Shared Baskets: An Easier Way to Order Merch as a Team

You can build a basket of products on hotline.co.uk and share it with a colleague by email. They open one link and see everything you selected, with the quantities and the prices, exactly as it was at the point you sent it. It replaces the version of this job where you paste 8 product links into an email and hope everybody opens the right ones. Merchandise decisions almost never involve one person. Somebody researches the options, somebody else has to like them, and quite often a third person controls the budget. All three need to see the same list, and until now the only way to give it to them was a wall of links and a covering note explaining which was which.

How sharing a basket works

Build your selection the way you normally would. Add the products you're considering, set the quantities you want, and when you've got something worth showing somebody, share the basket by email. Your colleague opens the link and sees the whole selection on one page. They don't have to piece together which products go with which quantities, and they don't have to open eight tabs to see what you're proposing to spend.

Why the shared version is a snapshot

The basket your colleague opens is what you sent, rather than whatever you've done to your own basket since. If you carry on browsing afterwards and swap two products, their link still shows the selection you shared. That's deliberate, and it's the part worth understanding. If you're asking somebody to approve a spend, they need to approve a fixed list. A basket that quietly changed underneath them would make the approval meaningless, and it would make the person who gave it look careless when the invoice came in different. If you do change your mind, share the basket again. They'll get the new version and can approve that instead.

Where it fits in an approval process

Most merchandise sign-off runs through three steps. Somebody shortlists. A manager approves the choice. Somebody in finance approves the money. A shared basket gives the second and third of those people one link with the products, the quantities and the prices in front of them, which is usually all they need in order to say yes. There's no reconstructing the shortlist from an email thread, and no ambiguity about which of the four bottles you meant. If the sticking point is what it'll look like rather than what it costs, request a free Visual Proof and send that alongside the basket. Start building from the full product range whenever you're ready. Proofs come back within 20 minutes during working hours and they show the product with your actual logo on it, which tends to end the conversation faster than a description does.

Name your approver before you send

If your organisation buys merchandise regularly, it's worth agreeing in advance who approves what. Approvals hold up more merchandise orders than production does. A proof or a basket sits in somebody's inbox for four days while everybody assumes somebody else is looking at it, and the deadline moves by four days. Name the approver before you send, and tell them it's coming.