Orders in a conversation
From a customer's buying intent to a confirmed order
When checkout is available for your business, the bot can guide a customer through an order without pretending that browsing is a purchase.
How an order starts
The customer must show clear intent to buy, such as “I want two of these” or “How do I place the order?” Asking for a price, photo or product detail does not by itself create an order.
The bot searches the catalogue and uses the product's current price, availability and stock. If it cannot identify the product or a required fact is missing, it asks rather than guessing.
The checkout flow
- The bot confirms which product and quantity the customer wants.
- It asks the business-wide and product-specific Checkout Questions in their configured order. Each answer can run up to 256 characters; a longer one is rejected and the bot asks the customer to shorten it rather than cutting it off silently.
- If saved customer information matches a question, the bot may offer to reuse it. It must receive the customer's explicit approval before filling the answer from memory.
- It shows a summary and asks the customer to confirm.
- At confirmation, ReadyChatAI checks the order again. If stock or availability changed, the bot warns the customer and offers to go ahead with only what's in stock — but if they agree, the order it confirms still carries the quantity they first asked for, not the reduced one. Check availability yourself before fulfilling an order that was confirmed this way.
- A successful real order receives an order number the customer can use later.
Before confirmation, the customer can add another item, change a quantity, review the order or cancel it and start over — there's no way to remove a single item from a multi-item order without cancelling the whole thing. Starting a brand-new order while an earlier one is still unconfirmed also cancels the earlier draft automatically, without telling the customer; that draft never shows up in Order Management, not even under Cancelled. Whether a completed order can still be changed or cancelled depends on its current state; a human should handle anything the bot cannot complete safely.
Requiring a delivery address
Some accounts have a rule that stops an order from being confirmed until the customer has given a delivery address. It isn't something you switch on yourself — see Checkout Questions for how it's set up and how it differs from writing your own address question, which the bot still asks but never uses to block confirmation.
What happens after confirmation
The order appears in Order Management, where your team controls fulfillment, status, shipping and tracking. The conversational order is a request recorded for your business; it is not a payment.
Confirming an order never lowers your recorded stock count. The bot only checks, at confirmation, that the current figure still covers the order — it never writes a new, lower number back to the product. Update stock yourself in Product Management after fulfilling orders, or the bot keeps confirming against a figure that no longer matches what you actually have.
Every confirmed real order also carries the same fixed line telling the customer someone from the store will contact them to finalize the purchase. That's built into the bot's confirmation message; it isn't a setting you can turn off.
The bot cannot:
- charge a card or confirm that money was received
- issue a refund
- approve an unlisted discount or custom price
- override unavailable stock
- promise delivery terms that are not in your business information
It marks and notifies your team when the customer needs help with payment, a refund, a custom quote or another exception. That mark does not pause the bot. The pause begins only after a human replies, and each human message renews it.
A customer can only look up their own order by its order number — asking about someone else's order number gets a clear access-denied reply, never that customer's order details.
Cancelling a confirmed order
When a customer asks the bot to cancel an order that's already confirmed, the bot cancels it right away and tells the customer to expect a confirmation email and a refund within 5–7 business days. None of that happens automatically: no email is sent, no refund is issued, and your team isn't notified — this path doesn't go through the mechanism that normally flags an exception for you. Watch for confirmed orders cancelled this way and handle the refund and the customer message yourself.
Playground orders are simulations
The Playground exercises the questions and confirmation flow, but it does not create a real order. A simulated confirmation has no real order number and does not enter Order Management.
Before connecting customers, test one ordinary order, one out-of-stock product and one order with every required checkout question.