Group Order Guide: Collect One Shared Order, Every Setting, and Real Use Cases
This is the last in a series of deep-dives into the nine poll templates Whocan offers. Each post covers one template end to end — what it does, every setting available, what voters see, and the real situations people use it for. The previous post covered Assign Tasks; this one is about Group Order — the template for collecting one shared order from a group.
Group Order is the smallest of the nine. It doesn’t earn its own row in the 12-month engagement table alongside the eight higher-volume templates — the demand for it is a fraction of the others. But it’s here for a reason: it’s the cleanest single job-to-be-done in the whole set. It answers one small, sharp question — “what does everyone want, and how many?” — and does nothing else. The Friday team pizza order, the dorm coffee run, the office lunch collection: small jobs that don’t deserve a spreadsheet and don’t survive a group chat.
What is a poll type?
A poll type on Whocan is a pre-configured combination of answer formats, default settings, and visual theme that fits one specific situation. All nine templates run on the same underlying engine — they just expose different parts of it. You pick the template that matches your problem, type a title, share the link. The engine handles the rest. For the wider overview, see the parent guide to all nine templates. If the three words template, sample poll and theme sound similar, the glossary post sorts them out.
What Group Order does
Group Order asks one question: “what do you want from this order, and how many?”
You — the host — set up the order lines: the things people can order (“Food”, “Drinks”, or something more specific like “Pizza”, “Sides”, “Dessert”). You share a link. Each person, for every line, writes what they want and enters a quantity. The result is a single, running order that adds up as people answer — one list you can read off to the restaurant, the barista, or the caterer.
It’s the difference between a group chat where “I’ll have a margherita — oh and a coke” scrolls past three times and gets miscounted, and one form where every person’s choice and quantity sits in one place, totalled. You collect once, you order once.
See it live
Below is a real, interactive Whocan group order embedded in this page. Add an item and a quantity to see how ordering feels. Nothing you do here changes anything in your own polls — it’s a public sample anyone can interact with.
Every feature, in order
This section is the whole spec — settings on by default, settings you can turn on with one click, and what voters actually see. Group Order is deliberately the most stripped-down template in the set: it exposes only what a shared order needs and hides the rest.
What voters do
A group-order voter sees the order lines the host set up. For each line they can:
- Write what they want — a free-text field, so “Margherita” and “Hawaiian, no pineapple” both fit.
- Enter a quantity — a number next to their choice, because “two coffees” is different from “a coffee”.
- See the running order — everyone sees what others have already put in, so nobody double-orders and it’s obvious what the total looks like.
Voters don’t need an account. They get the link, they fill in their line, they’re done. The host watches the order add up in real time. One thing they can’t do — by design — is add new order lines of their own. The order stays the shape the host built it: you’re collecting against a set menu, not opening a free-for-all.
Settings on by default
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Theme: Pizza | A food-focused look, pre-set for Group Order. Hosts can switch to any other generic theme or upload their own background image. |
| Participants can see how others have responded | Every person sees the running order as it fills — the shared-visibility that stops double-orders and miscounts. Switch it off if you’d rather collect quietly. |
Settings you can switch on (advanced)
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Theme picker & custom background | Swap the Pizza theme for any generic theme, or upload your own image; pick font family, color palette, shadow style, and separate desktop/mobile sizing. |
| Get notified via email about new votes | The host gets an email each time someone adds their order — handy for knowing when the last person has answered so you can place it. |
| Allow participants to receive email updates | People can subscribe to changes (“order’s going in at noon”). |
| Ask for name / email / phone number | Collect who ordered what — useful when you’ll hand food back to the right person or split the bill afterwards. |
| Copy poll | Duplicate an order you already ran — the fast way to reuse last Friday’s pizza order for this Friday. |
| CSV export | Export the full order — every person, every item, every quantity — as a spreadsheet once it’s collected. |
Group Order intentionally leaves out most of what heavier templates expose: no dates or times, no location field, no plus-ones or kids counts, no per-item participant caps, no deadline. Those belong to templates built around events; a shared order doesn’t need them. If you find you do need one of them, switch the poll into Advanced mode and the full toolkit unlocks without losing the orders you’ve already collected.
Managing the order
Once orders start coming in, the results table is where the host actually works. Two host-only tools sit in it.
Edit any response in place. Click the pencil icon on a row and it becomes editable — name, every item, every quantity, and email or phone if those fields are on. Useful when someone messages “actually make that two” and you fix it instead of asking them to redo the whole thing.
Add a response on someone’s behalf. Below the table there’s an Add vote button — it inserts a row in edit mode so you can enter an order yourself. It’s the workflow for “the two people at the next desk just told me what they want” or “someone texted their order instead of using the link”.
Answer format under the hood
Group Order gives each line one answer format: a free-text field paired with a quantity number — you write what, you enter how many. The template ships with two starter lines, Food and Drinks, and you rename or add lines to match your order (a pizza night might be “Pizza”, “Sides”, “Drinks”, “Dessert”). That single item-plus-quantity format is the whole template — it does one thing exactly. If you need anything else — dates, multiple-choice questions, sliders, sign-up slots — switch the poll to Advanced and the full set of answer formats unlocks without losing what you’ve collected.
Themes
Visual theming on Group Order uses Whocan’s generic-theme system, and the picker leans into food.
The default: Pizza. A food-focused look that reads as “we’re ordering in”, pre-set for Group Order. Keep it if the page should look like the order it is.
Bring your own: custom background. Upload your own image and the header carries it instead of a preset — the restaurant’s logo, a photo of the office kitchen, the team mascot. You can also pick font family, color palette, shadow style, and separate desktop/mobile sizing.
The picker also offers the other food themes — Spaghetti, Sushi, and Order — plus the full generic-theme set, so a sushi-night order can look like a sushi night. A few looks are reserved for other templates (the Calendar theme belongs to the Scheduling Poll, Buffet to Potluck) and don’t appear here. If you want one of those, or any setting Whocan has that Group Order doesn’t expose, switch the poll into Advanced mode and the full library unlocks without losing what you’ve collected.
Real-world use cases
Group Order is the smallest cluster, so rather than distilling anonymized clusters from thousands of polls the way the bigger templates can, here are the jobs the template is built for — the recurring small orders that don’t deserve heavier tooling.
1. The Friday team pizza order
The canonical case. Someone in the office volunteers to order pizza for the team, and instead of collecting toppings in a thread that scrolls away, they share one link. Each person writes their pizza and how many slices or pies, and the order reads itself back at the end.
Typical tweak: turn on ask for name so you know whose margherita is whose when the boxes arrive, and get notified so you know the moment everyone’s answered and can call it in.
2. The dorm or office coffee run
One person is walking to the café and offers to bring drinks back. A group order collects “oat flat white”, “double espresso”, “tea, no milk” with quantities, so nobody’s order gets lost between the door and the counter.
Typical tweak: almost none — this is exactly what the defaults are for. Share the link, screenshot the running order, hand it to the barista.
3. Group lunch delivery
A team ordering delivery for an in-office day, or a group settling a takeaway for movie night. Each person picks their dish and quantity from the places you’re ordering from; the host places one order and splits the bill from the exported list.
Typical tweak: turn on CSV export so the totals and who-owes-what drop straight into a spreadsheet, and ask for name so the split is easy.
4. Bulk buy or group merch order
A club ordering team hoodies in sizes, a group buying tickets in a block, parents pooling a stationery order — anything where “who wants how many of what” needs collecting once, cleanly, before someone places a single bulk order.
Typical tweak: rename the lines to the concrete choices (sizes, ticket tiers), and turn on ask for email so you can follow up on payment.
How Group Order compares
A few tools get reached for when someone needs to collect a shared order. Here’s the honest version.
Slack polls are single-choice: “which restaurant?” gets a clean answer, but “what does everyone want from it, and how many?” doesn’t fit a poll where each person picks one option. You end up back in the thread collecting the actual orders by hand. WhatsApp polls have the same shape and the same limit — good for picking the place, useless for collecting the order.
Google Forms can do it — a “what do you want” text field and a “how many” number field — but you build it yourself every time, then read the responses in a separate results tab. Group Order is that form, pre-built, with the running total visible to everyone as they go.
The neighbour inside Whocan that people confuse Group Order with is Potluck, and the difference is worth being precise about:
- Group Order is a fixed order from the host. You set the lines, each person fills in what they want and how many, and it totals into one order you place. Participants can’t add new lines — the shape stays yours.
- Potluck is the opposite model: open contributions from the group. Voters add their own dishes to a coverage list — “I’ll bring the salad”, “I’ve got dessert” — and the goal is that everything’s covered, not that one order gets placed.
If food is being pooled and brought by the group, that’s Potluck. If food (or anything else) is being collected and ordered from one source, that’s Group Order.
For anything that doesn’t fit either — a date to find, RSVPs to collect, an opinion to poll — the parent guide to all nine templates maps each situation to the right template.
The sister-poll pattern: order after the invite
Group Order pairs naturally with an Invitation. The pattern: one link collects who’s coming to the team dinner or the office lunch, and once you know the numbers, a second link collects what each of them wants to order. RSVP first, order second — two links, each doing the one thing it’s good at.
What it costs (nothing)
Every setting above is on the free tier. There is no paid plan, no per-poll fee, no limit on items or people. Whocan runs on light advertising on landing pages (not inside the poll itself) and on word of mouth. Over 57,000 polls ran on the engine in the last 12 months without anyone paying for them — and nobody should need a subscription to collect a pizza order.
Try it yourself — and the whole series
The fastest way to learn what Group Order can do is to make one:
No signup, no email required, no card. Set up your lines, share the link, watch the order add up. If you want to come back to it later from a different device, you can save the access link the app gives you — that’s all.
This is the final post in the series. Across nine deep-dives we’ve covered every template Whocan offers — from finding a time to collecting an order, and everything between. The full collection lives on the poll-types hub. If you’re new here and want a guided tour, start where the series started, with the Scheduling Poll guide, and follow the links from there. Whichever job you came for, there’s a template that does exactly it — and nothing more.