Understanding of Magento order statuses may be a bit challenging, so it was a pleasant surprise when I have found this nice graphic visualization from Aligent Consulting. See the diagram as embedded twit below. Click to the image to enlarge it.
not pretty, but I think our team has accurately sketched the #Magento order (not status!) state flow here pic.twitter.com/VoUDliuyRB
— Aligent Consulting (@aligent) September 9, 2014
Couple notes from follow-up discussion in Twitter:
- there maybe some differences with order statuses from version to version
- A shipment can be created before an invoice which will also leads to the “Processing” state
For the additional reference here is a order workflow from official Magento CE 1.9 manual:
As you may notice, the diagram from Aligent Consulting provides more details about payment processing stage, which is quite important to know.