What is an archived order?
Archived orders are orders which should generally not be shipped. These orders are either cancelled or in an unknown state, such as when your sales channel no longer sends updates for them, implying that they are no longer fulfillable.
SKULabs includes built-in safeguards to prevent shipping an order that might no longer be valid. One of those safeguards is "archived orders", which separates orders from the active fulfillment view into an Archived view when SKULabs cannot confidently confirm the order's true state.
Why archived orders exist
Historically, some sales channels (especially early WooCommerce and Walmart integrations) commonly removed or replaced orders temporarily during sync with no transactional record.
Today, most platforms provide clearer, stateful signals (payment holds, explicit cancellations, refunds, etc). However, some "eventual consistency" behavior can occur and cause orders to disappear briefly during sync, even when they still need to be fulfilled.
Why do orders become archived?
Orders can appear here when:
You fulfill the order in another software.
The order's status is no longer one that SKULabs has been configured to import as fulfillable.
The order is very old. See your store settings for potential customizations to statuses or historical order import. Note: certain marketplaces have hard limits on historical order import.
The order has a payment issue (pending, refunded, partially refunded, etc) and you have chosen not to import those orders in this channel's integration settings.
What should I know about archived orders?
Inventory is released for sale when orders are archived. To deduct archived orders, you can use bulk stock deduction from the orders list.
At this time it is not possible for archived orders to be added to batches or otherwise processed in groups.
How can I unarchive an order?
The best way to unarchive an order is by changing its status on your sales channel (for example, set it to paid and unshipped).
If the status of the order on your sales channel is one that you would like to import into SKULabs, there may be integration settings for your store in SKULabs to enable the import of it.
When neither of these options is possible, you may need to manually process the order within SKULabs.
How can I force an order to be unarchived?
Please contact support if you need to process a large number of archived orders. We can assist you by manually unarchiving them from our end after you've disabled orders auto-sync to prevent automated re-archiving.
Unarchive an order through the API
If you manage orders through the SKULabs API, you can return an archived or shipped order to the active processing queue with the order/modify_status endpoint. Send unarchive: true with the order. SKULabs moves the order back to processing and removes the Hold - Archived tag if the order has it.
You can also send a log_note to record your own note in the order's activity. Without one, SKULabs adds its default "Forced order to be unarchived" note.
For the full request format, see the API documentation linked from SKULabs API - Introduction (9217937).