How to take orders in Messenger without losing details

Updated 2026-07-26 · 7 min read

A real order in Messenger does not arrive as an order. It arrives like this:

Buyer: eta ache?
You:   Ji ache
Buyer: nibo
You:   Address ta din
Buyer: Jatrabari
Buyer: kutubkhali
Buyer: mastoor shop er opposite
You:   Number?
Buyer: ok

Nine messages. You still do not have a phone number, and nobody has said which size.

Two days later you are packing, you scroll back through the thread, and the address is somewhere between a voice note and a picture of a different kurti.

The six fields you need before you can pack anything

Six fields, every order, no exceptions for the buyer who seems to be in a hurry.

The phone number decides whether the parcel arrives

Most F-commerce in Bangladesh runs on cash on delivery, and every courier works the same way: the rider calls first, then delivers. That call is the whole delivery.

If the number is wrong by one digit, or switched off, or belongs to the buyer's brother who knows nothing about a kurti — the parcel is marked undelivered and comes back. You pay the delivery charge going out and the return charge coming back, and you still have the stock.

The address gets the parcel to the neighbourhood. The phone number is what gets it to the customer.

A Bangladeshi mobile number is 11 digits and starts with 01. If what the buyer sends is not 11 digits, ask again in the same conversation — not on packing day, when they have stopped replying.

Ask for everything in one message

Asking one field at a time feels polite. It is actually six round trips, and every gap between them is a place where the buyer puts the phone down. If you are already losing orders to slow replies — the reason most Facebook pages get messages but not orders — six round trips is six chances to lose the same one.

Send a numbered list instead. Save it once and paste it every time:

Order confirm korte ei 4 ta lagbe:

1) Naam
2) Mobile number (courier delivery er age call korbe)
3) Full address — thana + kachher ekta landmark
4) Size

Delivery Dhaka'r vitore 60 tk, baire 120 tk. Cash on delivery ache.

Two things are doing the work there. The number in brackets explains why you need the phone, which is what stops people sending a landline or their husband's number. And the delivery charge is in the same message, so the buyer has no reason to leave and come back.

Most buyers answer all four lines in one reply. The ones who answer three are easy to chase, because you can see exactly which line is empty.

Read the order back before you pack it

This is the step almost nobody does, and it is the one that removes returns.

Before the parcel goes out, paste the whole order back to the customer in one message:

Confirm kore nicchi:

Nasrin Akter — 01712345678
Jatrabari, Kutubkhali, Mastoor shop er opposite, Dhaka
Kurti (Maroon), Size M x 1
Total 1450 tk + delivery 60 tk = 1510 tk, cash on delivery

Sob thik ache?

It catches two different failures. The first is a typo — yours or theirs — in the number or the address, which is free to fix now and costs you two delivery charges to fix later. The second is the buyer who reads "Size M" and realises they wanted L. That is a thirty-second edit today and a refused parcel next week.

Do not skip it because the buyer already told you. They told you across four messages. You retyped it once. That is exactly where mistakes live.

A chat thread is not a record

Messenger cannot be sorted. You cannot ask it which orders are going to Chattogram this week, or whether this number has ordered before, or how many pieces of the maroon kurti you have promised.

So the moment an order is confirmed, it has to leave the thread. A khata works. A Google Sheet works better. The columns that matter:

1. Date
2. Name
3. Phone
4. Full address
5. District — the one everyone forgets, and the one courier pricing and cut-off times actually run on
6. Product, size, quantity
7. Price and delivery charge
8. Payment method
9. Status: packed, dispatched, delivered, returned

Nine columns, filled in the same day. If you do it weekly you will be reconstructing addresses from memory, which is the original problem again.

How Tanet Chat captures the order as fields, not messages

Tanet Chat treats the order as a form rather than a conversation, and the form is yours to define.

In the agent config there is a section called What to collect for each order. Each row has an internal name, a label, a type, and a star that marks it mandatory. Three presets are built in — E-Commerce (Full Name, Phone Number, Delivery Address), Digital (Full Name, Email Address) and Service (Full Name, Phone Number, Preferred Date, Service Type) — and you add your own rows on top: size, colour, alternate number, whatever your product actually needs. Pick the preset first and add afterwards, because clicking a preset replaces every row that was there.

Those labels are written into the agent's instructions as the required fields for an order, and the backend checks them again when the order lands. When the customer has given everything, the agent emits a hidden order signal that is stripped out before the message is sent — the customer never sees it — and the backend writes a real order row: product, quantity, price, name, contact, address, plus every custom field you defined.

A few things it does that a chat thread cannot:

• It reads the district out of the free-text address. "Jatrabari, Kutubkhali" resolves to Dhaka, so the order carries a district even though the customer never typed one.
• A missing mandatory field does not silently pass. The order is still saved, but marked incomplete, and the Telegram alert arrives with an incomplete-order warning on top — so a half-order is visible instead of lost.
• The alert has the whole order in it. Customer, product, quantity, total, contact, address, district and your custom fields, sent to every paired Telegram account. Pairing is a one-time setup step; until you do it the orders still land in your dashboard, but no alert is sent.
• The Orders page exports CSV. The columns are ID, Date, Customer, Product, Qty, Price, Status, Address, and one Order Data column holding the rest as raw JSON. The phone number and the district live inside that last column rather than getting columns of their own, so the sheet from the previous section still needs a little splitting — but you are splitting a file, not re-reading a chat.
• The read-back can be automatic. An invoice image goes to the customer right after the reply — name, phone, address, total, and the size if you named that field size. It is off by default; turn it on in settings. It also only renders for a complete order, so the incomplete ones still need the read-back you type yourself.

Access is invite-only — you request an invite on the apply page, there is no self-serve signup yet. There is a free tier, and Starter is ৳599/month if you outgrow it.

What to do this week

Even if you never use software for this:

• Write the four-line ask once. Save it where you can paste it in two taps.
• Add the read-back message before every dispatch. One message, thirty seconds.
• Open the sheet with those nine columns and copy every confirmed order into it the same day.
• Check your last ten returned parcels. Count how many were a phone number that did not work. That number is what this whole habit is worth to you.