FormSmarts Form Builder: Web Forms Made Easy

Add the Form Mailer Sender to Your Address Book

We will soon be changing the sender email address used by FormSmarts form mailer as part of a major upgrade of our mailing infrastructure.

• If you use email services like Yahoo!, Microsoft Hotmail, Gmail, or AOL, please add noreply@formsmarts.com to your address book now to ensure our emails continue to be reliably delivered to your Inbox.
• If your email provider lets you set a list of allowed senders (whitelist), please add noreply@formsmarts.com to your whitelist.

We have implemented several email technologies and partnered with major email service providers to ensure form submissions are always emailed to you in the fastest, safest and most reliable way.

We welcome your comments about this new development.

Posted on January 28th, 2010 in form builder.
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Tags: email notification, form recipient, form submission, form to email

New Form Templates: Tooltips, Mobile Forms,…

We’ve upgraded form templates over the last few days. This affects the look and feel of all web forms. Notable changes include:

• Tooltips — A help icon next to text fields now shows the field’s description and validation information on hover. You may want to review the field description you provided at the time you created your forms.
• Variable form width — The width of embedded forms can be resized down to 360px without side-effects, and should degrade well beyond that.
• Mobiles forms — Although our forms have always been accessible to mobile users, we now provide a specific template for standalone forms accessed from mobile devices. If your site visitors include a fair proportion of mobile users, you should also provide a link to the standalone form whenever you embed a form on your site.

If you installed the form embedding code on your website before August 2008, you should upgrade it to benefit from the new features.

Important: We’re now publishing most updates via our Twitter and Facebook pages. Please subscribe for updates and service status information.

Your feedback is most welcome.

Posted on September 18th, 2009 in form builder.
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Tags: mobile form

Web Forms to Excel

Stored form submissions and export to Excel® allow FormSmarts Pro users to aggregate form submissions on FormSmarts, and download a report at their convenience in Excel format.

You can activate these features for your FormSmarts Pro account here. If you’re not yet a FormSmarts customer, find out more about forms to Excel.

You will then be able to easily create Excel reports from stored form responses in a few clicks with the report generator.

Upcoming Features

The following features are scheduled for release in the coming months.

• Text Blocks in Forms. Insert blocks of descriptive text in your forms
• Teamwork Support. The workload is shared between multiple email subscribers: form submissions are sent, in turns, to each member of a team.
• User-Selected Form Recipient. The form recipient is selected by the user among a list of registered recipients, e.g. Sales, Billing, Webmaster.

Posted on July 8th, 2009 in form builder.
8 Comments »
Tags: excel, form results, form to excel

Get Forms as HTML Email

The email format we use to send form submissions is flexible and supported by all desktop, web-based, and mobile email clients. Plain-text emails however become tedious to read and process for long forms and when form results must be printed for processing, e.g. for mortgage application forms, quote request forms, and many types of forms in the insurance and real estate industries.

FormSmarts users now have the option to have form submissions sent formatted as a table in a rich text (HTML) email. Depending on interest, we may also start to send form results as PDF attachments.

The main advantages of HTML emails are:

• Form reports are shorter
• Look is more appealing online and printed
• Email addresses, web links, and callto links (e.g for Skype) will launch the relevant application when clicked, as long as the field type as been set correctly.

To start receiving form results in HTML, change the Email Format to HTML Email in the Settings tab of your account. This option is initially only available to FormSmarts Pro members, but we plan to extend it to all users if there is demand, and pending review of performance implications.

We welcome your feedback about the ability to get form submissions in HTML format.

P.S. We will soon allow text comments in web forms,… stay tuned.

Posted on June 4th, 2009 in form handler.
2 Comments »
Tags: email notification, form recipient, form results, form submission, form to email

Send Form Results to Multiple Email Addresses

We’ve updated FormSmarts form builder and form processing back-end to allow several email subscribers for each form. We’ll be releasing more subscription mechanisms later this month.

Before using an email address as a form recipient, you first need to add it to your account, and verify it. You can change the recipients of a form in the Form Details screen of your account.

The number of email subscribers allowed for each form depends on your plan.

Posted on May 31st, 2009 in form builder.
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Tags: form recipient, form results, form submission, form to email

How to Build Paypal Forms

The spirit behind FormSmarts Payment Integration is to make it very easy to request a payment as part of a form submission. In particular, the feature seeks to address the needs of:

• Event registration forms
• Booking forms
• Service request forms
• Order forms

And other common cases where a form submission must be followed by a payment.

FormSmarts Payment Integration only support Paypal at this time. We’ve planned to extend to other payment platforms in the coming months, based on user feedback.

Requesting a Payment on Your Forms

Requesting a payment on a form is easy:

1. Set the Return URL of the form to http://www.paypal.com
2. Add radio buttons or a drop-down list, and enter the description and price of products formatted as My Product Description ($30 USD), as shown on the screenshot below.

That’s all you need to do. We’ll pick up the products and quantities that were selected, and we’ll redirect the user to a pre-filled page on Paypal for payment. Feel free to try out these demos: registration form, booking form, order form, and contact FormSmarts Sales if you have any questions or need help integrating a paypal payment into your forms.

Billing Multiple Items on One Form

You can as easily charge for several items within a single form submission by adding other drop-down lists or radio buttons formatted as just described.

Adding a Product Quantity Box

If you’re building an order form, you will need to allow the user to enter the quantity or number of products they want to buy.

This can be done as follows:

1. Position the quantity field immediately after the one listing products for sale
2. Set the field type to Positive Integer.

Handling International Payments

To request a payment in a currency other than US dollars, simply change the currency code in the item’s description. For example, use (€60 EUR) to receive a payment in Euros, and (£60 GBP) for a payment in Sterlings.

The link inviting the user to proceed to payment is displayed in his preferred language, in any of the supported languages.

Reconciling Form Results & Payment

The name and email address submitted as part of form data may not always match those in the Paypal account that was used to send the payment. You will then need to reconcile each form submission with the corresponding payment using the FormSmarts reference number.

The FormSmarts reference number is the 25-character ID that is given to users on the confirmation page, and is shown in the subject of the email notification we send you. The same reference number will appear in the payment details in your Paypal account (Transaction Details screen, under the Custom heading).

How Payment Integration Works

In the current implementation, your Paypal email address must be the same as your FormSmarts login. You can change your FormSmarts login if needed.

To avoid the user having to type the same information twice if paying by credit card, we will attempt to pass on his first name, last name, email and country to Paypal. If you intend to request this information on your form, make sure you name the first name and last name fields exactly like this.

The web form and Paypal integration feature is only available to FormSmarts Pro customers. Lean more about FormSmarts Pro.

Redirecting Users to Your Site After Payment

To redirect users to you website after they have completed payment, log in to your Paypal account, and set the Return URL under Profile > Website Payment Preferences.

Get a FormSmarts Pro Account Free!

If you sign up for Paypal with a premium or business account (it’s free) with our referral link, we’ll refund your FormSmarts Pro subscription as soon as we get an equivalent referral fee from Paypal! See Paypal conditions here.

We welcome your feedback about payment integration.

Posted on May 5th, 2009 in form builder.
9 Comments »
Tags: payment integration, paypal, pro, return url

Personalize the Confirmation Message Shown After a Form Submission

You can now personalize the confirmation message that is displayed after every successful form submission.

To personalize the confirmation message for a form, visit the Forms tab of your account, and edit the form’s details. This feature is only available to FormSmarts Pro users.

Important note: All default messages shown during form submission are localized. If you change the confirmation message, users will see your personalized message instead of the default confirmation message in their own language.

You can always revert to the default confirmation message by erasing the text in the Personalized Message box.

We welcome your comments about this new feature.

Posted on April 11th, 2009 in form builder.
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Tags: form submission, international, pro

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