Question in one line is – is there any option to make orders visible to customer community users keeping OWD to Private? Please read below for detailed problem.
We have Customer Community User License (Not plus, basic one). We are exposing Orders, Assets, Cases tabs to the customer. despite of Asset's & Case's OWD being private, customer can see them under the account. However, he is not able to See orders (OWD being private)
Another thing to mention here is I understand and I have used Sharing sets for Asset & cases so that customer can see all the assets and cases which he is not related to (obviously under his account only). While Sharing set is currently not available for the Orders, I am able to expose orders to customers if I change OWD to Controlled by parent. However, I don't want to change this OWD from private to Controlled by parent as it disables Manual sharing which our internal users use extensively.
Best Answer
Private is private. If your internal users can't see Orders with Private Sharing, why would you expect your External users to be able to see them? Obviously you don't want to create a group for each Account and since you don't have a Community Plus license you can't use Apex Managed Sharing. Criteria Based Sharing Rules can't be used in communities either or that would seem to have been a potential solution to your issue. The only option will be to change your sharing model.