How to create a t-shirt order form on Google Forms
Written by: Melody Ma
Founder, FormPay
Updated: May 24, 2024
Published: May 24, 2024
T-shirts are a great merchandise option to sell for businesses, fundraisers, teams, schools, and even family reunions. While selling t-shirts might seem simple at first, managing different sizes and customization options for each buyer can quickly become challenging. Many people turn to Google Forms to organize the process, but it can be tricky to set up since it wasn’t built for selling products. In this post, we’ll walk you through step-by-step instructions for creating a t-shirt order form using Google Forms, and introduce better alternatives like FormPay that you can use instead.
Create T-shirt Order form with Google Forms
Even though it seems straight forward, creating a t-shirt order on Google Forms can be complex, here are the steps to build the form:
Use T-shirt Sign Up Form Template: Go to Google Forms’ dashboard and select the T-shirt Sign Up form template in the Template Gallery up top.
Customize Form Template: In the T-shirt Sign Up template, you can customize the available options to your need.
Add Colors: If you offer different colors for your shirts, you can use the Checkbox Grid question format to let your customers tell you what size and color they’d like. For the Checkbox Grid question, put the sizes in Row 1, and colors in Row 2. In the published version of the form, your customers can just check the intersecting checkbox for the size and color.
Add Quantity: Unfortunately Google Forms cannot handle sizes, colors, and quantities. You would have to set up a Paragraph question to let your customers manually tell you what size and colors they want and how many of each. Alternatively, you can use FormPay instead, which would allow you to set up colors, quantities and sizes for your shirts easily and intuitively.
- Calculate Purchase Totals: There is no capability to calculate purchase totals in Google Forms. You will have to create a Short Answer question where your customers can add up the purchase totals manually. We recommend that you use FormPay as an alternate solution to Google Forms as FormPay will automatically calculate purchase totals for you so that you can rest assured that your customers will be correctly charged and you’ll be made whole on orders.
- Add Payments: Google Forms doesn’t have payments integrated. This means you have to tell your customers to manually pay you through a payment link or bank transfer. You will also have to manually check each order to make sure people paid and paid correctly. Instead, a solution like FormPay has payments integrated directly so that your customers can checkout and pay you right away for their order. Both of you will receive an email confirmation of the order, and you don’t have to do any additional manual matching between orders and payments.
Better Alternatives to Google Forms for T-shirt Orders
As you can tell from the previous section, Google Forms can get complex and unusable once you try to order more than a simple item, and it doesn’t let you accept payments automatically.
Instead of using Google Forms as a makeshift solution for your tshirt orders, we recommend that you use FormPay instead. FormPay is similar to Google Forms, but built for ecommerce with payments integrated. You can sell different sizes, colors, and quantities of t-shirts easily. You can even add more items and variations as you need, and pickup and delivery options.
In addition, FormPay will automatically calculate all the totals for you and your customers, and let your customers pay you right away on checkout. You’ll even get an order dashboard to track your orders, and automatic confirmation emails for both you and your clients.
Lastly, there’s no cost to set up and no ongoing monthly fees to use FormPay.