How Pre-filled Forms Can Innovate Your Online Business

Pre-filled Forms play an important role in the success of your e-commerce business—are you sure you're making the most out of it?
Lexin-Ann Morales
Reading time: 6 minutes.

woman using pre-filled online forms PDF

When the pandemic hit the world in 2019, lockdown meant no more strolling down through the shopping malls anymore—and e-commerce businesses saw this as a ray of sunshine. The quarantine enabled online stores to be stronger than before. People started to see the benefits of scrolling down their mobile phones to choose products, explore different stores, and order something overseas. Aside from the convenience of buying stuff online, product reviews are useful for consumers. People can now check whether their desired product is worth the money or not, and this helps them set the right expectations.

The booming of the e-commerce business is projected to continue through the rest of 2021, up until the future. Whether you’re a start-up online seller or have been in the e-commerce industry for a while, you need certain tools in order to reach success.

One of the keys to a successful e-commerce business involves every brand touchpoint–one of those is online business forms—specifically, pre-filled forms.

Table of Contents:

  1. What are pre-filled forms?
  2. If I use pre-filled forms for my business, what’s in it for me?
  3. Reasons why you should use pre-filled forms
  4. How can I create a form that can be filled in online?
  5. Are pre-filled forms only used in the e-commerce business?
  6. Create pre-filled forms with PlatoForms

Read more: How to Optimize Pre-filled Invitation Forms for your Business

What are pre-filled forms?

Basically, Pre-filled forms are online business forms—except they’re pre-populated. Instead of sending blank forms to your clients, pre-filled forms automatically puts their information on each field, allowing them to get rid of the manual filling out of every field one by one.

Pre-filling forms have become so common that millions of websites use them. For example, when you type “I am looking for…” into Google, there is an auto-complete feature that suggests some options from which you may select one. Similarly, if you enter “How old was Jesus Christ at his crucifixion?” into Amazon, they suggest several answers for you to choose from. Prefill is here to stay.

You need certain pieces of personal information before applying for insurance. With third-party data, you can inject details such as household, driver, vehicle, properties, assets, beneficiaries, and risks into the application flow. Agents and end users can then use these details to help guide applicants through their journey.

With pre-filled forms, you can collect orders and send quoted prices to buyers. To provide a remarkable customer experience, your forms should be convenient, easy to fill out, and beginner-friendly. With pre-filled forms, you don’t have to think about any other technical ways to create form templates–the only thing that you need to worry about is taking orders!

If I use pre-filled forms for my business, what’s in it for me?

Online Forms are one of the most essential tools in e-stores. Your Online Forms are sent directly to customers to get their information, complete an order, or fill out an inquiry. To provide the best experience for your clients, it is important to use easy and time-saving forms. Online Forms with complex design and interfaces are difficult to finish—decreasing your form completion rate. Pre-filled Forms, or Pre-filled Invitation Forms, save the day by letting your customers have a smoother and easier transaction.

Here are some reasons why you should use pre-filled forms:

Time-efficient

Show your clients that you value their time by sending them easy and time-efficient forms. Pre-filled Forms are automatically filled with your customer’s information such as name, email address, and so on—enabling them not to fill out every single field of forms repeatedly.

Speed-up transactions

The long time spent filling out each field in forms can finally come to an end. With Pre-filled Forms, customers don’t have to fill out a blank form from scratch. Since pre-populated forms do the job, your clients can finish the form in a dash.

Go for a 100% form completion rate

Finally, your clients don’t have to worry about complicated forms! Pre-filled forms are easy to complete—no more complex designs and lagged interfaces. Easy peasy forms such as pre-filled forms have a 100% rate of being completed than blank forms!

Increased conversion rate

Forms with a high completion rate will definitely reflect on sales. Your pre-filled forms play an important role in making your customers happy—and will continue to do so.

Say goodbye to errors

Filling out fields from forms, again and again, are prone to spelling and inevitable errors. If a form is filled out automatically, customers have a higher chance of sending forms with accurate information.

Better customer experience

Using easy-to-fill-out forms such as Pre-filled forms can improve your customer experience. Clients love convenience—allowing them to keep on coming back to your business.

Secured transactions

One of the main struggles of e-commerce businesses is online security. Our online business forms and pre-filled forms generate a unique URL when sent to your customers—this means it can’t be alternated or viewed on another device. Every single form invitation creates a specific URL for each, so you can rest assured that your forms are only being filled by a specific customer.

So, how can I create a form that can be filled in online?

To start your pre-filled forms, log in to your PlatoForms account. Don’t have an account yet? No worries, signing up is easy!

how to use invitation feature for pre-filed PDF form

You can start to pre-fill information on the form before inviting your customers. You will see a “Pre-fill form” option in the invitation part of the form—with this button, you can input your customer’s information including name, phone number, email address, and more.

how to enable pre-filled feature for a pre-filled PDF form

Aside from enabling online form auto-fill, we included two more useful features in our pre-filled forms: Read-only and Hidden. These features allow you to hide certain fields that you don’t want the customers to see, or make them readable. Because of the Read-only and Hidden functionalities, you don’t need to erase information in your forms manually, you can just hide them or set them on a read-only modification.

how to save pre-filled PDF forms

Once your pre-filled forms are ready, don’t forget to hit the Save Pre-filled Form button! A unique URL will be sent to your clients upon invitation via email.

Read more: How Pre-filled Forms Can Boost Your Completion Rate

Are pre-filled forms only used in the e-commerce business?

Definitely not! Aside from order forms, you can also use Pre-filled forms for:

  • Online surveys
  • Quizzes
  • Questionnaires
  • Lead Generation
  • RSVPs
  • Invitation forms
  • Opinion polls
  • Enrollment
  • Job applications
  • Reservation for restaurants, hotels, etc.

Key takeaways:

  • E-commerce business continues to be at the heights of popularity because of the pandemic and will continue to do so in the future.
  • Complicated forms are difficult to finish, hence, decreasing the form completion rate.
  • Pre-filled forms provide numerous advantages to your business including faster transactions, secured order forms, and better customer experience.
  • Whether personal or business, pre-filled forms are versatile and can be used in any industry. Since it’s one of the most essential tools you use to collect orders or gather data, it should reflect the excellence of your organization.

Create pre-filled forms with PlatoForms

Need a pre-filled form for your e-store or organization? We at PlatoForms are glad to announce our latest feature, pre-filled invitation forms that offers pre-populated forms for your clients. This amazing feature allows you to pre-fill the forms that you will send upon invitation, send it in a scheduled manner, or track your forms. Aside from pre-fill invitation forms, your business can also benefit from our features that let you turn PDFs into online forms, convert PDFs to online forms, and more. This way, you can use your existing PDF forms, upload them to our software, convert your PDFs to online forms for that easy transaction. Get started to create a form that can be filled in online with PlatoForms today!


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