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Hello,

My sister operates a bakery from her home, and I want to make things easier for her by creating a system in Airtable where she can take orders for her products.

As a bonus I'd like to be able to track repeat orders from customers as a way to determine customer preferences, habits, trends, etc.

There are a few problems I'm finding with this. Airtable has no way for customers to "make an account" so to speak. I'm inclined to create a table for customers, but...

  • Customers would need to complete a separate form if they're a new customer, then come back to the order form, which feels cumbersome.
  • For each customer that already exists in the base, Airtable will reveal all of the names in the customer table whenever a returning customer begins to search for their name, which just doesn't sit right.
  • We could simply request name and phone number each time, but I'm not sure if that will allow me to combine those records based on phone number in order to be able to assess trends based on those orders by a particular customer.

Has anyone used any data in this way, or know of a way for Airtable accomplish this?

Thank you

There's not a quick or easy answer for this, because unfortunately Airtable was not designed to be a customer order taking system (with customer accounts and repeat customers).

Your best bet would probably be to create a customer portal with a portal tool like Noloco, which acts as a front-end for Airtable, lets your customers create accounts, and lets your customers place new orders & view existing orders.

I give a brief tutorial of Noloco on this episode of the BuiltOnAir podcast.

And I also presented a full one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.

Alternatively, instead of building a customer portal, you could also use an app like Square or Shopify to take the orders, and then use Make’s automations and integrations to send that data to Airtable.

And it sounded like your original idea was to do this all with a form in Airtable. Airtable's forms are pretty limited, so I would recommend taking a look at the more advanced Airtable forms that are offered by Fillout.

However, regardless of whether you try this with Airtable's forms or Fillout forms, you would then need to figure out some automations to piece together the customer & order information in Airtable.

Again, I would recommend doing this with Make's Airtable automations, because they are much more advanced than Airtable's automations.

You could probably use the customer's email address or their phone number as a unique identifier, if you went down this path.

(Some people have attempted to do this with Airtable's interfaces, but that won't work, because Airtable's interfaces are designed for internal team members only. Your customers would be required to sign up for an Airtable account, and they would always see the list of all your other customers in the lower lefthand corner of the screen in Airtable.)

p.s. If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with any of this, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consulting — ScottWorld

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