There is much confusion over what exactly is an Offline order and why do they happen – here’s the gist of it:
1ShoppingCart allows you to have the ability to accept Offline orders – if there are problems with the customer’s order during checkout then they will have the option to submit the order anyways. This will make the order show up in your shopping cart and then it will be up to you to contact the customer to sort out what is going on, solve the problem, and then manually change the order to Accepted.
The reasoning behind this is so that you don’t lose orders when something goes wrong during checkout; you’ll know when folks are trying to buy something from you and you can get in touch with them and help solve the issue, therefore generating more sales for yourself.
But how does an offline order happen? What goes wrong? It could be any number of reasons from an address entered that doesn’t match billing records to a missing middle initial. Also, it turns out that you can’t do mobile orders if you’re using PayPal Pro as your gateway with the shopping cart, they’re just not compatible at the moment – these orders will also show up as Offline.
Bummer! Hopefully they’ll come up with a fix soon as obviously mobile orders are on the rise.
But long story short is that a customer is trying to buy something from you, and that’s a good thing. You should get in touch with them asap so that they know their order was not successful as offline orders will still send the customer an order notice even though their payment wasn’t successful. Get their payment sorted out and voila! Everyone is happy!