Wholesale order form - which third party form builder? Form builder that edits multiple records?

​@oreocereus 

Yes, Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable can do that.

Fillout is 100% free, and you can have multiple line items on your form as long as they are linked via a linked record field.

The user can also add, edit, and delete line items from their form.

I give a brief demo of this in the 2nd video below, and I show off some other Fillout tricks in the first video:

• Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
• Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.

Fillout also offers hundreds of other features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, create custom PDF files from a form submission, accept payments on forms, pre-fetch dynamic data from an Airtable record, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, add a login page to your form, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.

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

Thanks Scott! It seems like fillout is a really great tool, thanks for your videos.
Do you know if there is a way to have the create record/edit record form presented in-line, rather than opening a new form? So somthing like this:
 

Our customers are often ordering 15-25 items, so clicking into each product ‘form’ will be a usability barrier.

Ideally I’d have the form prefilled with items available that week, with a field for “order qty” and a field for “order weight”

Fillout seems nearly great, but after playing with it for a couple of hours, here’s where I think it won’t work (I’d love to hear if I’m missing a set up option that would deal with these issues):

1. Sub-forms are shown on a different page - this is going to be difficult for our customers who order off their phones, and customers who order many items a week
   the dream solution here would be: users can “edit” the linked record in-line/on the same page as the current form (like my ms paint mockup above)
    
2. If that doesn’t work, I could prefill the linked products, and maybe live with the “edit” button - but the “edit” prompt isn’t that intuitive. As far as I can tell, there is no way to change the text for the edit button? You can change the text on the “add” or “change” buttons, but seemingly not the edit button..

Hey ​@oreocereus!

Unfortunately that is not possible if you need to leverage their direct integration with Airtable.

This might be a great use case for creating a dynamic form on n8n forms. Example I found online here. 
 

N8N should fetch data from Airtable before loading the form, in order to get available products to show as dropdown on the form.

I’ll try to share some of my personal use cases soon!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation

Thanks Mike! Unfortunately n8n won't resolve the issue affordable enough - the monthly fee is about the same as a more advance ready-to-go wholesale platform subscription :) which may be what we need to do, I just want to explore what I can diy at a lower price point. 

Oh! Forgot to mention you can self host n8n and pay only around $7 mo!

Hi ​@oreocereus,

That is correct — Fillout doesn’t yet offer “inline” editing of line items, but they do offer editing of line items in a pop-up subform.

Please be sure to submit it to them as a feature request using the little chat bubble in the lower right corner of their website! They’re very good about adding customer feature requests!

But yes, as you suggested, since Fillout lets you update existing Airtable records from a form, you could automatically pre-create every customer’s order form for them on a weekly basis, and then they could come into Fillout to edit their weekly order form.

(You could either use Airtable’s automations or Make’s advanced automations to automatically create the weekly orders.)

Of course, you could always turn to a form app that allows for unlimited line items, along with inline editing of those line items.

The only 2 form apps that I know of that do this are: JotForm and Cognito Forms.

But if you go down that route, you would be losing the live, real-time, back-and-forth communication with Airtable that Fillout has, and you would also be required to use a tool like Make’s integrations to bring your form data into Airtable

However, I’m starting to think that your idea of using a form for this may not be the best approach.

It’s sounding like you need more of a customer ordering portal with a customizable user interface that can do what you’re looking for.

If you want to use something that communicates live with Airtable, the easiest choice would be to use Airtable’s portals, but that is also the most expensive and is financially out-of-reach for most small businesses.

Other 3rd-party portals that communicate with Airtable — and are much more affordable than Airtable’s portals — include: Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, Glide, and MiniExtensions.

I gave a one-hour webinar on Noloco called Building a Client Portal on Noloco powered by Airtable, but that webinar doesn’t relate at all to what you’re looking to do.

You might also be better off using a 3rd-party shopping platform like Shopify, and then using Make (or a tool like Shopify Airpower) to bring your data into 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

Thanks for the tip!

Just returning to this now with a little free time this afternoon. Do you have a sense which of these tools might be most likely to achieve what I need to? I will start playing with them today, but learning a new tool always takes a lot of time to understand what is possible, so if you think one of these is more suitable I’d love to hear that!

I would recommend starting with either Softr or JetAdmin. These would be my 2 favorites from the list.

- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant

Thanks Scott!