Hmm, it's just a simple sed line, it should work and it's working correctly on my server. Are the previous curl lines working for you, so you have the orders history page content in $orders variable, if you try to echo it?
$ order_status=`echo '<td><em>Paid</em></td>'| sed -e 's/.*<td><em>//g' -e 's/<\/em>.*$//g'` $ echo $order_status Paid
echo "Filtering status..." order_status=`echo $orders | sed -e 's/.*<td><em>//g' -e 's/<\/em>.*$//g'` echo "order_status=$order_status"
Filtering status... order_status= Status of your order is still , nothing to do but wait.