Suppose you are running a web store and do not wish to use any e-commerce software at the moment. How are you going to collect orders? One way is to display your email address and ask customers to email you with their orders. Typically you would have a website showing off your products, and probably a page called ‘Ordering Information’ that says ‘Email me with your order’. There are several disadvantages to this
1. Customers may get turned off that they have to go to their web mail or email client, type in your email and compose a message. I don’t know about you, but even a simple thing like coming up with an email title turns me off sometimes! Although it might not take up much time, the customer needs to think of an email title like ‘My order’, and then in the email body, he would have to type ‘I would like to order 3 pieces of.. my address is.. what are the payment methods etc’.
2. You will be getting a lot of individual emails from different customers. Some might get routed to spam automatically without you knowing (due to the nature of email). You will get confused with all that different emails with different customers failing to provide the basic information for you to process their orders. For example, customers may forget to state the quantity of the product they want, their addresses or payment information. Overall, you will be overwhelmed with all these emails, forget to reply to some, and generally mess up badly if you are not sharp.
When you are starting out, a quick, easy and FREE solution to collecting orders is by using a terrific service Google has to offer. I can’t tell you how much I ADORE Google for their Google Docs product. Basically, Google Docs allows you to set up an online order form for your products for FREE. A sample form I created can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/yl9ascy.
As you can see, this form allows for some basic information about the product, terms and conditions, followed by textfields below with which you can choose to collect data from your customer. The advantage of using forms are:
1. You can choose what information you want from your customer. If any field is not filled in, an error is shown when a customer tries to submit. This way, you do not run into the problem of customers forgeting to give required information when you ask them to send you an email.
2. The beauty of Google Docs forms is that all orders are nicely adding to an Excel spreadsheet which you have access to. All order information is displayed is clear tables, so at a glance you can see who ordered what, the status of the orders etc.
In part 2 of this post I will teach you how to make an online order form to sell your products using Google Docs. I will also teach you how to, with some simple scripting, keep track of the quantity left of your products according to how many items your customer orders when he/she submits the order form. Stay tuned!
