Order Statuses Explained: The Full Lifecycle

Every order on GuestPostNow sits in exactly one status. Each status tells you two things: whose turn it is, and what happens if that person does nothing. Once you can read that, nothing about an order is surprising.

The statuses, in order

Pending — waiting on the seller

The buyer has paid and the money is held by GuestPostNow, not by the seller. The seller now decides whether to take the job.

• Whose turn: the seller.
• Clock: 5 days.
• If nobody acts: the order auto-cancels and the buyer is refunded in full.
• Buyer tip: a seller who has a question at this stage cannot start without your answer. Check the order's message thread.
• Seller tip: if something about the brief is wrong, ask before rejecting — rejecting is final and refunds the buyer.

Accepted — the seller is working

The seller has taken the job and is writing and publishing.

• Whose turn: the seller.
• Clock: 7 days by default; some listings set their own. The deadline shown on the order is the one that counts.
• If nobody acts: auto-cancel, full refund to the buyer, and the cancellation counts against the seller's completion rate.

Delivered — waiting on the buyer

The seller has submitted the live post URL. The buyer checks that the placement matches what they ordered.

• Whose turn: the buyer.
• Clock: 3 days.
• If nobody acts: the order auto-completes and the seller is paid. Silence counts as acceptance, so buyers should actually look.
• Buyer tip: check the link is present, points where you asked, uses the anchor you asked for, and is dofollow if that is what you paid for.

Revision — the buyer asked for a change

Something in the delivery did not match the order, and the buyer has sent it back rather than accepting.

• Whose turn: the seller.
• Use it for: a wrong anchor, a missing link, the wrong target URL — things the seller can correct on the published page.
• Not for: changing your mind about what you ordered.

Completed — done and paid

The buyer accepted, or three days passed after delivery. The seller's earnings are credited, minus commission.

Completed is not the end of the seller's obligation. The link-uptime guarantee runs from here and the URL is re-checked for months — see the guarantee.

Expired — the guarantee window has ended

Expired is a successful order. It means a placement was delivered, accepted and paid, and enough time has since passed that its link-uptime guarantee has run out — 12 months for orders of $15 or more, 6 months below that.

It is easy to misread "Expired" as a failure in your order history. It is the opposite: only orders that completed successfully can reach it.

Cancelled — the order ended without a placement

The buyer is refunded. An order can reach Cancelled several ways: the seller rejected it, the buyer cancelled before work started, a deadline lapsed, or admin resolved a dispute that way. Every route refunds the buyer; what differs is the effect on the seller's record. If you disagree with a cancellation, Refunds & Dispute Resolution explains the routes open to you.

Reading it on the order page

Every order page carries a timeline strip with a date under each stage it has reached. Empty cells are stages it has not reached — so this order was placed, accepted the next day, delivered five days later, and completed three days after that:

The one rule worth remembering

Two of these clocks run out in someone's favour by default: Delivered auto-completes and pays the seller, and Pending and Accepted auto-cancel and refund the buyer. Silence is never neutral. If you are waiting on the other party, say so in the order's message thread — that is the record our team reads if it ever becomes a dispute.

Sellers: the practical detail on hitting these deadlines is in Delivering an Order.