I’ve been using Google Forms for processing my merchandise orders for some time, but I haven’t really took time to check out how to make the process more efficient – so I am today years old when I noticed some features that can save time for me. I think a lot of people already know this since it’s easy to set up, but I just wanna share this for those who haven’t!
I use my Google Form to accept orders for merchandise, where I’ll ask for the customer’s shipping info and what items they order. I use forms because I don’t have the time to manage an online store yet and some of my items have uncertain production time. So after someone fills in the form, I check if the items are available, if the shipping info is clear and check shipping fee, then send them a confirmation email with the total pricing and payment info. It may not be the simplest but it is what works well for me at the moment.
Here are some little features I find helpful for me – saving Form entries to Sheets, using Google Form Email Notification, and Gmail message templates. Hope this helps you!
Saving Google Form Results to Excel Sheets
I find it useful to convert the form responses to Excel view, by clicking ‘View in Sheets‘ in the Responses tab of your Google Form.
- Go to your form in the edit mode.
- Click on Responses tab.
- Click ‘View in Sheets’. You will be asked to make a new Sheets file for the first time. After that, any new entry will be updated there.
Tip: You can see it in Excel file form that you can edit and mark with colors, for example I use different colors to mark different status like ‘confirmation sent’, ‘order shipped’, ‘order cancelled’, and so on, or go extra with adding dropdown filters.
Note: New entries will automatically be added at the bottom row of the file, timestamps are automatically added. You can change colors and text of existing entries that are already entered.
Google Form Email Notification
Instead of checking the form regularly to see if there’s any new submission, you can set an automated email to be sent whenever there’s a new form submission.
At the top right of your Google Form in editing mode, you can click on the puzzle icon and select Email Notifications for Google Forms.
Fill in the email address where the notification will be sent to. You can also set additional settings like conditionals (if form answer is certain things, send to a different person), create a PDF file of the answers, etc.
When someone enters a new submission to the Google Form, you will get an email with all the response entered in a neat table form like this.
Email template
Another thing I do is to send confirmation emails with greetings, payment information, and when to expect the delivery, and other info I should include in all order confirmation emails. Instead of copy-pasting repeatedly, we can just use an email template to save parts of the message that will always stay the same, then customize it after depending on your needs.
Apparently the template feature is not on by default, so you have to go to Settings (gear icon on top right on your Gmail screen), select See All Settings.
Go to ‘Advanced’ tab, then select ‘Enable‘ for the Templates part.
Now when you compose a new email, there will be ‘Templates’ function. You can write the email draft you want to save as template, then click ‘Save draft as template’.
The name you save on the template will be default used as the email subject, so you can set it accordingly to make it more time saving for you.
For me, I use a template that has the default subject like ‘Order Confirmation for Devonazure’s Merch’, some basic greetings (Hi, thanks for ordering! Here is your form submission, please check everything if all the info is correct, etc.), payment info, and where else to reach me in case they want to contact me somewhere else or follow my socials for future updates.
I’m still trying out different things to make the process easier for me, but these are some little tips that I find helpful so far, so I’m sharing here so I can remember it myself and also maybe it can be useful for someone who has similar issues with me!
