Once order volume grows, the first question is often not “How much did we sell this month?” but “Where did these orders actually come from?” Orders placed on the website, orders manually created by sales in the admin panel, and orders from MercadoLibre are mixed in one list, so at month-end channel performance can only be reconciled from memory. X1 adds a “Sales Channel” tag to orders in beta.13. This article explains what the four channels mean, how to filter and report by channel in the admin panel, and how historical orders are handled during upgrade.
Why a separate “Sales Channel” is needed
The order table originally had a “source” field, which records technical sources such as web, agent, and import; it is suitable for troubleshooting but not for answering business questions. For example, an order imported from an old system has a source of import, but it may actually have come from the website or from a platform.
Sales channel, by contrast, is a business perspective: whether the order was placed by the customer on the website, created on their behalf by a colleague in the admin panel, or synced from an e-commerce platform. Recording the two separately prevents them from interfering with each other in reporting.
What the four channels represent
The new version fixes the channel to four values, and the admin panel displays the corresponding Chinese names:
- Website: Automatically written when a customer checks out on the storefront; this is the default value.
- MercadoLibre: Orders synced from the platform after the MercadoLibre module is enabled.
- Manual: Written when an administrator creates an order in the admin panel, representing an order placed by sales or customer service on behalf of the customer.
- Other: Orders that cannot be categorized, such as records imported from external systems or with an unknown channel.
Values are validated at the application layer, and invalid values are rejected when written, so there will be no orders with an empty or misspelled “Sales Channel”.
How to use it in the admin panel: filtering, counting, and reporting
The order list can be filtered by channel. Filter conditions can be combined like any other conditions, for example “This month + Paid + MercadoLibre”, to reconcile platform orders separately.
The top of the list also shows order counts by channel, making it easy to see each channel’s share of order volume at a glance; the sales statistics page also breaks down amounts by channel, so daily and weekly reports can be compared directly.
When the details need to be handed to finance, order list export follows the existing export logic; filtered results include the channel, and the exported spreadsheet can be used directly for pivot analysis.
How historical orders are handled
The upgrade only adds one column and creates an index; it does not rebuild the table or modify existing business data. Historical orders are uniformly backfilled as “Website”, and order numbers, amounts, statuses, and transition records remain unchanged.
If old orders do include platform or manual orders, you can change the channel order by order in the admin panel, or map and write it based on source data during import. This avoids disrupting historical data while gradually making the channel data accurate.
A few usage recommendations
- First standardize the “manual order creation” process: when sales place an order on behalf of a customer, they must create a new order in the admin panel. That way the channel is recorded as Manual, rather than having the customer place the order on the website and then manually changing the status.
- For platform orders, prefer module sync rather than manual entry in the admin panel, to avoid recording the same sale twice.
- At the beginning of each month, check the share of the “Other” channel: if it remains high for a long time, it means some sources are still uncategorized, and you can investigate the import mapping or order entry points.
- Channel is a business tag; do not use it to replace order source: when troubleshooting payment callbacks or API issues, still look at the source field.
Summary
Sales channel tagging solves the specific question of “Where did the order come from?”: four fixed values, Website by default, manual orders recorded as Manual, platform orders recorded as MercadoLibre, and historical orders smoothly backfilled. The admin panel can filter, count, and report by channel. It does not change the existing order process; it simply turns information that used to be summarized manually into data that can be queried in the system. After one or two months of channel data has accumulated, deciding whether to adjust marketing spend and staffing by channel will be much more reliable than guessing.