How I used Airtable + Zapier + Gmail to build a Completely Free (and Simple) Order Management System

I posted a question here a few days ago trying to find a simple solution that might do what I wanted but I couldn't find anything. After wasting most of a day a few CRM trials, I decided to find some simple, cheap or free apps to accomplish the goal.

Challenge:

• Create an OMS that isn't complicated & shows order status at a glance.
• Automatically send a PayPal request when an order reaches X stage
• Store customer provided assets & business created (PDFs) with each order
• Notify customers when order status changes
• Don't break the bank

How I did this, 100% for free with Airtable + Zapier + Gmail free accounts.

I'm a huge Zapier fan although sometimes frustrated by the limitations (which are probably account level dependent since I have one of the most basic paid ones) so when a friend asked me to help them find a simple solution for order management, I started thinking about Zaps.

Zaps basically help to connect a bunch of different web apps together. In this case, I wanted to have a way that my friend's customers could submit an order, he could review them and automagically communicate with the customer when orders changed status.

Here's how it works:

1. I create an Airtable "base" (database which pretty much looks like a spreadsheet) for orders. This lists the customer's details like name, email, phone and order details then calculates the amount due, product cost and margin and holds some attachments related to the order along with having a drop-down for the status. Yes, I could do this via Google Sheets as well, but the limitation was that I wanted a nice looking form that would support file uploads, which Google Sheets doesn't excel at. Airtable is much, much better with file uploads.
2. In Airtable I restricted editing of the fields types and options so as a user only the content can be edited, not the values. This means no one can accidentally screw up the whole sheet or "base" as Airtable calls it.
3. I created a number of different views of the same data so you can filter and see orders that only match "invoiced" or whatever stage you want.
4. Zaps! I created 3 Zaps which watch for "new records in view" which basically means when a record meets the criteria to be displayed in a view (based on the filters) in Airtable then Zapier accepts it as new record in that view and will do whatever you set your Zap to do.

These Zaps will send the customer an email from the connected Gmail account whenever an order meets a designated status. Ex:

• Changing an order to "invoiced" means the customer will get an email with a paypal.me link that includes the order amount.
• Changing an order to "processing" means the customer will get an order status notification that their order is now in "processing" and they can expect it soon.
• Changing an oder to "completed" means the customer will get an email with the deliverable attached, if/when the deliverable is attached to the deliverable field in airtable, plus it asks the customer to share their experience and provides specific links to social sites to do so.

For those who aren't familiar with the PayPal.me link, here's how that works:

• It's basically a link that you can share and people can send you money based on an amount they choose.
  • Ex, you can see that here: https://paypal.me/linkbuilderseo
  • BUT if you want to specify the amount you want them to send you, all you have to do is add it to the link. For example, https://paypal.me/linkbuilderseo/10.00 would pre-populate it for $10
• This is a really simple way to request money without having to create an invoice.
  • I used the pricing field from Airtable to calculate the amount based on quantity then insert the value to the end of the link via Zapier and send the email via Gmail.
  • This basically created a dynamic email that basically says "Hi Bob, your order is ready to process and you have $50 due. Please click this link to submit your payment: https://paypal.me/linkbuilderseo/50.00 ... " and so forth.

This was my first time using Airtable and I am pretty happy with it. Quite impressed at the flexibility actually.

If you're interested in a free Airtable account, here's my referral link: https://airtable.com/invite/r/1pLlPTlt

I get credit toward a paid account for each signup via that link whether it's a free or paid account but I'm not otherwise affiliated. You can also go direct via this link https://airtable.com

This took about 4 hours to set up from scratch and with the current level of business it costs nothing. Airtable is free at this level (1200 records and 2GB attachments), Gmail is free, an Zapier is free (will run 100 times a month) and for these tasks it will process 33 orders before needing a paid account. You could change it so customers only get notified once, when they are completed for example, and thereby process 100 orders each month with the free account. If my friend gets 33 orders a month, it more than pays for the Zapier upgrade.

Now I'm looking for more ways to implement Airtable so I can play around with it some more...

submitted by /u/mlepisto
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