How to Use Multiple Submit Actions on Your Online Forms
One of the most powerful aspects of Formstack is the ability to use multiple payment processors, third party integrations, and other submit actions. A submit action is an action that takes place after the user hits the submit button. These include redirects to other websites, custom thank you pages, and the passing on of online form data to other applications, such as payment processors, CRM systems, email service providers, etc. You could, for example, pass on data to Salesforce, Authorize.net, Mailchimp and Google Spreadsheets in a single online form.
You can view your form’s submit actions under Settings > E-mails & Redirects > After the form is submitted.
When you add a third-party integration to your form, a submit action for that integration will be added for you automatically. If you want to add a URL redirect or custom thank you page, you will need to add those yourself under Settings > E-mails & Redirects > After the form is submitted.
To add more actions to the list, you can hit the plus button to the right of the action. The minus button, by the same token, can be used to remove actions. Always make sure you hit the Save Settings button when you are done setting up your submit actions.
Some actions can be performed at the same time, such as sending info to third parties, but other actions, such as redirecting to another website, can only happen once. This is because once a user leaves your form, Formstack no longer has control of that user’s browser, so we can’t send them on to another website.
What this means is that while you can redirect a user to PayPal or send them to a custom thank you page, you can’t do both. This is where smart routing comes in.
Smart routing allows you to decide which action you want to occur based on questions your user has answered on your online form. So let’s say we have a question on an online order form, such as “How do you want to pay?” with options for “check” or “PayPal”. If the user chooses “check,” we’ll display a custom thank you page showing them instructions on how to send in a check. If they choose “PayPal,” we can redirect them to PayPal instead.
So when you can’t or don’t want to perform certain actions, this is when you want to use smart routing.
If you have any questions about how submit actions work or what you can do with them, please contact our support staff.
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About the Author
These posts come from a collaboration of multiple team members! Everyone from marketing to development pitches in to share some insight on small business, online forms, data collection, and all things awesome.
Hi Ryan, great article. I am wondering if I use formstack on a wordpress site, can I set it up so that the user publishes the info in the form to their own site? for instance I might set up a form that says: “Type your life story here”. And then, when they hit submit, their life story appears on a page titled My Life Story, rather than being emailed, or whatever.
best wishes, Cameron.
Hello, Cameron. You can create a form like that, but Formstack can’t automatically update a page as you’ve described. You would need some sort of script on that page, probably PHP, to interpret the data being sent from Formstack.
You can pass on the data from Formstack via the URL, as explained here ( http://support.formstack.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=32 ), but that would probably be too much data to pass on via a URL redirect if you are talking about a story.
You’d probably have to program something using our API or web hooks to do that.
http://support.formstack.com/index.php?pg=kb.book&id=3