Order ID number is 1000, the Order ID cannot be adjusted or changed with values from 0 to 999. This will lead to a 500 error. The reason this behaviour exists is to prevent orders from having duplicated order numbers.