Where messages get lost
Orders in a small shop come by four routes: Facebook inbox, WhatsApp, phone, and the site form.
The first three have one problem. Messages sit mixed inside conversations, and when a new message comes the old one moves up. An order that came at eleven at night is not seen again in the morning.
This is where the site form helps: each submission is a separate entry, and the entries sit in a list. Not a conversation, a list.
How to ask for the form
In the builder, say in your own words, in your own language, what information you want to take. The more specific you are, the more useful the form will be.
If you say "put in an order form" you get an ordinary form. Instead, say what is written below. It says: "Keep boxes for name, phone, address, product, quantity and note, and make phone and address required."
নাম, ফোন, ঠিকানা, প্রোডাক্ট, পরিমাণ আর নোটের ঘর রাখো, ফোন আর ঠিকানা বাধ্যতামূলক।
Keeping the phone number box required matters most. In Bangladesh, for cash on delivery the phone number is the only sure way to reach someone, and almost nobody gives an email.
What happens after a submission
Several things happen together.
An entry is made in the inbox. The submission arrives in the inbox tab of the site manager page, with everything the customer wrote.
An email goes to you. So you do not have to keep the inbox open. There is a limit on how many emails go in a day, and even if the limit is passed, the submissions stay in the inbox, only a separate mail is not sent for each.
If you like, news comes on the phone too. At the very top of the inbox tab, in the "Order notifications on the phone" card, press "Turn on notifications", and whenever a new order comes a notification appears on the phone's lock screen, and pressing it opens the inbox directly. On Android, turn it on with Chrome; on iPhone you need iOS 16.4 or later, and you must first put BanglaCodes on the home screen. Notifications go for as many submissions as emails go for. Nobody sits in the shop opening email, and with one ping on the phone the order that came at eleven at night is not lost by morning.
On the Commerce plan the customer gets a reply too. If they give an email in the form, an auto-reply goes, and if they give a phone number an SMS can be sent.
Three states
Each submission in the inbox has a state, and these three states are the real working tool.
| State | Meaning |
| New | Nobody has seen it yet |
| Seen | Read, work is going on |
| Done | Delivered or answered |
Why this matters: if more than one person works in the shop, you can tell who has taken which. And at the end of the day, if there is something in the "New" box, you know today's work is left.
The habit is simple: open the inbox once in the morning and once at night, and change the state once it is handled.
Download a CSV and open it in Excel
On the Business and Commerce plans the submissions can be downloaded as a CSV file, and it opens in Excel or Google Sheets. One-time hosting has no CSV, but you can download the full site backup file, and the submissions come inside it.
It helps in three places: matching the month's accounts, making a customer list, and sending orders to the courier.
The file is made to show Bangla writing correctly, so when you open it in Excel no strange letters appear where the names are.
One limit is good to know: one file carries the newest thousand submissions. If there are more, the older ones stay in the inbox and do not come into the file.
Common reasons a form does not work
| What you see | Usual reason |
| The form fills in, but nothing is in the inbox | No hosting; without hosting the form stores nothing on any link |
| Submissions suddenly stopped today | The day's limit is passed, it will work again tomorrow |
| Email is not coming | The daily email limit is finished, or the mail went to spam |
| Phone number comes incomplete | The box is not required, tell the builder to make it required |
The first is what happens most, and it is hard to see because the form looks like it works fine. The matter is not the link but the plan: until you take hosting, the form stores nothing on any link, and once you take hosting, submissions are stored from the free share link too. To store submissions you need hosting.
Test your own form yourself
This should be the first job after the site goes live, yet almost nobody does it.
Open the site from your own phone, fill in the form with your own name and number, and send it. Then see whether it came into the inbox and whether you got the email.
What this five-minute job saves you from is finding out a week later that all the orders were being lost.
Do it again once a month, especially after you make a big change to the site.
Keep the customer information with yourself
The inbox information is an asset of your business, and it is not wise to keep it stuck in one place.
Take the backup of the whole site once a month, and on Business or Commerce download the CSV too. The backup brings the site's files, pages and submissions in one file.
This is not distrust of anyone, it is a normal habit. With any service, it is good to keep a copy of your own information with yourself.
The inbox is only one step of the whole path. What the whole arrangement looks like, from an order coming in to handing it to the courier, is given step by step in the post on a shop's web app.
Questions and answers
Why does the form not work without hosting? The form can be seen and filled in, but storing the information is part of hosting. It does not depend on which link you came by: once you take hosting, it is stored from the free share link too, and if you do not take it, it is not stored even on your own domain.
How many orders a day can I take? It differs by plan, and the limit is by day, so it starts fresh the next day. When you get near the limit, a warning comes on the dashboard.
Will I get a notification on my phone when an order comes? Yes. In the inbox tab of the site manager, in the "Order notifications on the phone" card press "Turn on notifications", and when the phone asks for permission press Allow. A test notification comes with it, and after that whenever a new order or message comes, news arrives on the phone. The news comes to the same phone you turned it on on.
Does the customer know the order has reached you? The site shows a thank-you message. If you want to tell the customer separately beyond that, the Commerce plan has an auto-reply email and SMS, and auto-replies go up to 20 a day, one a day to the same address.
Who can see the inbox information? You, as the site owner. If anyone from support ever looks, a record of it is kept on your own dashboard, so you can check for yourself who looked and when.
Can I delete old submissions? Yes, one submission can be deleted for good from the inbox, and it cannot be brought back. So download the CSV (on Business and Commerce) or the full backup before you delete. If you only want to keep the list clean, you do not need to delete, change the state to "Done".
What if the same phone fills in the form again and again? If the same submission comes again and again you will see it in the inbox, and you can handle it by changing the state. Customers often press twice because they cannot tell whether anything happened the first time, so keeping the thank-you message clear helps.
Should I keep an email box in the form? Keep it, but do not make it required. In Bangladesh a large part of cash-on-delivery customers have no email, and if you make it required you will lose the order. Phone required, email as they wish.
How do I send the orders to the courier? On the Commerce plan you can make a courier file directly from the inbox, and that is written up separately in the post on sending orders to the courier.
In short
- A form's submissions stay as a list and do not get lost in a conversation
- Make the phone box required, not the email
- Three states: new, seen, done
- As soon as a submission comes, an email goes to you, up to a limit a day
- If you turn on order notifications on the phone at the top of the inbox, news comes on the phone too
- Without hosting, the form stores nothing on any link
- After the site goes live, test the form once from your own phone
- Download a backup once a month, and the CSV on Business or Commerce