Inbox gets opened in the evening. A staff chat is where the manager already is. For a short lead from the site that is enough: name, contact, message, and the page they came from.
What the message contains
- Name and how to reply
- The message
- Page address and time
Without the page address you cannot tell which offer they answered. Still copy a long brief to email: chat history sinks, and mail can be found a week later.
Secrets stay on the server
The bot token and the chat id live in config next to PHP, not in the site bundle. The form posts to your endpoint, and the endpoint writes to Telegram. If the token is in JavaScript, anyone who opens the source can see it.
If the bot stays quiet
Check that the chat did not block the bot and that the bot is actually in that chat. On failure the endpoint returns JSON with text, not an empty page. The person on the site should see whether the lead left — or they will tap five more times.
What a chat will not do
A chat does not replace order records. It wakes the manager. Status, line items, and cancellations live where you agreed to store them — a sheet or the order bot, not a scroll of three hundred messages.
How the endpoint sits on a panel — the note on contact.php. Orders inside the bot, not from the site — the note on an order bot. To wire it up — use the contact form.