Getting Orders and Applications From Your Site's Forms

How does something a visitor types into my site form actually reach me?

Ask for the form to be built as a site form and take hosting on your own domain (6,999 BDT): every submission then lands in your site dashboard inbox with an email alert, 25 a day with email for the first 5. Business (14,499 BDT) takes 100 a day with 10 emails. Commerce (23,999 BDT) raises it to 500 a day and adds an automatic reply to the buyer, an SMS and an order file a courier can take.

Why a plain static form reaches nobody

An ordinary form looks exactly like a form: name, mobile, address, then a Send button. But what happens inside is another matter.

• A site built on BanglaCodes runs in the visitor's own browser and has no server of its own.
• Which means that when Send is pressed, there is nobody on the other side to receive it.
• What the visitor typed stayed on the visitor's phone.

So our AI never pretends. A tool that writes "sent" after the button is pressed while sending nothing anywhere is not merely bad code, it is a lie: the shopkeeper thinks no orders are coming, the buyer thinks the order went through.

There are two honest roads:

• One, a WhatsApp or call button instead of a form. That works on the free plan.
• Two, a site form. With lifetime hosting the visitor's submission really does reach our servers and lands in your inbox; Business or Commerce take more submissions a day.

This chapter is about the second road.

How to ask for a form

1. Ask in plain Bangla in the builder, and make it clear that this is to be a site form.
2. Say which fields it needs in the same breath and you will not be correcting it later.

Put an order form on my shop site with name, mobile, full address, what they want to buy and any note. Make it work as a site form so the submissions come to my inbox.

1. Publish it, and check that the hosting is paid for. Storing submissions comes with the hosting; once it is on, forms run on the published site, meaning the apnar-site.banglacodes.app address and your own domain.
2. Fill it in and send it yourself, then open the inbox and check that it landed. Never skip that one-minute test.

A few more things to keep in mind:

• Name the fields carefully, because those names are what you read in the inbox.
• Even where the labels do not match, we still find the name, mobile and address for the courier file by the shape of what was typed.
• The /p/ share link is for previews, and a form will not work there.
• You can have more than one form, say one for orders and one for complaints, and every one of them works.
• The inbox does not label which form a submission came from, so give each form a field of its own, such as a subject.

What lands in the inbox

Open the site dashboard and the inbox is there. Each submission carries:

• Everything the visitor typed, field by field, beside the names you chose. Very long text is trimmed.
• When it arrived, with the date and time. There is nothing left to argue about over who sent theirs first.
• For a checkout order, the whole cart: what and how many, the delivery charge and the grand total, shown as an order.
• A status you can change: new, seen and done.

The status is really a small ledger, and those three boxes are enough to run the whole shop on a busy day:

1. Open the inbox in the morning and read the new ones.
2. Mark them seen once you have read them.
3. Mark them done once the goods have gone out. Then you never have to hold in your head which ones are still pending.

The email alert and the CSV file

When a submission arrives, an email goes to your account address, so you do not have to sit with the dashboard open all day. The mail is only a nudge; the real text you read in the inbox.

Order alerts on your phone. If you would rather not wait to open email either, on the site manager's "Inbox" tab, right at the top, the "Order alerts on this phone" card has "Turn on notifications": press it and choose Allow when the phone asks. A test notification arrives at once, and from then on every new order or message shows on the phone's lock screen; tapping it opens the inbox. Alerts go for as many submissions as the emails do. On Android, turn it on in Chrome; an iPhone needs iOS 16.4 or later with BanglaCodes on the Home Screen first (Safari's Share button, then "Add to Home Screen"), opened from there to turn it on. The alerts reach the phone you turned them on from, up to 5 phones per account.

• On lifetime domain hosting the first 5 submissions of the day are emailed, 10 on Business, and 30 on Commerce. The rest still land in the inbox perfectly well.
• On a day when you hit the limit you are told by email, so you feel the rush rather than miss it.
• The whole inbox downloads as a CSV from the Backup tab, though the CSV is a Business and Commerce feature. One file holds 1,000 submissions, newest first.
• A single backup file of the whole site plus the inbox comes from that same tab. Taking one a month and keeping it yourself is a good habit.

What Commerce adds

When a shop's orders go from a few a day to many, landing in the inbox is no longer enough on its own. Commerce adds three things.

• An automatic reply to the buyer: when the form carries an email address, a thank-you mail in your own words goes to the buyer.
• SMS to the buyer: in Bangladesh a cash-on-delivery customer rarely has email but always has a mobile.
• The SMS is sent from your own gateway account, because a business sender ID has to be registered in your own name. Up to 200 a day and 30 an hour.
• A courier order file: instead of typing orders one by one, download the file and upload the lot in their panel.
• One file holds 1,000 orders, oldest first, because the customer who has waited longest is the one whose parcel should go first.

An order with no phone or no address stays out of the courier file, because nobody could deliver it. You are told how many were left out, so you never ship four parcels for five orders.

The daily limits and a busy day

It is worth knowing what happens past the limit:

• The visitor sees a polite message on the form saying today's quota is finished and it reopens the next day.
• Nothing vanishes silently, and no visitor is given a false assurance.
• The limit is actually on your side: the form is open to everybody, so without it somebody could fill your inbox with thousands of fake submissions.
• For a busy shop Commerce's 500 is the right size; when you keep bumping into 100 a day, that is the sign it is time to move up.
• Going from Business to Commerce charges only the difference.

Ask for no more than you need

The more fields on a form, the fewer people fill it in. And information you collect is information you are then responsible for. So keep a simple rule: ask only for what the job actually requires.

• A delivery needs a name, a mobile number and an address. It does not need a date of birth, a father's name or an NID, so do not ask.
• Do not make email compulsory. Most buyers in Bangladesh have no email address, and making it compulsory means losing half your orders.
• Rather than asking for a photo or a scan of a document, ask for it over the phone on the rare occasion you need it.
• Put one line under the form saying what the information is for and how soon they will hear back. Trust goes up, and so do submissions.

The form does not reach me

Beginner questions

Where does the form data live?

• On our servers, and it is visible only from your account.
• On Business or Commerce you can download it as CSV and keep a copy yourself as well.

Is there a free way to take orders without buying hosting?

• There is. Put a WhatsApp button in place of the form: the buyer taps it, the order message is written for them and they only press send.
• That is how most small shops in Bangladesh already work.

Will my phone tell me when an order comes in?

It will. Turn on "Order alerts on this phone" at the top of the site manager's "Inbox" tab, and every new order or message then shows as a notification on your phone, with no email to open. Android needs Chrome; an iPhone needs BanglaCodes on the Home Screen, on iOS 16.4 or later.

Can one form be used for both a shop and an office?

• Hosting is per site, so two separate sites need it taken separately for each.
• Inside one site you can have as many forms as you like.

Read next

• Online Shop and Product Catalogue
• Sharing and Publish
• Which Hosting You Need: Basic, Business or Commerce