Taking orders

#Two ways to create an order

Use New order in the Orders section. You can fill in the form by hand — or, much faster, paste the message a seller sent and let Dromos read it.

#Pasting a message

Paste the raw message into the box and press Extract details. Dromos reads out the customer’s name, phone, address, postcode, delivery date, time window, items, prices and the salesperson. Two styles of message are understood, because sellers use both:

• Labelled — “Customer Name: …”, “Post code: …”, “Total=£300”. Labels are unambiguous, so anything found this way is high confidence.
• Loose — name, number and address on their own lines with no labels. These are inferred from the layout, so confidence is lower and more fields stop for a person.

Customer Name: Rosa Whitmore
Phone number: 07700 900321
Address: 8 Lark Lane
Post code: L17 8UU

2X King Memory Foam = £300

Delivery on Wednesday after 3pm
Note: "Ring the bell twice, side gate"

(Salesman name) - Arif Mahmood

#Confidence, and what stops for a person

Every field comes back with a confidence — high, medium, low or missing. Anything below high blocks the order from being saved until a person confirms it. That is the point: Dromos reads quickly, and a human checks only the parts it is unsure of.

• Phone numbers are normalised to international format.
• A note in quotes becomes the driver’s note for the stop.
• The salesperson is matched to a real account, so commission lands on someone rather than on a typed name. A name that matches nobody is flagged instead of stored.
• The raw message is kept, word for word, on the order — useful if a detail is ever disputed.

#Dates

Sellers rarely write a year, so the weekday settles it: “Wednesday 30th of September” is unambiguous because 30 September is a Wednesday in only one of the plausible years. If the weekday and the date disagree, the field still fills but is flagged — one of the two is wrong, and there is no way to tell which.

#Prices in the message

A price a seller quoted is what the customer agreed to, so it is what gets charged. The catalogue price is still read and stored beside it as the price at sale, with a reason recorded — so margin and commission stay accurate. See Products & pricing.

#Website orders

Orders placed on the public shop arrive as pending review. Accept one and give it a delivery date in a single action, and it moves straight into planning. See Ordering online for what the customer sees.