Wholesale order form - which third party form builder? Form builder that edits multiple records?
I manage a small farm, and want to build a better wholesale order system. I feel that what I want to do should be possible with airtable as a backend and an intergrated form builder (and/or using make.com automations), but I don’t currently know what tools to use. So I’ll describe what I’m trying to do, and see if anyone here has some suggestions to get me started. I’ve spent quite a lot of time with jotform and fillout, and don’t think they have a good solution.
Ideally I’d do the data entry on airtable, and a form builder would automate a lot of the rest of the process.
There are a few things that make the form building challenging:
We deal with dozens of products changing each week
customers order in different “units” (retailers will order 30x bunches of carrots, a restaurant will order 10kg; a retailer will order 25 bags of salad, a restaurant will order 3kg)
customers have different pricing
I’ll struggle to articulate in words what I’m trying to do, but I’ve built a demo table that would do what we need - but I need to turn this into a “front end”! Hopefully my screenshots articulate:
There are two tables in this demo: a “fresh list” table which is populated with what is currently available in what quantities, and an “Order” table
Product looks up average ‘unit’ (bag or bunch) size, farmer enters their estimate of how many bunches or kilograms are ready to harvest. Formulas convert that to bunches or kilograms, depending on input unit, and subtract any linked order quantities.
In this Order table, the customer simple enters their name and the number of bunches, or kilograms, that they want to order. The look up fields keep a live balance.
So the back end is relatively simple.
What i’m struggling with is finding a form builder that will deal with multiple airtable records on a single page (e.g. from what I could tell, Fillout only lets you deal with one record per form).
In essence I think I want to use airtable as the back-end to a form that displays a live “availability” and lets customers create an order record for each product they want
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):
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)
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.
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 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, and Glide.
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.
Oh! Forgot to mention you can self host n8n and pay only around $7 mo!
Thanks for the tip!
Hi @oreocereus,
Other 3rd-party portals that communicate with Airtable — and are much more affordable than Airtable’s portals — include: Noloco, JetAdmin, Softr, Pory, and Glide.
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.
which may be what we need to do, I just want to explore what I can diy at a lower price point.