How do I handle orders that arrive over chat?

Selling over chat works because that is where the customers already are. The problem comes afterwards: the conversation is the catalogue, the basket, the confirmation and the receipt all at once — and all of it scrolls upwards. At ten orders a day you can hold it in your head. At thirty, you cannot.

Where orders actually get lost

Almost never at the moment of the sale. They get lost in the gaps between one step and the next:

• the message that arrived while you were with a customer in person, read and never opened again;
• the order confirmed out loud and never written down anywhere;
• the total worked out on the calculator, typed into the message, then typed a third time when the customer asks for a receipt;
• the customer who says «same as last time», and last time is two hundred messages away.

The last one costs the most, because it does not look like a mistake: it looks like time spent scrolling.

The practical rule: write it once

The advice you read most often — keep an order log — is half right. A log kept separately from the sale is a second job: you have to remember to fill it in, and you remember when there is time, which is not on the busy days.

What works is the opposite: the document you send the customer is the log. If you have to write out items and total anyway in order to say «your order is confirmed», that writing may as well stay somewhere instead of ending up inside a chat bubble.

The right moment to record an order is while you are confirming it, not in the evening.

What it takes for this not to become paperwork

Three things, and deliberately few:

• the products already in, with their price — otherwise you retype everything each time and get it wrong;
• going from quote to order to receipt without re-entering anything, because it is the same purchase at three different moments;
• a way of sending it in chat that is not an attachment to open: someone buying from a phone reads the message, they do not download a PDF and then go hunting for it in their downloads.

How Yataio handles it

You pick the customer and the items, and the document writes itself — VAT, discounts and totals worked out. When the customer says yes, one tap turns the quote into an order, and then into a receipt: nothing to re-enter, and every step stays in the archive with its own status.

To send it you choose at that moment between three forms: formatted text to paste straight into the conversation, an image the customer cannot alter, or a PDF to download and print. You see the preview before sending. There are also ready-made phrases with placeholders that fill themselves in — customer name, amount, order number — so you do not rewrite the same two lines every time.

The three ways of sending are explained in the guide, and turning one document into another here.