Order ID Scheme

Owned by Perry Tew
Last updated: Mar 08, 2018 by Hunter Schaeffer
3 min read

Order ID Scheme

Order ID Scheme allows you to choose between a Date and Time stamp based scheme and an numeric (incremental) orderID.

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Order ID Schemes

There are two orderID schemes to choose from: "Date and Time based" and a sequential "Numeric" scheme.

Date and time based

The date and time based scheme is the default order ID scheme used by UltraCart when you create your account.

DEMO-YYYYMMDDHHMM-RRRRRR

Where DEMO is the Merchant ID, YYYY is the year, MM is the month, DD is the day, HH is the hour, MM is the minute, and RRRRR is a random unique identifier.

The first four digits after the merchant ID and hyphen are the year. the next four digits represent the month and day, and the next four represent the hour (in 24 hour format) and minutes of the day, and the final six digits after the second hyphen are a random number string designed to eliminate duplicate orderID's placed within any given minute.

So a real orderID in the Date and Time based scheme appears like this:

  DEMO-201212051603-233424

Numeric

If you would like to have a sequential order ID scheme then select numeric, enter a starting number, and select the width of the ID (UltraCart will place leading zeroes in front of the number).

The alternate format, numerically increasing, uses your designated starting number then increments upward one for each successful order.

An example numeric order ID with a staring number of one thousand and a width of ten would be: DEMO-0009103113

  • UltraCart recommends selecting a significantly high starting number and a width of at least ten digits. Selecting a low starting number might give customers the indication that the online store has not been around for a long time or does not have a large volume of business.
  • Merchants should never reset the starting number lower than an existing order ID or a collision will occur.

Declined Transactions with Numeric Order Ids

Before UltraCart communicates with your payment gateway, it generates an order ID.  For example if might generate DEMO-000012345 as the order ID.  The order ID is transmitted to the credit card company in the transaction attempt.  If the transaction fails you may see a log of this in the gateway's interface.  UltraCart will try not to discard the allocated order ID in most cases.  It will reuse it until a successful transaction is placed. This prevents gaps in your order ID sequence. 

Skipped OrderID's when using sequential "Numeric" order ID Scheme

While UltraCart will attempt to reuse declined transaction Order IDs, this behavior is not guaranteed due to the distributed architecture of the UltraCart platform. IF another order number was already allocated the next sequential number, then any subsequent orders will start up after that order. Therefore, it is recommended that you do not rely upon the uninterrupted sequential order id property in critical business functions.