Taking orders

With orders on, a customer can put dishes in a cart and place an order without leaving the chat. You see it on the Orders screen, move it along, and the customer watches it happen in their own chat. There is no payment in the chat: customers pay when they collect, at the table or on delivery.

You need a menu with prices first.

Switch it on

Under Menu → Settings, turn on Take orders in the chat and choose How customers get their order:

• Pickup — they collect it.
• Delivery — by your own staff, with a flat Delivery fee and, if you like, a Minimum order for delivery. The customer types their address.
• Dine-in — for a table. Put your bot link on each table's QR code with the table added at the end — https://keyda.in/business/chat/kb_live_your_key_here?t=7 — and the order arrives marked "table 7".

Answering customers holds two choices that apply to orders and bookings alike: Accept every order and confirm every booking automatically, and how many minutes may pass before a customer still waiting is shown the phone number in your business details. An order nobody has accepted never looks accepted to the customer.

What the customer does

Every dish that can be ordered has an Add button on its card; a dish with options opens to choose one first. A bar above the message box shows the cart. The checkout lists the lines with steppers, asks how they want it, their name and phone number, and a note for the kitchen, and shows the total, delivery included. Place order, and the order card appears in the chat.

They can also just type it: "two butter chicken and three garlic naan", "mujhe 2 butter naan chahiye". The bot answers with the lines and the total for them to check, and Add to order puts them in the cart. A message that names every dish plainly is read without AI and costs nothing. Anything less clear is answered by the AI, which asks when it is unsure which dish was meant. "Same again" brings back their last order, priced today. The bot can never place, change or cancel an order itself: that is always the customer's own tap.

Every price is checked again when the order is placed. If a price changed or a dish sold out while it sat in the cart, the customer is shown the cart again instead of being charged a different amount. A second tap on a slow connection returns the same order, not two.

The Orders screen

The Board has four columns: New, Preparing, Ready and Done today. A new order rings a chime (Sound on), flashes the browser tab and raises a badge on Orders — on any screen of the dashboard, even in a background tab. Each order is also emailed to your bot's contact email, or to the business's owners when there is none, up to 200 a day.

Move an order with one tap: Accept or Reject, Start preparing, Mark ready, then Mark completed, with Out for delivery in between for a delivery. Cancel order stops one at any open stage. A rejection or a cancellation can carry a reason, which the customer reads. Each move appears on the customer's order card within about 15 seconds.

Open an order for its lines, the customer's phone with a WhatsApp link, Open chat, the timeline of who moved it and when, and a Note for your team that the customer never sees. All orders lists every order with filters, and Export CSV downloads what it shows.

A customer can cancel an order themselves until it is accepted. After that, they call you.

WhatsApp alerts

WhatsApp alerts in the Orders screen's header sends a WhatsApp message to your own phone for every new order and booking, and one reminder when one is still waiting past your waiting time. Each team member who handles orders switches it on for themselves; it goes to the phone number they sign in with, so nobody else's number can be added. Send a test message shows it working. A message says the order's number, how many items, the total and how it is collected, with a link to the order — never the customer's name, phone, address or note. A business gets up to 100 alerts a day.

Limits

An order can have up to 30 lines and up to 50 of each. One chat can have three open orders at a time; one internet address can place 30 orders an hour; and a bot takes up to 500 orders and bookings a day, your own test orders included. During early access orders cost nothing and no plan limits them — these limits are what stops a flood of fake ones.

What is kept

The order keeps its own copy of each line, so a later price change never rewrites it. The customer's name, phone, address and notes are erased after 180 days; the totals stay for your records. See Your data.

The Overview's Sales card shows today's orders and their value, the items that sell most, and how many chat visitors saw the menu, opened a dish, added something and ordered.