Capture leads and orders from your website

To capture leads, orders, or bookings from your website, give the site permission to create entries in that collection. A form submission then becomes an entry the moment it is sent, goes through the same checks as one created by hand, arrives without an owner, and can start an automation, which by default listens to exactly this source.

Requirements

• Your website registered in Sonta; see How collections power a site.
• A role that can manage website connections.

Steps

1. Grant write access to the collection. In the website's permissions, allow it to create entries in Leads, Orders, or your bookable collection, and nothing else it does not need. Changing the site's permissions ends its current access, so the site reconnects afterwards.
2. Point the form at the collection's fields. A property developer's enquiry form sends name, email, phone, and the development the buyer asked about.
3. Decide who picks it up. Entries from the site arrive without an owner, so they sit in the pool everyone who can see the collection can pick up. Assign them by hand, or with an automation.
4. Add an automation for the first response. Trigger it on new entries in the collection: notify the sales desk, assign an owner, or send an acknowledgment. See Create and activate an automation.
5. Test with a real submission. Send the form once and check that the entry appears with the right fields.

What the site's entries go through

• The same checks as entries created by hand: required fields for published entries, unique values, and field rules. A duplicate email in a unique field is refused. See My entry will not save.
• Booking capacity. A booking from the site is refused if the slot is full or closed; see Slot length and capacity.
• Status. In the collections that come with a new business, such as Leads, new entries are saved as published. In your own collections they start as drafts, which suits things you review first, such as reviews; see Reviews and rating rollups on a product.

Notes and limitations

• Automations listen to the site by default. An automation on new entries fires for entries from the website unless you change its sources. The same default means entries created by hand do not fire it.
• Secrets stay private. Secret fields are never returned to the website.
• Grant only what the form needs. Write access to Leads does not need read access to Leads; the site can create entries without seeing anyone else's.

Related

For the whole arrangement, see Using Sonta as your site's backend.