Order and product notes

Some things cannot be picked from a list. A name to engrave, the invoice a payment settles, the date a cake is needed, a message to go with a gift. The free plugin has no way to ask, so shops end up telling customers to email separately and then matching the email to the order by hand.

Pro lets you ask the question in the basket, and you write the question yourself.

Two kinds of question

A note on a product

On the Products tab, open a product and tick Ask for a note. A box appears for you to word the question: "Name to engrave", "Which invoice is this for?", "Any allergies we should know about?"

Any product can ask. This used to be available only on customer-set-price products, tucked inside their options where nobody found it; it now stands on its own.

A message with the order

On the Settings tab, A message with the order adds one box to the basket for anything about the order as a whole - a delivery instruction, a date it is needed by, a message for whoever is receiving it. Again, you word the question.

Insisting on an answer

Either kind can be made compulsory. A required product note stops that product being added to the basket without one, and the basket says which product is waiting rather than refusing silently.

Each different answer is its own line

This is the part worth understanding, because it is what makes the feature work rather than merely exist.

Three of the same mug with three different names on them is three lines in one order, not one line with a quantity of three and one name attached. Each line carries its own words, so the person making the parcel up can read what goes on which.

Adding the same product with the same words simply raises that line's quantity, as you would expect. Two mugs both saying "Dad" is one line of two.

Correcting a typo

Customers misspell their own children's names. They can fix what they typed in the basket itself, rather than removing the line and adding it again from the product page and hoping they get everything else right the second time.

If they are paying on a checkout page on your own site, changing the words re-prices and re-words the order before it is paid for. Nobody pays for the version with the typo in it.

Where the words end up

Everything typed reaches all of these:

• Your order email
• The customer's confirmation email
• The Mark as shipped page you open while making the parcel up
• The customer's order status page
• The PDF receipt
• Your Stripe dashboard

The echo back to the customer is deliberate rather than incidental. Somebody who cannot see their own message come back to them assumes it was lost, and writes to ask whether it arrived - which costs you the support email the feature was supposed to save.

Why it is asked in the basket

Stripe's own payment page allows a maximum of three short custom fields, which is not enough for a basket of any real size, and none at all in some modes. So the questions are asked in your basket, before checkout.

That constraint turns out to be a feature: because the words are collected before the customer ever reaches a payment form, they behave identically whether your shop pays on Stripe's page or on your own.

If Pro is not active

Nothing is asked. The questions you worded are kept exactly as you wrote them, and orders go through without them rather than stalling on a box nothing can fill in.

This is the promise every Pro feature makes: a paused feature, never a broken shop. See What Bang! Cart Pro adds.

Notes and variants are different things

A variant is a thing you stock: Navy in Large, with its own price and its own count on the shelf. A note is a thing the customer writes, and it changes nothing about price or stock.

They work together happily. A product can sell in three sizes and still ask what to embroider on it.