Recording phone and email orders in the Shopware admin

Not every order comes in through the checkout. Regular customers call, buyers send an email with a list of items, an order is written on paper at a trade fair, and during the holiday season customers ask for help on the phone. If you record phone and email orders in the Shopware admin instead of keeping them in spreadsheets or in the inbox, stock, documents and customer history stay in one place. Shopware provides a dedicated module for this in the administration (Shopware documentation), and since version 6.7.15.0 you can decide there whether the customer automatically receives the order confirmation by email (Shopware release news). This guide covers the workflow, prices and tax per customer group, payment method and team permissions – and why the new option touches a legal question when you sell to consumers. How we set up such processes in B2B shops is described at the end.

Why phone and email orders belong in the shop

In B2B sales, personal contact is not on its way out. In German wholesale, only 44.90 percent of enterprises with 10 or more employees made any e-commerce sales via websites, apps, marketplaces or EDI in 2024, and these channels accounted for 25.52 percent of total revenue (Eurostat). The larger part of the business therefore comes in through other channels, such as the phone, email, field sales or a conversation at a trade fair. Whoever gives the advice often takes the order at the same time.

This is exactly where the effort comes from. Eurostat explicitly excludes orders placed via manually typed emails from e-commerce (Eurostat glossary): someone has to read them and process them by hand. An order that only exists in an inbox or on a sticky note has no connection to the shop or the ERP system: the stock level in the shop is wrong, the invoice is created somewhere else, and the customer does not see the order in their account.

If, on the other hand, the order is created in the shop, it uses the same structures as an order from the checkout: order number, documents, status, shipping and, if connected, the handover to the ERP system. How orders from emails and PDF files reach the ERP automatically is covered in our article on AI order entry. How regular customers can reorder faster on their own is shown in the article on B2B quick order. This article is about the case in which your team records the order in the shop.

The “Create order” module in the administration

You start in the order overview: the Create order button opens the screen for a new order (Shopware documentation). The documentation describes the purpose of the module like this:

There may be situations where you may want to enter an order manually for the customer.

Shopware documentation, Create an order in admin

The screen is divided into three areas that you work through from top to bottom: customer, products and options. Then you open the preview. The order is not saved yet at that point – that only happens with Save order (Shopware documentation).

1. Select the customer: In the customer area you pick an entry from the customer list. Besides the name, the list shows the customer number, sales channel and email address (Shopware documentation).
2. Create a customer: If the caller is not yet a customer, you create them directly from the screen without leaving the order. A guest account does not need a password; however, the customer cannot log in to the customer account later (Shopware documentation).
3. Add line items: Add product creates a new row in which you select the product and enter the quantity. The price is determined automatically at first.
4. Empty line item: For services or items that do not exist in the shop, such as cutting to size, you add an empty line item with its own name. The name later also appears in the order confirmation and on the documents (Shopware documentation).
5. Credit: You record a manual credit as a separate line item with a name and a gross amount; Shopware determines the tax rate from the product line items.
6. Options and preview: Under options you set the payment method, shipping method, addresses, currency, order language and, if applicable, a discount code. Then you check the preview and save.

Prices and tax: net or gross per customer group

Whether the price column of an admin order shows gross or net prices depends on the customer group the customer is assigned to (Shopware documentation). You define the tax display per customer group in the settings (Shopware documentation). In practice this means: before you record the first line item, it should be clear whether the caller is ordering as a business or as a private customer – and whether they are assigned to the right group in the shop.

You can change the automatically determined price in the line item, as well as the tax rate, which is initially entered as the default tax rate of the product (Shopware documentation). For an empty line item you first have to enter the tax rate yourself so that the gross price is output correctly (Shopware documentation). This freedom is useful when a special price was agreed on the phone. At the same time, it is where typos creep in: a misplaced decimal separator in the price field goes straight into the order. What applies legally when a wrong price reaches the customer is covered in our article on pricing errors in online shops.

Setting payment, shipping and addresses correctly

The admin order offers the payment methods that are available for the sales channel (Shopware documentation). If a payment method is missing, the documentation names two checkpoints: it must be assigned to the sales channel and allowed as a subsequent payment method (Shopware documentation). By default, four payment methods are active: cash on delivery, invoice, prepayment and direct debit (Shopware documentation). You can also control when a payment method is available with an availability rule from the Rule Builder.

For business customers, purchase on account is often the norm. Whether a new customer may order on account straight away on the phone is a commercial decision that should be made before the order is recorded. Credit limits and checks are covered in the article on purchase on account in B2B.

Some payment methods have to be carried out by the customer themselves, such as an online payment service. Using such a service as an example, the documentation describes how the customer triggers the payment after the order has been created, either in their customer account under Change payment method or via the link in the order confirmation email (Shopware documentation). This creates a practical dependency: if you turn off the confirmation for a guest customer, you take away this link – and a guest cannot log in to a customer account.

• Billing and shipping address: You select the billing address from the customer account. A different shipping address can be selected as soon as the option “Shipping address is the same as billing address” is turned off (Shopware documentation). On the phone, it pays to read the shipping address back once.
• Shipping method and shipping costs: Besides the shipping method, you can enter an individual shipping cost amount, for example for bulky goods or pickup (Shopware documentation).
• Currency: You can choose from the currencies enabled for the sales channel.
• Discounts: You enter a discount code in the options; automatic promotions that have already been added can be deactivated for this order.

The new option: send the order confirmation or not

Until now: after an admin order is saved, Shopware sends the order confirmation email to the address stored in the customer account (Shopware documentation). Shopware 6.7.15.0, presented in the release news of October 1, 2026, adds the option “Send order confirmation email to customer” in the final step of creating the order (Shopware release news). If you turn it off, the order is created as usual, but no order confirmation is sent. Orders placed through the storefront are not affected by the change (Shopware release news).

It is enabled by default, so the existing behavior remains unchanged.

Shopware, Release News October 2026

So if you want to use the option, you need Shopware 6.7.15.0 or later. The same rules apply to this update as to any other: test it in a staging environment first, then roll it out – in-house or as part of Shopware maintenance. After that, the technology matters less than the team rule for when the option may be turned off. Typical cases are:

Distance selling by phone: what applies to consumers

A distance contract exists when the trader and the consumer use only means of distance communication for the contract negotiations and the conclusion of the contract (Section 312c(1) BGB). The German Civil Code (BGB) lists letters, phone calls, emails and text messages, among others, as means of distance communication (Section 312c(2) BGB). An order by phone or email is therefore typically a distance contract, even if your team only creates it in the shop afterwards. According to the wording, the only exception is a contract concluded outside a sales system organized for distance selling.

For consumers, this results in a right of withdrawal (Section 312g(1) BGB). The withdrawal period is 14 days (Section 355(2) BGB). It does not begin before the trader has informed the consumer about the right of withdrawal in line with the statutory requirements (Section 356(3) BGB). Without this information, the right of withdrawal expires at the latest twelve months and 14 days after the statutory start of the period (Section 356(4) BGB). Information that is given neither during the call nor afterwards is therefore not a detail: the right of withdrawal can then last up to twelve months longer.

For means of distance communication with limited space or limited time, Article 246a Section 3 of the Introductory Act to the German Civil Code (EGBGB) sets out a minimum list, including the main characteristics of the goods, the identity of the trader, the total price and, where applicable, the conditions, time limits and procedure for withdrawal. The remaining mandatory information must be made available to the consumer in an appropriate way (Article 246a Section 3 EGBGB). Whether this relief applies to your order line is something to clarify with your legal advisor; a call script that covers these points makes sense in any case.

Then comes the confirmation. It must reflect the content of the contract and contain the information under Article 246a EGBGB, unless the trader has already provided it to the consumer on a durable medium before the contract was concluded (Section 312f(2) BGB). A durable medium enables the recipient to keep or store a statement addressed to them personally and reproduces it unchanged (Section 126b BGB). An email with the text or a PDF attachment usually meets this requirement, a mere link to a web page that can change does not, according to the prevailing view. What a robust order confirmation contains is covered in our article on transactional emails in Shopware.

In the current version, the information under Article 246a EGBGB also includes the existence of statutory warranty rights, displayed prominently using the harmonized notice (Article 246a Section 1 EGBGB). With the previous release, Shopware introduced support for the GARAN label and the notice on statutory warranty rights; with 6.7.15.0, the label is embedded in the order confirmation email as an inline PNG file (Shopware release news). If you turn off the email, you therefore also have to provide these elements another way, unless they were already available on a durable medium beforehand. More on the implementation can be found in the article on the warranty notice obligation in Shopware.

Email orders have a special feature. The general obligations in electronic commerce – technical means for correcting input errors, information before the order is placed and the immediate electronic confirmation of receipt – do not apply if the contract is concluded exclusively through individual communication (Section 312i(2) BGB). This does not release you from the contract confirmation for distance contracts. The electronic withdrawal function, in turn, applies to distance contracts concluded via an online interface (Section 356a(1) BGB); whether an order concluded by phone falls under this is a matter of interpretation. Notes on the implementation can be found in the article on the withdrawal button in Shopware.

Business customers: what is different in B2B

The rules on distance selling and withdrawal apply to consumer contracts (Section 312(1) BGB). A consumer is any natural person who enters into a legal transaction for purposes that are predominantly outside their trade, business or profession (Section 13 BGB). A trader, by contrast, acts in the exercise of their trade, business or profession when entering into the legal transaction (Section 14 BGB). If a buyer orders for their company, the statutory right of withdrawal and the contract confirmation under Section 312f BGB therefore do not apply.

Mixed cases are tricky: the tradesperson who also orders something for home on the phone, or the sole proprietor without a company account. What counts is the predominant purpose of the individual transaction, not the customer group in the shop. A short question in the call script (“Are you ordering for your business?”) and a correctly assigned customer account help to avoid later disputes. How business customers can be verified at registration is covered in the article on business verification in the B2B shop.

A written confirmation also makes sense between businesses, but there it is a matter of agreement: parties that are not consumers can agree to deviate from the obligations under Section 312i(1) sentence 1 numbers 1 to 3 BGB (Section 312i(2) BGB). If the order acknowledgment comes from the ERP system anyway, the new option avoids duplicate confirmations. Which data flows between the shop and the ERP for this is something we clarify when planning the integrations.

Team permissions: who may create orders

Anyone who creates orders in the admin can change prices, set tax rates and record credits. This authority therefore belongs in a dedicated role. In Shopware you assign permissions per area at the levels view, edit, create and delete. The permissions build on each other: whoever receives create automatically also gets edit and view (Shopware documentation). Users with administrator status have all available permissions and cannot be assigned a role (Shopware documentation).

• A dedicated role for order intake with the create permission in the orders area, without administrator status.
• Grant the additional permission Create credits only where it is needed; it allows voucher line items in existing orders (Shopware documentation).
• Personal accounts instead of shared logins, so it remains traceable who created an order.
• Add missing individual permissions specifically via the detailed privileges instead of granting full access. The documentation names the permissions order, order_customer and order_delivery as an example (Shopware documentation).
• Review roles regularly against the actual tasks, especially when people change teams.

What a role design along tasks looks like and how to secure price changes with a four-eyes principle is covered in our article on roles and permissions in the shop back end.

Documentation: call notes, emails and retention

With an email order, the order exists in writing; with a phone order, the record is only created by your team. So write down when who agreed what with whom: date and time, contact person, arrangements on price or delivery date and, for consumers, when and how the withdrawal information and the contract confirmation were sent. Whether a field on the order or your CRM serves this purpose is secondary, as long as the note is clearly linked to the order.

Merchants within the meaning of the German Commercial Code (HGB) must keep received business letters and copies of the business letters they sent in an orderly manner (Section 257(1) HGB), for six years (Section 257(4) HGB). A customer’s order email and your confirmation typically fall under this. Electronic retention is permitted if the copy matches the received business letter visually and can be made readable during the retention period (Section 257(3) HGB). An order typed over from an email therefore does not replace the email.

Team workflow: from intake to confirmation

A fixed workflow ensures that the quality of order entry does not depend on who happens to be on the phone. The following sequence works as a framework:

1. Identify the customer and clarify whether they are ordering as a consumer or for their business.
2. Select or create the customer account and check the customer group and thus the net or gross display.
3. Record the line items, read quantities and prices back, justify and note special prices.
4. Set the payment method, shipping method, shipping and billing address and the order language.
5. For consumers, give the mandatory information during the call, including the information on the right of withdrawal.
6. Check the preview and make a deliberate decision on the order confirmation option.
7. Save the order and check that the confirmation has arrived or has been sent another way.
8. Link the call note or order email to the order and file it.

Where shop customizations make sense

The standard module covers the process. As the number of phone and email orders grows, however, gaps appear that can be closed in a targeted way. As a Shopware agency, we develop such additions individually for each shop:

Before a major version change of the ERP system, it is worth checking the connection so that admin orders do not get stuck at a changed interface. Our article on checking the shop integration before JTL-Wawi 2.x describes this using JTL-Wawi as an example.

Bring phone orders into the shop properly

Phone and email remain important ordering channels, especially for advice and in the holiday season. With the Create order module, these orders end up where stock, documents and customer accounts are maintained. The new option in Shopware 6.7.15.0 gives you more control over the confirmation; for consumers, the obligation to confirm the contract remains unaffected (Section 312f(2) BGB). If you would like to define the workflow, roles and confirmation for your shop, get in touch via our contact page.