How to Create Custom Sales Order Grid in Magento 2?

In a customer-centric world, the ability to take advantage of customer insights to plan marketing strategies and enhance the shopping experience is critically essential. 

Thanks to advanced technology, collecting valuable customer data is not as difficult as ever. Various data-gathering software, apps, and extensions are developed to increase the power of eCommerce businesses. 

However, reducing costs is what most businesses care about. 

So, before thinking about getting help from online marketing analytics or data tracking software, let’s begin with your store’s sales order grid. Here is how Magento 2 order grid merchants can use their customers’ order data most using the Sale Order Grid at the backend. 

Why is Order Grid important for Magento 2 e-retailers?

Knowledge is power! And getting to know targeted customers’ insights, wants, and needs is the key to opening the success door for any business. 

They are collected for various reasons, from enhancing a customer’s shopping experience and analyzing the market trend to increasing the company’s bottom line. 

Here are some aspects of the business that customer data can be applicable to:

• Behavioral targeting: Have a deep understanding of the brand’s target market and key customer group. Merchants can plan multiple marketing campaigns to maximize conversion and effectiveness.
• eCommerce personalization: Define precisely the shopping behavior of the target buyer group (what they tend to buy, how much time they spend browsing through a product page, how often they shop from our site, etc.).
• Customer satisfaction: Once understand customers’ needs and their level of satisfaction on your website, it’s easier to incorporate different tactics to enhance the shopping experience.
• Dynamic pricing: With enough data, you can gauge customers according to their spending patterns and on-site behavior. Then, you can set probable prices to entice them back to your site. As a result, this can contribute significantly to the brand’s pricing and reduce cart abandonment.
• Overall assessment of the business’s performance: Based on customers’ order data, merchants understand not only the shoppers but also the entire company’s performance. They can define current issues in the business and make improvements.

With cutting-edge technology, targeting and capturing a group of customers’ information, even the whole market, is not challenging. If you are looking for other options to boost your eCommerce sales and retain loyal customers on Magento, we recommend trying to integrate a point-of-sale system.

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ConnectPOS is a powerful point-of-sale provider on Magento that has supported many retailers worldwide. We offer a free 14-day trial and free consultation to assist your omnichannel journey!

However, one problem is that lots of shoppers feel uncomfortable when an unknown company collects and uses their private information for any marketing purposes. Where is the way out?

Any eCommerce site will have a grid or table capturing all the customers’ order information. This is considered an eCommerce business’s most trustworthy and valuable data resource. And this is what we will discuss in this post. 

Magento 2 default Sales Order Grid layout

While WordPress is the top choice for building websites, Magento is one of the best platforms for online shop development. Its convenient and user-friendly structure enables non-tech merchants to scale their businesses online easily. 

Magento 2 is a highly improved and optimized version of the Magento platform. It’s developed to be beneficial both for online merchants and web developers. 

Power of default Order Grid Layout in Magento 2

With the fantastic application of customers’ order data, Magento 2 develops its in-built order management system to facilitate the backend management tasks more efficiently. 

As a Magento 2 store owner, you might know where all the orders are saved and collected at the backend. 

For those who don’t know, Magento 2 offers its users a Sales Order table. Each column in the table represents an order attribute that can be changed at the backend to the merchant’s needs.

Magento 2 store owners can view this table by choosing Sales > Orders (Open the configuration at the Admin Panel). This is how the default Order Grid looks like:

The system will give online merchants 20 order attribute selections to customize the order table. Merchants will choose 9 out of 20 available options in the offered list. Only the chosen order attributes are displayed in the order table. 

How to create a custom Order Grid in Magento 2 default 

There are 2 main actions you can perform at the backend to customize the default Order Grid: 

• Change the column selection
• Change the position of any column in the table

For changing the column selection, you can select your wanted order attributes among 20 available options to display in the Order table. 

To create a custom sales order grid, following the steps below: 

• In the menu bar, click the Columns control. Then, a drop-down block will appear.
• Tick on the checkbox of any column you want to add to the grid.
• For the order attributes, you can remove or clear the checkbox of these columns. 
• At the bottom of the block, you have 2 other selections: Reset and Cancel.

To move any column in the table, you need to:

• Move your mouse to the column you want to change its position.
• Click and hold the header of that column.
• Drag it to the new place and finally release it.

Is a Magento 2 Order Grid extension necessary? 

Magento 2 store owners can change the Sales Order table at the backend. But is that customization enough for the needs of an online store?

The answer is Yes and No.

Yes, if you’re pleased with the number of available order attributes offered inside the default version of Magento 2. In addition to this, the priority on your business’s development at present is not customer data optimization. 

However, this mindset can negatively impact your business’s performance in the long term. Especially if you want to grow your business from the ground up, then this might not be a smart choice. 

Below are some limitations of the Order Grid in Magento 2 default:

• The number of order attributes available to display in the Order Grid is limited and unable to cover all essential aspects of an order.
• Some crucial attributes related to purchased products and orders are not supported (e.g., Price, Tax, Quantity, Billing telephone, Billing fax, and so forth).
• Merchants can only choose 9 out of 20 available order attributes to display in the Sales Order table.
• The order attributes in the “Columns” setting are not organized and shown in the logical group, which can negatively impact on the order management tasks for store owners.

In conclusion, we recommend getting an extension that allows you to add more custom columns to your Order Grid. This way, as an e-retailer, you can use the customers’ order data for specific marketing purposes. 

Furthermore, adding more order attributes means you can collect more information about the buyers and the ordered products. Therefore, the results analyzed from the stores’ order information are more correct and useful. 

The best solution for customing Sales Order Grid in Magento 2

If you are searching for a supportive extension that increases your Order Grid functionality at the backend, Magento 2 Custom Order Grid from Mageplaza is a worthy investment.  

The primary power of this module focuses on improving the limitations of the Magento 2 default version. Better Order Grid enables store merchants to add more columns (order attributes) to the backend order grid and group them logically. 

What’s unique about Mageplaza Better Order Grid extension:

• Customize the Sales Order table with up to 30 extra orders, billing, and product attributes.
• Support multiple options for billing and shipping information. This makes the information related to customers’ orders much more precise and informative for store owners.
• Hide and show orders on the grid according to the status configurable at the backend.
• Add and edit the column header for better personalization.
• Optimize the Filter feature for your grid.

In addition to 20 default order attributes, the new order grid, after being expanded by the Mageplaza extension (nearly 30 new ones), allows admins to choose and display any information they want in the Sales Order table. 

With the generous support of Mageplaza Better Order Grid, store admins can view, manage, and process order tasks with no difficulty. Besides, ConnectPOS as a Magento POS system, can also support adding custom sale products within the extension.

How to create a custom Order Grid with Mageplaza Better Order Grid

Before creating a custom grid, you must install and connect the Magento 2 Order Grid module to your e-store. 

Activate Mageplaza Better Order Grid 

Once you have completed all the required steps to install the module, your next task is to turn it on at the store backend. In other words, you have to log into your Admin account in Magento 2 and activate the Mageplaza Better Order. 

To use the extension: 

• Once logged in the Magento 2 Admin, go to Stores > Configuration > Mageplaza > Better Order Grid
• Scroll down to the General tab. Here, choose Enable = Yes to enable the module 
• If you want to customize the header of the displayed columns in the grid, select Change Columns Header = Yes

Furthermore, the module also allows merchants to hide any order by status. In other words, the orders with selected statuses will be hidden from the grid. In the General tab, choose Yes for the Select Status to Hide Orders field to use this feature. 

Create a custom Sales Order table

With up to 50 attribute options for an order, the Mageplaza Order Grid module categorizes them into 4 main specific groups for better management, including: 

• Default Group: Include the order attributes in the Magento 2 default version (ID, Purchase Point, Grand Total, Customer Email, etc).
• Billing Group: Support attributes of order billing (Billing Country, Postcode, Region, etc.).
• Shipping Group: Include information about the order’s shipping (Shipping Company, City, Fax, etc.).
• Product Group: Contain attributes of the product (Name, SKU, Product Type/ Options, etc.).

Significantly, the Billing and Shipping groups contain all the attributes related to an order’s billing and shipping data. This allows you to optimize the number of information collected from your shoppers. 

To customize your Sales Order table: 

• In the menu bar, open the Columns drop-down list
• Tick to the check boxes of the attributes/ columns that you want to show at the grid
• Click Save, and all the chosen columns will be displayed in the order table 

Moreover, store admins can change the header of each column at the Column Header. 

Order management tasks in the Mageplaza order grid

To create multiple orders table:

• Click the Default View in the Order menu area
• Choose Save View As
• A blank block appears where you can enter a new name for the order template 
• Click on the arrow icon to finish 

Merchants can delete unused templates by choosing that form and clicking the trash can icon.

The Filter function of the default order grid works perfectly with extra added columns. Therefore, there’s no need to worry that the Filter won’t be applied to the new order attributes in the sales order table. 

To retrieve the order table data from the file:

• Move your mouse to the menu bar, click Export
• Choose the type of file you want for the downloaded data (CSV or Excel XML)
• Click on the Export button to start the downloading process

The bottom line

Customer data is indispensable for the long-term development of both in-store and eCommerce companies. The sales order grid is a valuable data source that any eCommerce business should not miss to remain competitive.