Skip to content
Sellerlane Help Center

Customer self-service

Self-service lets buyers handle routine requests straight from their order or delivery page, no account required. You stay in control: a per-type policy decides which actions happen instantly and which queue for your approval first.

What buyers can request

Each request is tied to a non-shipping item (or the whole order) and acts on the underlying entity, the event booking, digital grant, or gift card:

  • Reschedule or cancel an event booking
  • Re-deliver a digital purchase to a different email, or reset downloads (re-download)
  • Resend a gift card, or do a public balance check
  • Cancel an unfulfilled order

Buyers open these from the tokenized delivery page. The link they receive is the authorization, so there’s no login step, and the seller backend always re-enforces your policy before anything happens.

Set your rules

Go to Settings → Self-service. Rules are grouped per product type, and each type has its own allow toggle, approval toggle, and where relevant a cutoff window, limit, and reason requirement, this is finer-grained than a single returns policy.

Events

  1. Allow reschedule / Allow cancel turn each booking action on or off (both default on).
  2. Reschedule / Cancel needs your approval decide if the action is instant or queued. Reschedule defaults to instant; cancel defaults to needing approval.
  3. Reschedule / Cancel cutoff (hours before start) the no-self-serve window before the booking. Default 24 hours. Inside the cutoff, the request is forced into the review queue even when approval is off.
  4. Max reschedules per booking default 2; once reached, further reschedule requests are blocked.
  5. Require a reason off by default; when on, the buyer must give a reason to reschedule or cancel.

Digital

  1. Allow re-deliver to a different email default on. Re-sends the same download links to a new address.
  2. Re-deliver to a different email needs your approval default on, this is the toggle that governs re-deliver.
  3. Allow re-download (reset count) default off. Resetting the download counter re-grants downloads, so it always needs your approval regardless of the toggle above.

Gift cards

  1. Allow public balance check default on.
  2. Allow resend gift card default on. For safety the resend always goes to the original recipient, a buyer can’t redirect a gift-card code to a new address, and a code whose scheduled send date is still in the future won’t be resent.
  3. Resend needs your approval default off (instant).

Orders

Allow cancellation of unfulfilled orders is on by default for quantities that remain unfulfilled. Already fulfilled quantities stay untouched. Approval is configurable and defaults to required; when approval is off, the request is still stored durably before the cancel runs.

Cancellation releases the affected inventory and reduces any outstanding COD/manual collectible. A plain pending ₹1,000 COD order with nothing collected creates a ₹0 refund. If ₹200 was prepaid by store credit and ₹800 remained COD, only real refundable tender—at most ₹200 in this example—is offered. Linked automatic refunds are off by default; you can enable them in policy or choose Create refund while approving, and Sellerlane commits the cancellation and refund together. See Refunds and returns.

Excluded products (final-sale)

Use the Excluded products search to mark specific items ineligible for any self-service. An excluded item blocks all of its own requests, and because a whole-order cancel has no single line, an order is blocked from self-cancellation if it contains any excluded item.

What happens when a buyer submits

The backend loads your policy, resolves the target, checks exclusions, then:

  • Within policy and outside any cutoff with approval off: the request is saved as requested + auto-approved, then applied immediately (e.g. a same-email gift-card resend). A durable worker and periodic sweep safely redrive it if the immediate attempt is interrupted.
  • Approval required, or inside the cutoff window: the request is saved as requested, and the buyer gets a “We received your request” email. You decide.

Review and decide

Pending and decided requests appear in two places:

  • Self-service requests inbox (its own page), with a status filter, Pending, Approved, Completed, Declined, and Approve / Decline actions per row.
  • Inline on the order detail page, so you can act without leaving the order.

Approving applies the underlying action (reschedule, cancel, redeliver, reset downloads, resend). Declining opens a note where a reason is optional, and the buyer is notified either way. The lifecycle runs requested → approved → completed, or declined, and every decision is stamped and logged.

Troubleshooting

  • “Self-service is not available for this item” the product is on your excluded list. Remove it under Settings → Self-service → Excluded products.
  • “This order can no longer be cancelled” there is no remaining cancelable quantity, the window closed, or another policy gate applies. A partially fulfilled order can still expose its unfulfilled remainder when policy allows.
  • “Reached its reschedule limit” the booking hit Max reschedules; raise the limit or reschedule it for the buyer.
  • A request you expected to be instant got queued check whether it fell inside the cutoff window, or whether its approval toggle is on (re-download is always queued by design).

Next steps

See Order & rewards lifecycle for the cross-system COD, refund, fulfillment, and reward examples.