That's a great question.

By default, the statuses from the Order Details are not reported to the customer unless you explicitly changed the templates to show this information. It is generally not necessary to change them especially for small number of items.

If you handle large number of items and you often ship out some products first, you can use the statuses under Order Detail to help you keep track of which item you have shipped and which ones are awaiting shipment. 

I hope this helps.

Thanks for you input. There is at least one place the shipping status of individual Order Details is seen by the customer, under My Orders. Seems it should be documented that this status defaults to Not Shipped and the admin needs to update it when shipped. Especially since they need to update it at the Order level as well. What probably should happen is a prompt when changing status at the Order level. Something like "Mark all Order Detail items as shipped?" That simplifies things for the typical case of all items have shipped while still allowing for individual item status to be updated such as in a back-order situation like you mentioned.

Probably fine at the end of the day but seems like this could work better.
fred

I think prompting to mark all Order Detail as same status is a great idea. I'll add this to our roadmap to consider.

Please note, the default Manage Order module should not show the Order Detail statuses (only show Order statuses) unless somehow you explicitly changed it. You can see it here. The password is located on the Login page. Try to login as "shopper1".

 

I'm referring to what the customer sees under My Orders. But mine is different than the demo one. I'd attach a screen shot but I dont see any way to do that here. I put it at:
https://preferredseed.com/images/order31.png
Not sure how I would have changed this template. Can you tell me where to revert to using the style in the demo?