The phone order is the most expensive order most Linnworks sellers take. Not because of the products — because of the process. The call gets scribbled on a pad or typed into an email, then someone rekeys it into Linnworks later, guessing at prices, hunting for the customer's address, and hoping the PO number made it from the notepad to the invoice. Here is what it looks like to take a phone order properly: finished, priced and sitting in Linnworks before you hang up.
The anatomy of a rekeyed phone order
Walk through the traditional flow honestly and count the touches. The call comes in; someone writes down the customer name, the items, the quantities and any agreed prices. Later — sometimes hours later — someone else opens Linnworks, creates a new order, searches for the customer, and discovers three near-duplicate customer records from previous manual entries. They pick one, retype every line, guess whether "the usual price" meant £4.20 or £4.02, and set the order live. Each touch is a chance for a typo, a wrong price, a missed line, or a lost PO reference. Multiply by ten or twenty calls a week and you have a part-time job made entirely of transcription errors. We put numbers on this in the hidden cost of rekeying B2B orders — for most sellers it is thousands of pounds a year in labour before you count a single mispriced line.
Step one: find the customer while the phone is still ringing
The fix starts with lookup speed. If your order tool can search your processed Linnworks order history, the moment the caller says "it's Sarah from Fenwick Building Supplies" you type a few characters and their record appears — name, company, billing and delivery addresses, all pulled from orders they have actually placed. No separate customer database to maintain, no duplicates to untangle, because the source of truth is the order history you already have. Trade Order POS does exactly this: it auto-fills customer details from the last three years of processed Linnworks orders, so returning callers take seconds, not minutes.
Step two: let price memory answer the awkward question
Every phone seller knows the pause after "and what's my price on those?" With per-customer price memory, the answer is on screen: the system remembers what this customer paid for this SKU last time and offers it as the default line price. You can honour it, adjust it, or override it line by line — but you are negotiating from the actual history rather than from memory or a sticky note on the monitor. If you maintain formal wholesale tiers as well, that is a pricing-engine job; we wrote about structuring those ladders in tiered pricing for Linnworks without spreadsheets.
Step three: build the order live, with real stock figures
Taking the order during the call only works if you can trust what you are promising. Live SKU search against real-time Linnworks stock means when the caller asks for forty units and you have twenty-six, you say so immediately and offer alternatives — instead of confirming the order, discovering the shortfall at pick time, and making an apologetic call-back. Quantities, per-line prices, an order-level discount if you agree one, and a delivery charge all go into the cart as you talk. A VAT-aware cart that flips between ex-VAT and inc-VAT views helps here too, since trade callers almost always talk ex-VAT.
Step four: capture the metadata that keeps accounts departments happy
Trade phone orders come with paperwork obligations that retail orders never have. The buyer's PO reference has to appear on the confirmation and invoice. Your own reporting needs the order tagged with the right source and sub-source so counter, phone and web sales are distinguishable in Linnworks. And payment status matters at creation time: a card payment taken over the phone is Paid; an account customer on 30-day terms is Unpaid; a pro-forma customer is Pending. Recording that status as part of the order — rather than in someone's head — is what keeps your credit control honest.
Step five: hang up with the order already in Linnworks
The end state to aim for: before the call ends, the order exists in Linnworks as a native order — correct customer, correct prices, PO reference attached, payment status set. Optionally it is auto-processed and a branded PDF confirmation is already in the customer's inbox, so the "can you confirm that in writing?" request is answered before it is asked. Nothing to rekey, nothing to reconcile, nothing on a pad.
Handling the calls that don't become orders yet
Plenty of phone conversations end with "let me check with the boss." Two features cover this gracefully. Drafts let you park the whole cart and resume it when they call back tomorrow. Quotations go one better: generate a priced quotation PDF and email it during the call, without creating any order in Linnworks at all — so your open-orders screen stays clean and the follow-up has a document to anchor it. And when a regular says "same as last month," one-click reorder rebuilds their previous order instantly.
What changes when rekeying disappears
- Error rate collapses. One entry, made while the customer can correct you in real time, beats two entries hours apart.
- Calls get shorter. Lookup, price memory and live stock remove the "let me check and call you back" loop.
- Cash flow improves. Payment status captured at order time means account orders enter credit control immediately.
- Staff stop dreading the phone. A ringing phone stops meaning twenty minutes of admin after the call.
Take your next phone order live instead of rekeying it later — try Trade Order POS free for 14 days and have the order in Linnworks before you hang up.