When a customer orders something made-to-order — a name printed on a shirt, a cake with a message piped on it, a custom wedding piece — then cancels partway through, most sellers reach for the same deposit logic as any other order: keep it all, or refund it all. Thai law treats a made-to-order job as a different kind of contract from an ordinary sale. The customer can still cancel at any point before it’s finished, but what you’re owed is compensation for the actual loss the cancellation caused, not whatever number you wrote down as the deposit.
Why the deposit rule doesn’t fit a custom order
Section 587 of the Civil and Commercial Code defines a “hire of work” contract (จ้างทำของ): one party agrees to complete a specified piece of work, and the other agrees to pay for the completed result (Section 587). An order a customer places in chat for something made specifically for them — a printed shirt, an engraved frame, custom-cut furniture — falls under this kind of contract, not the ordinary sale-of-goods rules that govern a simple deposit (our guide to deposit forfeiture on a no-show). The difference matters because what’s being sold is work that doesn’t exist yet, not a finished item that can just as easily be sold to the next customer if this one backs out.
The customer can cancel — but owes you for the work done
Section 605 lets the client cancel a hire-of-work contract at any point before it’s finished, but only on condition that they compensate the contractor for the loss the cancellation causes (Section 605). In practice: a customer can’t be stopped from cancelling, and you can’t simply keep a flat deposit either. What you can charge has to track the actual damage — material already cut or printed, labour already put in, or a sale you lost because the item was too specific to resell. That’s a different situation from a pre-order deposit held against stock that hasn’t arrived yet, where the item can usually still be sold to someone else if the order falls through (our pre-order deposit workflow).
One way to make that number easier to calculate if a cancellation does happen — our own suggested default, not a fixed rule — is to collect roughly 30-50% of the total upfront, sized to match your material cost, and to get the customer to confirm the exact design, size or wording in chat before you cut or print anything.
Set up in 1CS
1CS’s commerce tools turn a conversation into a payment-ready bill. Turn on the “shopping cart” capability from the AI Agent page’s capability list, or click “Enable shopping cart” on the Business > Sell products page. Add an entry such as “Deposit for custom order [job name]” to the catalog, priced at whatever share of the total you’ve agreed with the customer. Then, under Business > Business info, open the Payment & Delivery tab: set the Delivery fee (THB) field to 0 if the customer is collecting the finished piece in person — it has to be set to something, or a bill can’t be sent at all — and add at least one payment account. Send the deposit bill from the conversation’s own Bill tab with “ส่งบิลเข้าแชท” (send bill into chat). If the order is later cancelled partway through, edit that bill or send a new one for the actual compensation you’ve worked out, and add a note explaining it’s compensation for work already done, not a forfeited deposit. The Thai help center walks through every screen in ขายและออกบิลในแชต (in Thai).
A message to send before you start the job
Send this the moment a custom order is agreed, before any cutting, printing or production starts — so the terms are something the customer agreed to upfront, not something you explain for the first time once there’s a problem:
We’ll get started on your [item] exactly as discussed. We’re collecting [amount] THB ([percentage]% of the total) upfront before we begin cutting/printing. Cancel before we start and that’s refunded in full. Cancel after we’ve started and we’ll deduct the cost of materials and work already done, then refund the rest. Work begins once you confirm the design, size and wording here in chat.
