Allow customers to ask questions about their order

3 March 2025 | Cate

When customers place an order, they want reassurance that everything is on track. But, what happens if they have a question before their order gets despatched? Many businesses focus on post-delivery support, but offering a way for customers to ask about pending orders can significantly improve the shopping experience.

By allowing customers to easily enquire about their unshipped orders, you can reduce confusion, prevent unnecessary returns, and boost overall customer satisfaction. Our Customer Questions feature allows you to implement this game-changing pre-ship experience quickly and effectively.

Please note, customer questions is only available on V2 sites. You will need to upgrade to V2 in order to use this feature, if you're site is still on V1.

Setting up customer questions

Prior to an order being shipped, you can allow customers to ask up to three different questions about their order or individual products. To switch this feature on, do the following.

In Settings > Settings > Orders tab > Customer Requests section, tick Enable Customer Questions.
In Order Change Window (days), set the number of days after the order has been placed that the customer can ask a question.

Settings for allowing customer questions after an order has been placed

By default, the three order questions are set as:

When will I receive my order?
Can I change some of my order?
Can I cancel some of my order?

The text of these can be changed to anything you wish within the Your Account section of each language in Settings > Languages. Our How to Change the Default Text on my Site guide explains how Languages work and how to change the text. To remove a question entirely, simply delete the text in the field, so it is blank, and save. This question won't then appear.

Edit customer questions in Languages

Be mindful of how quickly you process orders before deciding on the Order Change Window and what questions you allow them to ask. For instance, if you generally process and ship orders the day after they are placed, you don't want to allow people to ask to cancel their order after 7 days.

From the customer's point of view

Understanding how the above process is viewed by your customers will help you decide how you would like it to work on your online shop. We've kept it as simple as possible to ensure customers don't get frustrated and end up contacting you via phone or email, which would defeated the object. If you make any changes, always keep simplicity and clarity in mind.

Once the customer has accessed their order, they will be shown an Ask a Question button below the main order details and above the list of products they've ordered.

Ask a question about an order

Once they click on the button, they are shown the Ask a Question page. Here, they need to tick the product(s) that are relevant to their query, then select from the list of questions within the Question drop-down, and enter their message into the Message field - all of which are required. Once they're done, they can click on the Send Request button at the bottom.

Ask a question about your order or individual products

Managing customer questions

Email notifications

All questions will send an email to you, the site owner, automatically. By default, these will go to the Default Email Address set in Settings > Settings > Website tab.

If you wish for these emails to go to another email address, such as a dedicated one for customer service, you can specify this in the Email Addresses field in Settings > Settings > Order tab > Customer Requests section. Multiple email addresses must be separated with a comma.

Please note, if you're using Self-Service Returns, the email notifications for these will also go to the same email address(es) you specify here.

Within Orders

Once a question has been made on an order, you will see the Customer Comments icon appear next to their name within Orders. You can hover over this icon to see the message or click into the order to view the comments within the Order Processor. Additionally, for those syncing order details with an external system, these comments can be exported via the Order CSV export, and can also be sent via our API.

Spot returns requests and order questions in Orders with the Customer Comments icon

The message will show the recorded time of when the question was sent, which question they chose, which SKUs they are referring to, and the message they included.

The customer question within their order

Order statuses

If the customer chooses the order change or cancellation question within the Customer Question, Bluepark will automatically set the order to Pending, if it isn't set as this already. This alerts your team that an action is required on that order within the Orders section because the icon colour will change.

If you wish to make this even easier for those processing orders, you can set custom order statuses for when this occurs. To do this, follow our How to create custom order statuses guide to create your own and streamline your order workflow.

Use custom order statuses for cutomer order questions and returns requests

Once you've created your custom order statuses, you can choose which one should be triggered for the order change and which one for the cancellation. This is done by setting the relevant order status within each drop-down in Settings > Settings > Order tab > Customer Requests section.

Processing order changes and cancellations

If a customer requests a change to their order, such as exchanging one of the products for something else or wanting to order two of something instead of one, this should be done by editing the order within our Remote Control feature. Our How to Edit Orders guide explains how this works.

If the customer wants to cancel their order, the Cancelling an order section in our How to Process Returns & Refunds guide explains the correct process to do this.