Creating Manual Draft Order
Typically an Order appears in the circuly Operations Backend when a website visitor goes over your checkout page and places an order. The next step is to create a subscription for the order to start collecting recurring payments.
However if you have B2B customers that want more than “x” units of a product or operate on a quote-to-order basis, then the Manual Order feature enables you to manually create orders in the circuly Operations Backend and send the order as quotes to the customer.
The customer receives the quote via email and can use the link in the email to finalise the order with minimum effort.
The link in the email takes the customer to the checkout page where all the fields are pre-populated with information that you previously added while creating the draft order (such as billing address, name, contact details etc) and the only manual input required from the customer is adding the payment details and make address changes (if any).
Once the customer finalises the order, the status of the draft order changes from Pending to Ordered and an Order is created in the Order List. You can proceed to creating a subscription like you normally would to start collecting recurring payments.
Video Guide
Article Overview
- Creating a manual order
- Customer actions and journey
Creating a manual order
- In your circuly Operations Backend > Go to the Orders Tab > And click on the + CREATE ORDER button in the top right corner.
- You will see the Create Order window where you can create the order by adding the customer and product information.
- Start with ITEMS > Click on the ADD button to add products to the order.
- In the Add Item window > Select a product from the drop down list or search for it by typing the name of the product in the field.
Note: Only limited number of products are visible in the dropdown menu. Therefore if you can’t find a product, simply type the name of the product in the input field.
- Continue by selecting the product variant from the drop down list.
- Check/edit the various Subscription details such as the subscription price, quantity, frequency, duration and start date.
- Once you’re satisfied with the input > Click on the ADD button.
- Once the product has been successfully added, you’ll find it under the ITEMS section.
- Repeat the step if you want to add more products to the order by clicking on the ADD button and repeating the process.
- Continue to the ADDRESS section > And add the customer information.
- Alternatively you can also choose an existing customer if the order is for a customer whose details already exist in the system. You can do so by clicking on the Select existing customer dropdown option and selecting a customer (You can search via first name, last name or email address).
- Check the details.
Available options for sending the draft order to the customer:
- Option 1: You can toggle on the switch for Send order as quote to customer.
Note: when you toggle on the switch for Send order as quote for customer, the customer will receive an email from the Email Templates. The email contains the link to the checkout page where the order can be finalised. Additionally there is also an offer enclosed in PDF format that can be used to finalise the order and can be used to upload to your customers purchasing systems.
If you do not toggle on the switch then the customer will not receive any email. This is a slightly different process as the customer then has to login into their Customer Self Service portal and add their payment details.
- Option 2: You can toggle on the switch for Charge by invoice.
This switch can be only enabled, when the switch for Send order as quote to customer is disabled. Instead of sending the order to the customer in the form of a checkout link the order is instead sent as an Invoice than can be paid by the customer.
Keep in mind that the payment processing will need to be managed outside of circuly. You can still mark the invoices manually as Paid to keep an overview of the outstanding invoices.
- Optional: You can also add a note for the customer under the REMARKS field. Whatever you add here will be added to the email sent to the customer. You can use this field to inform your customer about any additional charges such as shipping and how they will be deducted.
- Once the order has been created, it will appear under Draft with the status Pending.
Note: You can also work with the circuly API to create manual order. You can find the documentation here. Please keep in mind that this works only for offline payments. If you want to create an order with other payment service providers, kindly write a service desk ticket to our customer support.
Customer actions and journey
- Once you’ve successfully created a draft order > Your customer receives an email from the Email Templates that contains the link to the checkout and to the invoice.
Note: The email templates used to send the email are: Order Offer and Order Offer PDF. Set up the email template before you start using this feature.
- When the customer clicks on the link, they are taken to the checkout page. All the details on the checkout page are pre-populated.
- The customer continues and finalises the order by adding the payment details and proceeding to the Order confirmation page.
- The customer also receives the Order Confirmation email when the order has been successfully processed.
Next steps:
- The status of the order will change from Pending to Ordered once the customer has successfully completed the process by adding their payment details on the checkout page.
- To see the associated order click on ORDER under the Associated order column.
- Continue how you normally would, that is by creating a subscription for the order.