Introduction

Welcome to another part of our WHMCS General Settings tutorial. This tutorial will review another tab from the General Settings, namely, the “Ordering” tab. Orders will likely be the most desired and exciting thing on your website. Structuring and configuring your order page properly will undoubtedly increase conversion and lower fraudulent activity on your WHMCS.

Of course, WHMCS has an abundance of configuration options under the General Settings, and we will review them in the rest of our WHMCS tutorials in the series.

Getting Started

To access the General Settings, please log inside your WHMCS admin area. After you log in, please point your attention to the top right corner. There you will see the wrench icon. Please click on it, and then click on the "System Settings" option from the revealed icons. 

This action will redirect you to the "System Settings" page, where you will see all the available WHMCS settings. 

To access the "General Settings," please click on the "General Settings" content box, which will be the first option under the "All Settings" title.

Ordering Tab

To access the "Ordering" tab, please click on the "Ordering" tab on the right side of the "Localization" tab. It will contain settings relevant to the orders you receive from your web hosting customers and let you tweak your order forms and procedures to best fit your business model.

Let's explore each setting one by one to understand them better.

• Order Days Grace - Please use this content box to select the number of days before an invoice payment becomes overdue. 
• Default Order Form Template - Please use these radio buttons to select the template you want your customers to see on the order page. The thumbnail will give you a small preview of how this will look.
• Sidebar Toggle Option - Please use this checkbox to display product categories in a sidebar when a buyer clicks "Show Menu". If you prefer disabling the option, please uncheck it.
• Enable TOS Acceptance - Please use this checkbox to enable ToS (Terms of Service) acceptance before the visitor can proceed to checkout. We highly recommend enabling this option.
• Terms of Service URL - Please use this text field to type in your Terms Of Service URL - for example, “https://domain.com/terms-of-service” or “https://domain.com/legal”.
• Auto Redirect on Checkout - Please use this radio button to select an outcome after the customer proceeds to checkout. We believe the best option here would be to redirect them to the gateway, as the buyer can immediately enter their payment details.
• Allow Notes on Checkout - Please use this checkbox to allow clients to add notes and leave messages to you. This method may be a good way of gathering feedback, improving your order process, or fetching additional information from the buyer if he does not find a way of outlining this information in the order process itself.
• Monthly Pricing Breakdown -  Please select this checkbox to divide your configured billing cycles into equal monthly payment portions. For example, if your product's biennial price is $240, it would be divided by 24 months, and the cost would be displayed as $10/month.
• Block Existing Domains - Please use this checkbox to block pending, existing, or suspended domains from being used on the order page consecutively. This setting will prevent scammers from submitting fraudulent orders and prevent existing clients from mistakenly adding orders with domain names they already used for their web hosting accounts.
• No Invoice Email on Order - Please use this tickbox to stop the "Invoice Created" emails when a buyer submits an order. Despite turning this setting off, your customers will still receive an invoice. However, you will reduce the number of emails sent from the system.
• Skip Fraud Check for Existing - Please use this tickbox to skip Fraud Checks for existing customers with at least one active order if you use one of WHMCS's Fraud Protection modules.
• Only Auto Provision for Existing - Please use this checkbox to enable product/service provisioning for existing clients that already have an active product/service. This setting includes automatic domain name registrations as well. The method is excellent for preventing fraud, especially if you detect such activity on your orders.
• Enable Random Usernames - Please use this tickbox to enable username randomization during account creation. By default, WHMCS will generate usernames based on the first eight characters of the product's domain name. Should you enable this, WHMCS will generate a random username with eight letters instead.
• Signup Anniversary Prorata - Please use this checkbox to enable "Anniversary Prorata" for clients. This option makes all of the customer's products renew on the original sign-up date for the first product they purchased. For example, if the customer purchased a web hosting account on 01.01.2023 and then another on 02.02.2023, both the web hosting accounts will renew on 01.01.2023. "Anniversary Prorata" applies only to web hosting services/products - addon services and domains are not included.
• Enable Product Cross-selling - Please use this tickbox to enable product cross-selling. This option enables product recommendations in the Client Area's shopping cart.
• Product Cross-sell Locations - These options will become available only if the "Enable Product Cross-selling" option is ticked on. It will allow you to select the location where you would like clients to receive the product recommendations.
• Number of Cross-sells - This option will become available only if the "Enable Product Cross-selling" option is ticked on. Please use this text field to define the number of cross-sales products you would like WHMCS to recommend to the client when he is in the shopping cart. We recommend using a small number to improve the user's experience if you use the cross-selling option.
• Recommend Existing Services on Order Confirmation - This option will become available only if the "Enable Product Cross-selling" option is ticked on. Please use this tickbox to enable product recommendations on the "Order Confirmation" page.
• Product Cross-sell Style - This option will become available only if the "Enable Product Cross-selling" option is ticked on. Please use this tickbox to include an explanation for the customer concerning the recommended products.

Once you have chosen the desired settings on this page, please click on the blue “Save Changes” button located at the bottom of the page. Otherwise, please click the grey “Cancel Changes” button on the right side of it to revert them.

This wraps up all the settings in the WHMCS “Ordering” tab. Hopefully, you found our explanations helpful and applied some of our recommendations within this tab to fine-tune your WHMCS’s ordering capabilities. 

Conclusion

Please follow our next tutorial in line, which will go through the “Domains” tab. It contains settings related to how you use WHMCS to register and renew domain names for your customers.