Follow up on forms and wholesale applications

When somebody fills in a form on your site, our plugin tells us. You can then answer them automatically: a wholesale applicant hears back in seconds instead of whenever you next check your inbox.

We work with Gravity Forms, Fluent Forms, WPForms, Contact Form 7 and WooCommerce's own account form. You need plugin version 1.0.8 or later.

Turning it on

1. In your WordPress admin, go to WooCommerce → Amino Engine → Forms.
2. Tick Tell Amino Engine when somebody fills in a form on this shop.
3. Every form on your site is listed underneath. Choose which one is your wholesale application, or leave it on None.
4. Save.

From then on:

• Every form on your site sends us "Sent a form", with the form's name, its id, and what they typed.
• The one you picked also sends "Applied for wholesale", so a flow can start on wholesale applications alone without you having to know any form ids.
• If a form has a tick-box asking for marketing email and they ticked it, we record that as permission and add them to your list. If it does not have one, or they left it unticked, we do not.

A form with no email field on it sends nothing, because there would be nobody to attach it to.

What one looks like

This is a real wholesale application arriving, so you can see what a flow has to work with:

{
  "name": "wholesale_applied",
  "properties": {
    "form_plugin": "wpforms",
    "form_id": "7",
    "form_title": "Wholesale application",
    "page_url": "https://yourstore.com/wholesale/",
    "fields": {
      "Business name": "Northgate Clinic",
      "Contact name": "Jo Martin",
      "Email": "jo@yourstore.com",
      "Monthly volume": "200 to 500 units"
    }
  }
}

The answers are keyed by the question as you wrote it, not by a field number. That is the whole point: a condition you write reads Business name or Monthly volume, which you can check at a glance six months later. A condition reading input_7 is one nobody can check at all.

The ready-made flow

Go to Flows → Create a flow and pick Wholesale application. It is three steps:

1. "We have your wholesale application" — sent straight away.
2. Wait one hour.
3. "Your wholesale application — next steps" — what you need from them, and how long approval takes.

Both emails are receipts rather than marketing, because they are about the person's own application and contain no offer. That means they reach somebody even if they are unsubscribed from your newsletter. Keep them that way: if you edit one into a discount offer, change its kind to Marketing in the flow editor.

Edit the wording, the timing and the number of steps however you like — it is your flow once you have created it.

Approving somebody is not an event. That is a decision you make in your own shop, so the "you're approved" email is one you send from your shop — see "Send a receipt from your own code", or use the WordPress switch and let WooCommerce send it.

Starting a flow on any other form

Pick Sent a form as the trigger instead, then add a condition on form_id so it only runs for the form you mean. The form's id is on the plugin's Forms page next to its name.

What we keep

We keep what they typed, so your emails can use it and so you can read the application without leaving this screen. We deliberately never keep passwords, card numbers or anything that looks like a card security code — the plugin strips those on your own server before anything is sent.

Sending a form is not the same as asking for your newsletter. Somebody applying for wholesale asked to buy, and we never record them as having ticked a box they were never shown. Whether they can be sent offers is a separate question, decided by one switch under Settings → Sending rules: on — how every account starts — they gave you their email on your own site, so offers may go to them; off, only a ticked box does it. Either way an unsubscribe stops it. See “Receipts and marketing are two different things”.

If it didn't work

1. Nothing arrives at all. Open Settings → Events here. If Sent a form says "never seen", the plugin is not reporting. Check the tick-box in step 2 above, reconnect the store under Settings → Store connection, and submit the form again.
2. "Sent a form" arrives but "Applied for wholesale" does not. You have not picked which form is the wholesale application. Go back to step 3 above.
3. The flow was created but nothing enters it. Check the trigger is Applied for wholesale and not something else, and check the flow is switched on. A flow that was never switched on reports zero for ever and looks exactly like a broken one.
4. People are ending up on your marketing list and you did not expect it. Either your form has a consent tick-box and they ticked it, or your account is set to send offers to anyone who gave you their email on your own site — which is how every account starts. Settings → Sending rules turns that off.
5. Your form plugin is not in the list of five. Tell us which one it is. Adding a plugin we already know the shape of is a small job.

Still stuck? Email support@aminoengine.com and tell us which form and roughly when somebody last sent it.