Patisseries hate forms because cake work is conversational. Colours, flavours, scale, the moment when the customer realises a three-tier sponge with buttercream is not in the same postcode as a Victoria sandwich. A form flattens all of that into checkboxes, which is why Beurre had run its bespoke side on email for years and why the front end of the site quietly suffered for it. Customers didn’t know what to ask. Raf didn’t know what to answer until they did.
The brief was narrow. The main WooCommerce shop already handles the published menu – the trays, the boxes, the things that fit a SKU. The bespoke work, the wedding cakes, the proper celebration pieces, needed a way in that wasn’t ‘send us an email and hope’. A quote request form that gathered enough for Raf to reply with something useful on the first pass, without scaring anyone off with thirty mandatory fields.
I built it in MetForm, free tier, hand-assembled rather than dropped in from a template. None of the cake-form templates floating around fit what Raf actually does, and the ones that came close wanted a Pro licence for the bits any decent free plugin should already have. Five questions, well chosen, beats twenty exhaustive ones every time. The job is to start the conversation in the right place, not to extract a complete brief before anyone has spoken.
The signature trays appear as named options – Lemon and Yuzu, Lemon Drizzle, Opera – so the form speaks Beurre’s language rather than asking customers to invent the vocabulary themselves.
The allergen question is the bit other developers would skip. Checkboxes for the common ones, fine, but a form alone is not enough for anything serious, and treating a tickbox as a contract is how people end up in hospital. So the form surfaces allergens, but it also makes plain that anything actually important gets confirmed by Connor before the booking is real. The legal position and the moral position point the same way here. Anyone building forms for food businesses should think harder about that than most of them do.
Deposit acknowledgement is built in for the same reason. A quote request is not a booking. The booking step involves a deposit and a confirmed date, and customers respect being told that up front. The worst version of any patisserie order is the one where the customer thinks they’ve booked and the patissier thinks they’ve quoted.
Submissions land in Connor’s inbox formatted so he can forward straight to Raf without reformatting. It’s a working form. The triumph, if there is one, is restraint.