Displaying Order History and Wishlists

A strong post-purchase experience depends on giving customers clear visibility into their past and future purchases. Order history covers past activity by enabling customers to review and track completed orders. Meanwhile, wish lists support future intent by enabling customers to save items for later.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use Liferay’s dedicated widgets to build and display order history and wish lists on the storefront.

Building the Order History Page

The Order History page is a core part of the post-purchase experience. It provides customers with visibility into past orders and current shipment status. This enables them to review order details, confirm delivery timelines, and resolve common questions independently. Providing this transparency reduces support requests and improves overall satisfaction.

Liferay provides two primary methods for displaying a customer's placed orders: the traditional widget-based approach and the low-code display page template approach.

The Traditional Approach (Widget-Based)

The fastest way to implement order history is by creating a standard page and adding the Placed Orders widget. This out-of-the-box widget delivers a complete experience immediately. It displays a list of past orders and enables customers to view full order details, including items, payment, and shipping status.

The primary advantage of this approach is the speed of implementation. Beyond basic styling, customizing the layout or presentation of this widget requires developers to create a custom display template.

The Low-Code Approach: Display Page Templates

For greater design flexibility, you can use Liferay’s display page templates to build order pages, applying the same approach used for the shopping cart. In this approach, you use tools like data sets or collection providers to display the list of orders. Then, you create a default display page template for the Order content type and design how it displays order data. When a user selects an order from the list, Liferay uses your template to render the specific order's details.

The key business value of this approach is visual control. You can leverage all of Liferay’s page builder features to implement your design for both the order history page and order details page. This way you can provide users with a consistent, branded experience without code.

Leveraging External Order Management Systems (OMS)

Many organizations rely on an external order management system (OMS) to manage order fulfillment and status transitions. While it is technically possible to query the OMS directly from a Liferay page, it’s recommended that you synchronize order data back into Liferay Commerce. By doing this, organizations can maintain accurate, consistent order data across the platform and ensure all dependent commerce features continue to function reliably.

Implementing Wish Lists

Wish lists enable logged-in customers to save products for future purchase. For customers, they provide a convenient way to track items without committing immediately. For businesses, they help reduce cart abandonment and surface valuable insights into product interest and buying intent.

Liferay provides the out-of-the-box Wish Lists widget that you can add to your My Account page. The widget enables users to view saved products, manage their list, and quickly move items to the shopping cart when they’re ready to purchase.

From a customization standpoint, the Wish Lists widget shares the same constraints as the Account Management widget. However, Liferay does not currently offer low-code fragments or templates for redesigning the wish lists experience. If the OOTB widget does not meet your design or integration requirements, you can access all wish list functionality and data through headless APIs. This enables developers to build custom page elements that deliver a fully branded experience while retaining full control over presentation and behavior.

Clarity’s Order History and Wish List Strategy

For Clarity Vision Solutions, the priority is maximizing operational efficiency and scalability while delivering customer value quickly. Given the trade-off between implementation speed and design control, Clarity plans to use both the Placed Orders widget and Wish Lists widget. This strategy avoids reliance on the beta DPT feature for orders and eliminates the need for custom development.

Additionally, Clarity plans to synchronize their external OMS order status updates back to Liferay Commerce. This guarantees data accuracy across the platform and preserves the reliability of the Order History experience for distributors.

Conclusion

Order history and wish lists are foundational elements of a complete customer account experience. Together, they give customers confidence after purchase by providing visibility into orders and shipments, while also supporting future buying decisions by allowing products to be saved and revisited.

Next, you’ll create account management and wish list pages for Clarity’s distributors.