Vendors still receive POs as PDFs in a sales rep’s personal Gmail. Use a form so purchasing clerks can paste their PO number, line items, and a ship-to with ZIP or postcode straight into your queue.
Notifications should hit order entry, not a hunter’s mobile.
Keep it optional so new accounts are not blocked.
Link it from quotes and from the footer.
Use the dashboard as the inbox; do not retype from email.
A purchase order is the buyer’s official request to buy on their terms. US accounts payable often already has a PO number before anyone talks to you; UK buying teams may issue a PO after a quote. The public form is not your ERP—it is the handshake that records entity name, PO reference, SKU, quantity, and ship-to so you can raise an order in NetSuite or Xero later.
Do not treat this page as a legally binding instrument on its own. Your terms of sale still live in the contract or the PDF PO they attach. The HTML simply stops the details living only in a forwarded thread.
Clerks abandon vendor portals that demand a login before they can even paste a PO number.
Ask for a file link to the stamped PO in the notes if your warehouse will not pick without the PDF.
EDI is the dream. HTML is what mid-market suppliers actually ship on a marketing domain.
No buyer login. Fast for one-off and small-account POs.
Correct at volume with Walmart-class retailers; months of mapping for everyone else.
Universal and chaotic. Missing ship-to lines are why this form exists.
Fine once the account exists. Terrible for the first PO from a new plant.
Manufacturer microsites rarely have Magento. Publish the form on /purchase-orders, point it at a form owned by customer service, and export into the ERP each morning.
US plants and UK plants can share one form if the address placeholder says ZIP or postcode; split bill-to later inside the ERP, not on the public page.
Your lawyer and your terms decide that. This tool stores the data; it does not replace a signed instrument.
Start with a Drive/Dropbox link in notes, or add a file input on the form.
Collect ship-to on the form. Put bill-to in notes or a second textarea you add after copy.
Not natively. Export CSV or webhook the row into middleware.