Payment instructions and deadlines

The moment a customer confirms, they are asked how they want to pay. This page covers that choice, what the payment message contains, the deadline, the reminders, and what happens when the deadline passes.

First, the customer chooses how to pay#

Confirming sends a short list rather than payment details:

The list holds Bank transfer / QR, and Cash on delivery if you have switched it on. Nothing about how to pay — no QR, no bank details — goes out until the customer taps one, so nobody is told to pay by a method they did not want.

If an order falls outside the cash-on-delivery range you set, that option is still shown, with the reason it can't be used in its small print. Tapping it explains the range and shows the list again.

What the customer receives#

Once they choose Bank transfer / QR, two things arrive:

1. Your payment QR as an image, if you have uploaded one.
2. A caption with your bank details, the exact amount, the order reference and the deadline.

The reference matters#

FB-1204 is the handle for the whole order. It is what the customer types into their bank transfer, and it is the first thing looked for when a receipt arrives — before falling back to matching by recency.

It is also what you type in owner commands: PAID FB-1204, EXTEND FB-1204.

The deadline#

By default a confirmed order must be paid within 24 hours. The deadline is set at the moment of confirm, and it is shown to the customer in your shop's own time zone.

The deadline is doing real work. Stock is reserved from the moment of confirm, so an order left open indefinitely is stock nobody can sell.

Reminders#

A reminder goes out before the deadline. Because it is sent on a schedule rather than as a reply to a message, it uses a pre-approved WhatsApp template.

Reminders respect your shop's quiet hours — by default 9am to 9pm in the shop's own time zone. Outside that window nothing is sent and the next sweep tries again.

When the deadline passes#

The order is marked EXPIRED and every reserved item goes back into stock. The customer is notified — again on a template, again inside the send window.

EXPIRED is deliberately a different status from CANCELLED. One is a deadline, the other is a decision.

An order is never expired while a receipt is sitting on it unresolved. If the customer paid at the last minute and you have not decided yet, the deadline does not remove the order from under you.

Asking again#

A customer asking "how much do I owe?", "what's the QR?", or "which bank?" gets the same instructions re-sent. That is a pure lookup — it changes nothing about the order and it does not notify you.

A customer asserting they have already paid is different. They are asked for the receipt, and the instructions are not resent — resending them reads as the bot ignoring "I already paid". No alert is raised either: a text claim is not proof of anything, and you are paged when a receipt actually arrives.

Extending#

EXTEND FB-1204 pushes the deadline out. Use it when a customer tells you the transfer is coming — it costs nothing, and it is much cheaper than letting an order expire and rebuilding it.