Tracking multiple items in a Commerce order individually

Question

I need to track items individually in a Drupal Commerce store that I'm building, and I'm wondering if anybody here have an idea how to make this happen. Let me expand on this a bit:

If a customer puts 3 items in the cart, does the whole checkout process, pays for them etc. the store manager should be able to set statuses individually for those 3 items.

Most of the times these items will be shipped seperately, therefore the store manager should be able to set the first item to shipped while the other two is pending for example.

The only solution we've came up with is to explode the order into three seperate orders so after that one order, the store manager would see three orders with each product on the admin interface. Making this solution happen perfectly (set the right order totals to each order, set them to paid after the one payment, delete original order etc) introduces a lot of problems and it's a lot more complicated than we've expected.

Is there more straightforward, better solution out there for this purpose?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Since line items are fieldable, why not consider adding a field to the line item type and either switching to the Inline Entity Form for line item management on the order edit page or else creating a custom interface (Views + editablefields?) for manipulating the value of those fields?

That's what I'm going to be doing on a friend's site to track related eBay listings.