A good order message on WhatsApp has five things in it: what, how much, at what price, by when, and where. A good confirmation repeats them back. Almost every order dispute we’ve seen traces to one of those five being missing from one of the two messages. So here are the messages, ready to copy, for both sides of the order.
Swap the names, the items and the numbers. Keep the structure. The point of a template is that it looks identical every time, so the other side can read it in three seconds without hunting for the date.
For the business placing an order
1. Placing an order
2. Chasing an unconfirmed order
Send this at the 24-hour mark. Repeat the order rather than pointing at it.
3. Confirming a change to an order
Gartner has found that 50% of purchase order lines undergo changes after issuance, so you’ll use this one more than you expect. Re-send the whole order, never just the change.
4. Confirming receipt, including a short delivery
Send it the same day, from whoever counted. A short delivery recorded at the door is a conversation. The same shortfall found at month end is an argument.
For the business supplying
These five matter more than the buyer-side ones, honestly, because the supplier holds the information the buyer is waiting for. Stock, rate, van schedule, dispatch time. A supplier who sends messages 5 through 9 without being asked becomes the one his customers plan around, and that is worth considerably more than a 2% discount.
5. Acknowledging an order
6. Acknowledging with a change
This is the most valuable message in the list. A supplier who tells you on Monday that the date slips to Thursday has given you three days. A supplier who says nothing has given you a Thursday morning phone call.
7. Dispatch notice
8. Invoice sent
9. Payment reminder
Polite, specific, and carrying every reference the other side needs to act without replying.
Note what the payment reminder does not do. It doesn’t apologise for existing, and it doesn’t threaten anything either. It states the amount, the reference and the date, then offers two easy exits: send me the payment reference, or tell me what the query is. Most overdue invoices in small business are overdue because somebody forgot, and a reminder written as an accusation makes the forgetting awkward to admit.
Three rules that make all nine work
Always include the order reference. Every message about an order carries the same number, from placement through to the payment reminder, so that a year later somebody can search “1042” and find the whole story in one thread. Any numbering works as long as it never repeats.
Always repeat the quantities. “As discussed” and “same as last time” are how orders go wrong, because last time is a memory and memories differ. Write the numbers even when both of you are certain, especially when both of you are certain.
One order per message. A single message holding Tuesday’s beans and Friday’s cups will get half-confirmed, and you won’t know which half. Two orders, two messages, two references.
A smaller fourth rule, since three is a suspiciously tidy number: send the order from the business, not from a personal number. When the person who does the buying leaves, so does every arrangement they agreed, and the phone goes with them.
When the message is also the record
These templates are the fallback, and they’re a good one. They cost nothing, they work with every supplier you have, and the discipline of writing the same five facts every time will do more for your order accuracy than any software purchase.
What they can’t do is answer “which orders are unconfirmed right now?” A thread is a conversation. It can’t be filtered by status, sorted by date or handed to a colleague, and the history lives on a phone rather than in the business. Pairing the messages with a tracker fixes that, at the price of retyping each order once.
When both sides keep their orders in one place, the retyping goes away: the message is generated from the order and the reply is a tap rather than a paragraph. That’s the shape OrderBookApp takes, and the templates above are still what goes out to every supplier who isn’t on it, which will always be most of them.
Pin the ones you use to a note on your phone. Honestly, that’s the whole system. The businesses that stop losing orders aren’t the ones with better software, they’re the ones whose messages look the same on a Tuesday as they did in March.
Keep reading
- How to get suppliers to confirm orders (without chasing every one) covers the six habits that make these templates get answered.
- How to track vendor orders on WhatsApp is the system that turns a thread full of messages into a list you can filter.
- PO acknowledgement without EDI: a simple flow for small suppliers is for when a big customer asks you for capability you can’t justify buying.