Need advice on connecting to Webflow CMS by Airtable

[KeiKei]

Hello Dear all,

I would like to connect Airtable to my website Webflow CMS by Zapier. My company is selling products, and there is main website and OEM websites to sell our products.

The current process, each time we need upload a product, we need to upload to other OEM websites too. In future, lets we got 99 oem websites , means that we need to upload 99 times if there is a product upload, and each website may got different prices on products.

So our initial plan is to using Airtable to store the products(texts, img, links, indicators).

so my questions is:

1. i wonder if this idea work or not in Airtable if we were to select those products and publish the products on selected OEM websites or all websites?
2. if i delete/edit/update a product data in Airtable, will it make changes to all the websites or selected websites?

3)is there any other problem that i might face or need to concern with? :dizzy_face:

Regards,
iTs

[Zollie]

If you’d like data in Airtable to affect an external service (or the other way around), you’ll most likely be using integrations (such as Zapier) and/or the API. Integrations can be limited in functionality. Whereas hosting your own web application to make API requests to/from Airtable is highly flexible/customizable. Both methods can be costly depending on how well they’re implemented and maintained.

[Bill_French]

KeiKei:

3)is there any other problem that i might face or need to concern with?

If you expose content in Airtable on the web using the API, make sure you consider the limitations in the Airtable API (max 5 requests per second). Imagine 10 visitors to a page that pulls 50 records from Airtable. Suddenly, this is the equivalent of 500 records and at least 10 requests perhaps in as few as 1 second - oops!

[KeiKei]

Hello =D thanks for the reply. This will happen if the website pull data from Airtable directly. Our plan of integration is with webflow because webflow got its own database and can build website, so visitor will visits webflow’s website and the website data is pulled from webflow database first.

What we wanted is import data to Webflow database(multiple websites) from Airtable. Plan to use Airtable to control what data to sent to multiple websites.

[Bill_French]

KeiKei:

Our plan of integration is with webflow because webflow got its own database and can build website, so visitor will visits webflow’s website and the website data is pulled from webflow database first.

Okay, then you’re on solid footing for serving requests. You are essentially caching-forward the data to a server infrastructure more adept at handling requests.

All is good until you get to this question…

KeiKei:

if i delete/edit/update a product data in Airtable, will it make changes to all the websites or selected websites?

The answer - of course - is yes if (and only if) you continually poll the Airtable data source testing for changes and re-push those changes up into Webflow. This means that whatever integration layer you create to populate the Webflow system must also be smart enough to detect change and force updates to Webflow when they occur.

This is not possible in Zapier; not sure if Integromat can handle multiple arbitrary changes on a given record. As such, you probably need to build a custom integration layer to meet requirement #2.