unusual Logic behind how order numbers are incrementing

Question

I'm curious about the logic behind how magento increments it's order numbers, especially regarding orders from different stores within the same website.

We have four stores and have received orders on three of them, all of which are incrementing up from a different point.

Eg.

US store: 100000001

UK store: 1000000001

IE store: 300000001

Is there any logic behind how these numbers start, why would the UK store order numbers begin from 1 billion, the US from 100 million and IE 300 million. I would have thought the UK would be 200 million or something.

Interestingly the first UK order was made less than a minute after an order on the US store.

I should also mention that before going live we deleted some test orders with the SiteClue_Delete_Orders module.

Why are they in a different sequence at all?

Can I edit that order numbers directly in the eav_entity_store table? Would that effect how Magento connects with our Payment Gateways, Braintree & Paypal?

Answer 1

Each store should have a unique starting number. So it sounds someone manually changed these numbers.

You can edit the settings yourself, by editing the increment_prefix in the eav_entity_store table. Also edit the increment_last_id to reflect the change.

However, when dealing with Payment Service Providers like paypal they generally check if the order IDs are running up and are not yet used. So make sure, if you edit the increment_last_id value, it's higher than the previous one.

Answer 2

With the help of Sander Mangel I was able to figure this out by looking at the eav_entity_store table.

Magento basically adds 100 million to the increment_prefix which seems to be based on the store_id, as we tried out multiple website/store architectures this is why we had an increment_prefix of 10 for one of our stores, which caused those order numbers to start at 1 billion.