The Anatomy Of An Online Order Form

If you are running an online business, it’s important that you add an effective and high-converting online order form to your order page. By effective I mean your customers can easily place their order on the form and pay you online. By high-converting I mean that few customers abandon the form before purchasing. I’d recommend reading my article on how to increase web form conversion rates, where you will find some useful takeaways regarding this topic.

Now let’s take a glance on the online order form. It is a common type of web form in e-commerce used in selling products and services, having different shapes and sizes, depending on the needs of the business owner. Many of these order forms share some similarities, so without further ado, behold the anatomy of an online order form:

1. Logo. If you own a company or a small business and have a logo, make sure you add it to the order form. It’s good for branding and creates awareness. A logo is a trust factor, convincing people that you run a serious business.
2. Title. Regardless on how your visitors land on your form, you want them to know that they are on the checkout step. If “Order Form” is too generic, you can add a title such as “Place Your Order”, “Buy Subscription” or “Finish Payments”.
3. Description. It would be a good idea to add a small description to your order form. Do you have terms of service or a delivery policy? Include them in the description below the title with a link and a small introduction. The more detailed your information, the better for you and your customers.
4. Customer Identification. Collecting the name and email address of your customers is worth more than you think. You can communicate with your customers regarding their orders and build a relationship with them, that in time can facilitate the creation of new orders. Moreover, you can save this information in your database and prepare nifty marketing campaigns, such as sending newsletters with new products or promotions.
5. The Offer. This is the focus of the order form. Do you sell items? Display them in a choice field, be it single choice, multiple choice or dropdown. If you’re selling cakes with a 123ContactForm order form, use the multiple choice field to display all your available types of cake. This way, people can buy more than one. Are you selling subscriptions? Display them in a single choice field, so people won’t buy more than one subscription by accident.
6. Delivery Information. This is the kind of information that businesses with delivery services request. A simple address field and a phone number, in case the customer isn’t home by the time the delivery arrives. But if you’re selling a subscription, membership or anything else that doesn’t involve delivering to a physical address, you can leave this part out of your form.
7. Payment options. The more options you add here, the better. Usually people pay online by credit card or PayPal. So having payments available through PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, Maestro and American Express are more than enough. Payment gateways such as Authorize.Net, Stripe or Sage Pay already support these types of credit card. And each one is available on 123ContactForm, in the Payment Processors section of your account.
8. The Purchase button. Did the customer filled in every piece of information needed to make the order? Good! It’s time to place the order with a click of the button.

This is the anatomy of an order form that you can view, but there are some elements that make an online form great, some that are not visible on the form.

The Lifeforms Of An Online Order Form

Confirmation email. This is the autoresponder that the customers receive by email after placing their order on the form. It let’s them know that the order has been successfully processed and that it’s on its way. This can be easily configured on 123ContactForm in the Notifications section.

Payment notification. This is a confirmation sent by email that let’s the customer know that the payment has been received on your side. You’ll find this feature on 123ContactForm in your payments settings.

Automatic taxes and discounts calculator. On 123ContactForm, you can apply taxes or discounts on one item or per total. All you have to do is go in the Payments section and use the available payment summary options. You can also create your own custom calculation system by adding formulas to the order form.

Coupon codes system. Planning to send out promotions to your customers? Don’t forget to add the coupon box to the form and have the discount calculated on the payment summary. Try this with the 123ContactForm coupon codes feature. Enable coupon codes on the order form and send them to your customers.

The Prescription For A Healthy Order Form

Last but not least, make sure your online order form is performing well, and by that I mean it’s rendering on the page without delay and it doesn’t take too long for the order to be sent.

Take for example the server where the form is stored. If the server is not updated on a regular basis and is slow, your online business might suffer. A good server is good for your order form, speeding up its load time on your customer’s browser.

The way you process your order form is also vital. If your PHP is poorly written and the data takes too long to move from one end to another, your clients might end up unhappy.

Build your online order form with 123ContactForm. It’s hosted on Amazon Web Services, you can start with a template and everything related to processing your data is done on our side. You don’t need programming skills.

And there you have it, the anatomy of an online order form! Need more help getting started? Learn everything there is to know about creating order forms in my article here.

Don’t hesitate to contact our Support Team for assistance, if needed.

Start building your own order form today with 123ContactForm and increase the revenue of your online business!

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Originally published at www.123contactform.com on May 4, 2017.