How to Purchase Phone Numbers

In this tutorial, we will discuss how you can utilize our Smart Carrier platform to conveniently purchase 1 or more phone numbers to assign to your account. A phone number, or also often referred to as a (D.I.D or direct Inbound Dial) is used to configure outbound caller ID, and the ability to receive calls when your customer or prospect places an inbound phone call to your phone system.

Your customer or prospect may dial your phone number if they are calling you back from a previously missed call, or if they have obtained your phone number from a representative of your company, website, advertisement.

In order to purchase new phone numbers, you will need to have at least one routing container and one credit card on file, which we will cover how to add a routing container or credit card to your Smart Carrier account in another tutorial.

If you do not have a routing container added to your Smart Carrier account, you will receive a message on your screen advising you to add a routing container with at least 1 IP address. 

If you do not have a credit card on file, you will receive a message that you need to add at least one credit card to your account.

When you are ready to purchase one or more phone numbers, login to your Smart Carrier account at app.smartcarrier.io and navigate to Purchase Telephone Numbers under the Telephone Numbers menu.

Here, you have three main options. These options are Purchase Individual phone numbers, Upload a file, and history. We will now discuss each of these main options.

The Purchase Individual Phone Numbers Option will let you purchase 1 or more phone numbers in a specific area code or state. 

For example, if you would like to purchase 1 new phone number based upon area code 206 for Seattle, Washington, leave the Search by slider on the default area code option, as shown. Then type 206 in the area code box, and select WA- 206. If you would like to see a list of area codes available in a given state, simply type the 2 letter state abbreviation, and the state area codes will appear below. 

If you wish to purchase more than 1 phone number, change the Quantity to the number of phone numbers you would like to purchase. Please note, each phone number will be charged immediately for the monthly DID cost using the credit card you have on file.

If you wish to lock the number, which will ensure the number is never altered or replaced by our AI dialing service, check the locked box. For example, if you will be publishing the phone number online, or providing the phone number to your customers to call back directly, you will need to lock the phone number. 

Next, click the routing container box and select your applicable routing container. 

If you wish to receive an SMS message, also known as a text message at the new phone number or phone numbers, check the SMS enabled box. We will cover how to check and reply to your SMS messages in another video.  You can  check the SMS enabled box at a later time in the My Assigned Numbers page of Smart Carrier, which we will also cover in another tutorial. 

When you have selected the options, you wish to use, press the submit button. To check what phone numbers have been assigned to you based upon the options you have selected, you can view this information in the History page. Please note, it may take up to ½ hour for your phone numbers to be available in the history page. During this time, you will be able to view the request under pending request.

When the request is completed, you will be able to download the phone number or phone numbers from the Completed request section of the history page.  The completed request section will show you how many phone numbers where provisioned, as well as how many phone numbers where unavailable. If more 1 or more phone numbers were successfully provisioned, you can click the down arrow key to download the provisioned phone number list, as shown. Please note, the downloaded file will be in CSV (comma separated values) format.

If you wish to purchase bulk phone numbers in more than one area code or state, this can be completed in the ‘Upload a File’ option by uploading a file of the phone numbers you wish to purchase. For example, if you would like to purchase 2 phone numbers in Washington state area code 206, and 3 phone numbers in Portland Oregon area code 503, and 4 phone numbers in California area code 818.

First, select Upload a file. Then select the blue Upload a file button. To see what format is needed to upload a file, click the ‘here’ link, and a template file which can be used to add the phone number information will download. Next, open the template file. In the first column ‘Area Code or State Abbreviation, enter the area codes, 206, 503, and 818, as shown. You can also enter the 2 letter state abbreviation if you are not concerned about which specific area code you wish to use. For example, if you wish to use any available area code for Washington, instead of entering 206, enter WA in the Area Code or State Abbreviation field.

Next, in the quantity of numbers column, enter 2 in the 206 column, as shown, 3 in the 503 column, as shown, and 4 in the 818 column. If you would like to lock the phone number as described earlier in the video, select 1. If you do not wish to lock the phone number, enter 0, as shown. In the routing container column, you can obtain your routing container at the link provided via the routing container column. If you only have 1 routing container, you can leave this blank.

In the SMS enabled column, as described earlier in the video, you can enter 1 to enable the SMS on the DIDs, or 0 to disable SMS on the DIDs. 

Next, save the file to your computer and go back to the Upload a File for Purchasing Numbers window, click browse, select the file you just created, and click save.

You can now view the status of the phone number purchase inquiry in the history page as we described earlier in the video.

This concludes the Purchase Telephone Numbers tutorial.