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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

What you’re referring to is called a customer portal, where customers can login to create orders & view existing orders. There are a few ways to get this functionality:

  1. Use Airtable’s portals, which costs $120 per month for 15 users, and $8 per month for each additional customer after that.
     
  2. Use a 3rd-party portal, which are much less expensive and much more powerful than Airtable’s portals.

    The most popular portals that are currently available for Airtable are:
    Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, and Glide.

    I gave an entire one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable.
     
  3. “Light” portal system: External users can create & edit Airtable records by using Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.

    I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:
    - Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
    - Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.
     
  4. Alternatively, instead of building a customer portal, you could also use an app like Square or Shopify or Stripe to take the orders, and then use Make’s automations and integrations to send that data to Airtable.

Hope this helps!

If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

 

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