Introducing Email Orders

Plenty of your customers still order by email: a few lines typed on a phone, a purchase order from their system, a photo of the list on the walk-in door. Someone on your team reads each one and types it in again. Email orders gives your store an order address. Freshline reads what arrives there, matches it to your customers, products and units, and puts it in front of you as an order to check. One click turns it into a draft order.

What’s New

• An order address for your store, and, for customers who order from a shared or automated mailbox, an address of their own.
• It reads what customers actually send: the email itself, PDFs, Excel and CSV files, Word documents, and photos or scans of a handwritten list.
• Customers, locations and dates are filled in from who sent it and what it says. “Thursday” means this Thursday.
• Every line shows its source. The customer’s own words sit above the product they were matched to, so you can check a match at a glance.
• Units and cases are worked out for you. “3 bags” of shrimp sold in 2 lb bags is read as 3 cases, 6 lb in all, and a unit it isn’t sure of is flagged.
• It tells you what it isn’t sure of, line by line, and says why an order needs a look.
• It learns your customers’ words. Once you’ve confirmed that “baby back ribs” means your Pork Ribs, it finds them straight away next time.
• Nothing is ordered without you. Every order waits for someone to press Create draft order.

How It Works

Freshline uses AI to read the email and its attachments, the way a person on your order desk would: what’s being asked for, how much, by when and where to. It reads first without looking at your catalog, then matches what it read against your customers and products, and checks each line against the customer’s prices.

Prices never come from the email. Each line is priced from your price lists, exactly as if you’d added it to the order yourself. A price written in the email is only used to tell two packs of the same product apart.

Your Order Address

Your store’s address is under Settings → Email orders, and at the top of the Email orders page. It’s your store’s short name at freshlinestore.com, and it doesn’t change if you rename your store. Give it to customers, put it on your order guide, or have a customer’s purchasing system send purchase orders to it.

Emails from a customer’s contacts are matched to that customer by their email address. That doesn’t work when orders come from a shared inbox or a no-reply address, like a purchasing system’s. For those customers, Create address on the customer’s page gives them an address of their own. Every email sent to it is an order from that customer, whoever sends it.

Customer addresses are hard to guess, and Turn off stops one accepting orders. A turned-off address can’t be turned back on, so it never starts routing orders to someone else.

The Inbox

Email orders in the sidebar works like a mail client. The count beside it is what’s waiting for review. Emails appear the moment they arrive, show how far the reading has got, and update on their own when it’s done.

Search finds emails by sender, subject or customer. Ready to order marks an order that was read with full confidence, with nothing missing or guessed. Emails that held no order go to Not orders, with the reason.

Reviewing an Order

Open an order and you see it the way it will be created, with the original email beside it. Everything on the page can be changed, and each change is saved as you make it.

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1. 1Why it needs a look. The reasons it wasn’t marked Ready to order. Here, two of the matches are uncertain.
2. 2Customer, location and contact. Filled in from the sender and the email. Click any of them to choose another.
3. 3Date, delivery and PO. The date the customer asked for, delivery or pickup, the PO number and any notes for you.
4. 4The customer’s words. Each line starts with what the email said, quoted.
5. 5What it matched. The product and variant it was matched to. The pencil opens the product picker.
6. 6Quantity and unit. By the unit or by the case. A case shows what it adds up to: 6 lb in all.
7. 7Unsure. Matched, but not with full confidence. Check the product and unit before creating the order.
8. 8Original email. The email as it arrived, with its attachments to open. It stays in view as you scroll.
9. 9Create draft order. Creates the order once nothing is blocking it. Dismiss sets the email aside instead.

Fixing a Line

Change the quantity or unit right on the line, or click the pencil to pick a different product. Tick Leave out to skip a line without deleting it. When nothing in your catalog fits, the line is highlighted and says so. A few products that came closest are offered under Could be, one click each.

Before Creating the Order

Create draft order stays off until the order has a customer, a location, a date, delivery or pickup, and at least one product, and every highlighted line is fixed or left out. A yellow box at the top says what’s left.

If there isn’t enough stock when you create the order, nothing is created. The lines that ran short are marked with what’s left, including when several lines draw on the same stock.

One Email, Several Orders

An email with orders for two locations, or two days, becomes one order each. They sit side by side as Order 1 and Order 2, and each is reviewed and created on its own.

After You Create It

The order is created as a draft, with the products priced from your price lists. Your customer isn’t emailed about it; confirm it when you’re ready, like any draft. The email moves to Ordered with a link to the order, and the order links back to the email.

Creating the order also teaches Freshline the customer’s wording. Each line’s words are remembered against the product you confirmed, for that customer, and matched straight away the next time they write it.

The PO number goes on the invoice note, and the customer’s notes go on the order.

Senders You Don’t Know Yet

When an email comes from an address that isn’t one of your contacts, the customer can still be found from the email, by name. That match is offered but never trusted, so the order is flagged. If the sender belongs to that customer, Save … as a contact adds them in one click, and their next email is matched like any contact’s.

Read Again, Dismiss

Read again matches the email again, with its sender looked up afresh: useful after you’ve added a product it should have found, or saved its sender as a contact. An email that was set aside or held no order is read again from the start. Changes you made on the page are replaced, and it isn’t offered once an order has been created from the email. Dismiss moves an order you won’t create to Dismissed, and Review again brings it back.

On a Phone

The inbox and the order page both work on a phone. Lines become cards, with the quantity, unit and Leave out stacked under the product, and the original email follows the order.

Email orders is open to the Owner, Manager, Sales Rep and Order Desk roles.

What It Reads

Orders can be in the email itself or in its attachments, and one email can mix both. Each attachment is opened on its own, so one file that can’t be read doesn’t stop the rest.

Up to 20 attachments per email are read, each up to 25 MB. Logos and small images in a signature are skipped. A photo of an order sheet sent from a phone isn’t, even when it’s shown inline.

How It Matches

The Customer

Who sent the email decides the customer, before anything in it is read. A customer named in the email is only used when the sender is unknown.

The Location, Date and Delivery

• Location: the one the email names, matched against the customer’s locations and their addresses. Otherwise the contact’s only location, or the customer’s only location. Otherwise the one they last ordered to, flagged as “Location taken from the last order”.
• Date: what the customer asked for, read against the day the email arrived in your store’s time zone, so “Thursday” is the coming Thursday. A document’s own date, like a PO’s issue date, isn’t taken as the delivery date.
• Delivery or pickup: what the email says, otherwise what the customer’s last order was.
• PO number and notes: picked out of the email or the document.

The Products

Lines are matched against the products this customer can buy: active, and priced for them. The wording doesn’t need to match your catalog, or even be in the same language.

Units come with the product. A line in pounds of a product sold by the pound is a quantity in pounds. A line in bags, boxes or cases of a product sold in cases is read as whole cases, and the line shows what that adds up to. When it isn’t sure which unit was meant, the line is marked Unsure for you to check, and a quantity that doesn’t make a whole case is flagged rather than rounded.

When It Asks for a Look

Every order is checked when it’s read. When everything below holds, it’s marked Ready to order in the inbox and “Matched with confidence when read” on its page.

Change and cancel requests are read too, and flagged “Asks to change or cancel an order”. Freshline doesn’t change existing orders from email: make the change on the order, then dismiss the email.

Quick Reference

Inbox Folders

Email Status

Flagged When Read

Line Badges

Before Creating the Order

What Goes on the Order

Getting Email Orders

We’re turning email orders on account by account. If you’d like it for your team, email us at [email protected] and we’ll set up your order address.

We’d love to see the emails it gets wrong. If an order needed more fixing than you’d expect, tell us; the trickiest emails are the ones that make it better.