The problem is not too few orders
For a shop doing well on Facebook, the day often looks like this. Forty messages in the inbox, twenty comments under a post. Someone wrote "how much", someone wrote "I will take it", someone gave half a line of an address. Meanwhile someone phones to say "but I ordered the day before yesterday", and you dig through the inbox and cannot find it.
The problem is not too few orders. The problem is that the orders are not in one place.
You lose in three places, and all three cost money:
- Hand-copied addresses. You write what the customer wrote into a notebook or somewhere else, and every time there is a chance to get one digit or one word wrong. A wrong address means a returned parcel, and a return means courier charges both ways
- Lost orders. When a new message arrives in the inbox, the old one sinks down, and comments are lost along with the post
- Writing the same thing again and again. What is the delivery charge, is cash on delivery available, how many days will it take: twenty times a day
None of these three is your carelessness. A messaging app is built for talking, not for keeping orders. It is being used for the wrong job, so the result is bad.
What a small web app fixes
You do not need to imagine anything big when you hear "web app". Here it does four jobs:
- One link, which you can pin on your page and send in reply to comments
- One form, where the customer writes their own name, number and address
- One list, where all orders collect by date, and each one has a status you can change
- One file, which you can upload straight to the courier's site
The biggest gain is hidden in number two, and it is often missed. The customer writes the address themselves. Two things follow. One, the mistake that used to happen while copying no longer happens. Two, if the address is wrong, it is clear whose mistake it was, and there is nothing to argue about.
There is a fifth job too. Not every shop needs it, but in some shops it changes sales: letting people turn the product around to look at it. For products like shoes, handmade clay items, jewellery or furniture, customers want to see it from all sides, and a run of photos does not do that.
It works well for plain shapes and runs in the browser, with nothing to download. If you need very fine detail or a realistic model, real photos are still better.
The whole path at a glance
See how one order goes from start to finish, step by step:
- You pin the link at the top of your Facebook page, and put it in your WhatsApp profile
- When someone writes "how much" in a comment, you reply in one line and give the link
- The customer opens the link, picks the product, and writes name, number and full address
- The total, with the delivery charge, is added up in front of them: one rate inside Dhaka, another outside
- The order lands in your list, and an alert arrives by email
- You open the list, look at the order, and change the status to "seen"
- After packing, you download the courier file and upload it to their site
- You set the orders' status to "done", and they do not appear in the next file
At no step did you have to copy an address by hand, and no order got lost under the inbox. That is the whole gain.
What to ask in the order form
The most common mistake when building a form is asking too much. Every extra box makes some customers give up on the form.
What you must have:
- Name
- Mobile number
- Full address, in one big box, not split into parts
- What they are taking, and how many
Nice to have, but not required:
- District or area, useful in the courier file
- Email, but never required, because most customers who buy with cash on delivery have no email
- A small note box, for things like "please call in the afternoon"
What not to ask:
- Date of birth, profession, or any marketing question
- National ID number, under no circumstances
- Anything like a card PIN or a bKash PIN, because no real form ever asks for these
Remember one thing. A customer's name, number and address are not your property. They are held in your care. Take only what is needed, and do not send that information anywhere else.
After the order arrives: the list and the status
The real benefit of orders collecting in a list is not looking at the list, but changing the status.
Three statuses are enough for most shops: new, seen and done. New means not yet looked at, seen means confirmed by phone, done means the parcel has gone.
Why do these three boxes help? Because when the phone rings, you no longer dig through the inbox. You search by the number, tell them which status the order is at, and that is it. The one sentence "your order was sent yesterday" stops most complaints.
With an email alert on top, a new order never slips past you. On a busy day this helps most. How to handle the inbox day to day is in the post on the order inbox.
The courier file
Typing orders one by one into a courier's site is one of the most annoying jobs, and it is where the most mistakes happen. The alternative is to download a CSV file (a list file that opens in Excel) and upload it to their panel in one go.
Some honest notes are needed here, because every courier has different rules:
- Steadfast takes the full address as plain text, so the file uploads as it is
- Pathao's sheet needs the city and zone boxes to match their own list exactly. When the district is recognised, the city box fills itself in their spelling; the zone box you have to fill
- RedX is not supported yet, because each of their orders needs a numeric area code
One more rule applies in every case: an order with no phone number or address does not go into the file, because nobody can deliver it. Check how many were left out, so you do not end up sending four parcels for five orders. One file holds up to a thousand orders, oldest first, because the customer who has waited longest should get their parcel first.
SMS and automatic replies to the customer
A customer who buys with cash on delivery often has no email, but everyone has a mobile. So a short SMS as soon as the order arrives, "we have received your order", cuts down both complaints and phone calls a lot.
Know one thing up front: the SMS goes out from your own gateway account, not from us. The reason is legal. In Bangladesh, a masking sender ID in the name of a business has to be registered separately with BTRC, with a trade licence and NID, and it has to be in your own name.
Two practical warnings. One, Bangla text fits 70 characters to an SMS and English fits 160, so a long Bangla message is really a bill for two or three SMS. Two, after you set up the gateway, always send a test SMS to your own phone. Almost every gateway in Bangladesh answers "OK" even when the balance has run out, so the message arriving on your own phone is the only proof.
If the customer gives an email, an automatic thank-you letter can go out too, written in your own words. The SMS and this letter are both Commerce features, and both have daily limits: SMS to customers is 200 a day and 30 an hour, thank-you letters are 20 a day and one a day to the same address.
Which plan you need for what
This part is the most misunderstood, so I will say it plainly.
| What you want | What you need |
| Show an order form on a site published for free | Free |
| A site on your own domain, for life, with form orders in the inbox (25 a day, email alerts for 5 of them) | ৳6,999 once |
| 100 orders a day, a blog and extra pages, your own code | Business ৳14,499 |
| SMS to customers, automatic replies, the courier file | Commerce ৳23,999 |
In all four rows the price is one time, not yearly. Each step includes everything in the one before, so Commerce has Business's blog, extra pages, own code and backup. And in the price of both Business and Commerce, lifetime hosting for your own domain is already included, so you do not pay the ৳6,999 separately. Going from Business to Commerce, you pay only the difference.
Know three limits. Lifetime hosting allows up to 25 submissions a day, Business 100, and Commerce 500. For most small shops the first is plenty.
What this platform cannot do
Knowing the real limits up front saves disappointment later. A site published on BanglaCodes is static, meaning the site's files run in the visitor's browser, and no separate program runs on a server. So these do not work here:
- Visitor login or accounts. A setup where the customer sees their own order history cannot be built here
- Taking card payment inside the page. You can place a payment link from your own gateway, and then the money goes straight to your gateway, and cash on delivery is always there
- One live database for everyone. What one visitor writes cannot be shown to another visitor, so a live stock count like "only 3 left" will not work here. (Keeping one set of figures for yourself and your staff is a different matter, and that works with the Business plan's cloud data.)
- PHP, WordPress, WooCommerce, Node or any database will not run on the server
One thing needs saying separately, because money is at risk. Each item's price comes from the customer's browser. We add up the total again ourselves and check it, but if someone changes the price of one item, it cannot be caught. So before sending a big order, glance at the price once.
What to do if you cannot pay right now
Not every shop is ready to go on a paid plan today, and that is fine. The free tier gives a few things, and they are not small.
A free published address. When you publish the site, you get the address your-name.banglacodes.app, which opens without anyone needing an account, and which is permanent. Pin that on your page. If product photos, prices, delivery charges and rules are laid out in one place, half the questions in your inbox stop coming.
An order form that goes to WhatsApp. On a free site the form's data does not collect in an inbox, but the form can be built so that when the customer fills it in and taps, a neatly written message with all the details opens in WhatsApp, and then they just send it. The customer types the address themselves, and it reaches you in an organised form. The place it collects is then WhatsApp, not a separate list.
An accounts app on your own phone. You can build a small app to keep orders or dues and run it on your own phone. Publish the site first, then when you open that address the records stay on the phone. They are not kept on the free share link, because that is run separately for safety. And one limit needs saying plainly: the data stays on that one phone. If you open it on another phone there will be nothing there, and if you clear the browser's data the records go too. So download a copy yourself now and then. If you run a tailor's shop, the app page's templates have a ready card called "tailor's order book": the customer's measurements, advance and due, delivery date, one tap to WhatsApp when ready, and a button to download a backup file. The book starts empty.
Payment boxes for bKash, Nagad and Rocket. If you put your own bKash, Nagad or Rocket number in the site manager, the order page gets the number, a copy button and a box for the TrxID. The customer's TrxID also comes through in the message of a WhatsApp order, so it is easy to match who sent the money. This is free too, with details in the online payment article.
Many shops run for months on just these. The time to move to a paid plan is when hand-copied addresses and lost orders start eating too much of your time.
A plan for the first week
- Day 1: Write the answers to the ten questions you get most on one page, with the delivery charge and rules
- Day 2: Gather the product photos and the price list in one place
- Day 3: Build a one-page site from that, publish it, and pin the address on your page
- Day 4: Add the order form, and start with only four boxes
- Day 5: Place an order yourself as a customer, right to the end, and see where it gets stuck
- Day 6: Start the habit of giving the link in reply to comments, every time
- Day 7: Count how many orders came in through the form this week and how many through the inbox
Do not skip step seven. That one number will tell you whether it is time to pay for the next step. And step five catches the most mistakes, because until you fill in a form you built yourself, you cannot tell where the customer will get annoyed.
Questions and answers
If I have a Facebook page, do I need this separately? The page and the order list do two different jobs. People come to the page, and orders collect in the list. You do not need to drop the page. Sending people from the page to the link is the main job.
Will customers fill in the form, or will they still write in the inbox? Both will work, and in the first few weeks the inbox will still be the bigger share. If you give the link in reply to comments every time, the split slowly changes. The smaller the form, the more people finish it.
Where is the order data kept, and can I get a copy of it? With lifetime hosting, the data is kept on the server and can be seen only from your account. A backup file of the whole site and its submissions can be downloaded with lifetime hosting itself; the CSV that opens in Excel is on Business and Commerce.
What happens when the daily limit is passed? The form politely says today's quota is over, and it opens again the next day. For a busy shop, Commerce's 500 is the right fit.
Can I show stock running down? Not to the visitor directly, because the site cannot keep one live count for everyone. What you can do is go in yourself and write "sold out", or confirm by phone after taking the order. Your own stock book can be kept the same on every device, though, with the Business plan's cloud data. It opens with a passcode, so customers do not see it, only you and your staff do.
What happens to old orders? When you set the status to "done", they do not come into the next courier file, but they stay in the list. Being able to find an old order was the whole answer to the original problem.
In short
- The inbox and comments are built for talking, not for keeping orders, so the problem is not your carelessness
- If you pin an order form link, the customer writes the address themselves, and the hand-copying mistake goes away completely
- Four boxes are enough in the form: name, number, full address and what they are taking. Never make email required
- Three statuses, new, seen and done, are enough for almost every shop, and when the phone rings you do not dig through the inbox
- For form orders to reach the inbox: hosting on your own domain at ৳6,999 (25 submissions a day, 5 email alerts), Business at ৳14,499 for more orders and a blog, and Commerce at ৳23,999 for SMS to customers, automatic replies and the courier file, with lifetime domain hosting included in the last two
- Three things are not possible here: visitor login, taking card payment inside the page, and one live database for everyone
- Before paying, try a site published for free with a form that goes to WhatsApp, then count how many orders came in through the form in a week and decide
When your site is built, the full system for changing prices, pictures and text yourself is in the site management guide, with pictures.