Compromising for E-Commerce: Order Request Forms

Not everyone is prepared for a large e-commerce website development project.  Done right, a shopping cart-driven website can be rewarding for a business, but it is also an involved project and it requires some comfort with the idea of managing orders online.

In other cases, a company may produce too many special order kinds of products to be able to offer a predetermined, fixed price item on a website.  Or maybe there are a vast number of special questions they need to ask the customer to get their order just right.

Along comes the order request form.

What I mean by this is basically a simple online email form, but it is tailored with the shopper in mind.  It asks specific questions or pieces of criteria that will help the merchant streamline that order-building process.  What size do you prefer?  What day do you want to make an appointment to look at samples?  How many batches would you like?

A simple order request form does not accept any payment.  It is a preliminary step to gather enough information to allow someone at the business to put together an appropriate order and contact the customer to pay offline once the final balance has been determined (or through a separate system).

It is also possible to create more sophisticated forms that do accept payment.

Some website owners will insert a two-step process that is not directly attached to the form.  For example, after you fill out the initial form, you get a “thank you for your request” page with a PayPal button.  The disadvantage with this setup is that the PayPal button is not directly linked with that form, so the payment is not as easily tracked, and it does not affect the success of the order fulfillment since they are submitted completely independent of each other.

A step further from this is a truly integrated payment gateway, working together with the form code.  This requires a little more sophisticated programming assistance, but popular gateway services like Authorize.net make it fairly easy for a web developer to achieve these days.  With Authorize.net’s “hosted order form” option, using the SIM (simple integration method), you can create a very basic request form on your own site, followed by the payment form on the credit card service provider’s site.

Setting up a payment form in this way is usually helpful for service-based businesses, because it allows their customer to enter a custom order amount (for varied invoices), and the cost of the credit card gateway service and programming needed to integrate it is reasonably low.