Marketplace and merchant state machines overview

The basic concept of state machines allows creating a patterned behavior and automation for complicated processes defined by the business, for example, order processes. With the help of the state machine, a business owner can coordinate the process of changing the statuses of orders and order items according to the business logic. To provide the algorithm of dealing with orders for Marketplace administrators and merchants simultaneously, there are multiple state machine templates. These templates help the Marketplace owners to make the order management process flexible and corresponding to the business logic. As the process of managing marketplace orders is different from that of managing the merchant orders, there are two separate state machine engine templates: Marketplace state machine and Merchant state machine.

Marketplace state machine

The Marketplace can have one or several state machines assigned to the marketplace orders. Marketplace State Machine processes marketplace order items. Our exemplary Marketplace state machine provides the following states:

• New
• Paid
• Canceled
• Refunded
• Sent to Merchant
• Shipped by Merchant
• Delivered
• Closed

To learn more about states, see State Machine Fundamentals.

Marketplace state machine in the Back Office

Marketplace administrators manage the orders in the Back Office. For details, see Managing marketplace orders. In the Back Office, the Marketplace administrators can change the state of the marketplace order by triggering the states. However, they can do that only if there are manually executable events related to the marketplace order items. Triggering the states executes the corresponding event and moves the marketplace order item to the next state. There can be multiple triggering buttons corresponding to several items in the marketplace order. When you click one of those buttons, only the items with such a manually executable event execute it. The rest stay in the same state and need their trigger to be performed to move to the next state.

If there are no manually executable events applicable to any of the items, there is no button to click in the Back Office interface. In this case, the action is performed automatically.

Merchant state machine

The Marketplace administrator can define one or several state machines for merchants:

• One as the default, which applies automatically to merchant order items in every merchant order.
• Another state machine for a specific merchant.

Merchant state machine processes merchant order items and works in parallel with the Marketplace state machine. The status of the merchant order is aggregated from the merchant order item statuses. The merchant order status gets properly updated when the state of the items changes. Our exemplary merchant state machine provides the following states:

1. New
2. Canceled by merchant
3. Shipped
4. Delivered
5. Closed

Next steps

Learn how the marketplace and merchant state machines interact with each other