u/Street-Painter3410

I'm testing the waters with airtable to track both inventory/materials, orders, & customers for the small business I work at. It's a laser business and we make a lot of different products, ranging from pre-made, pre-made with customization, and fully custom orders. I'm running into a few problems so far.

1. A lot of our products have variations to choose from. Ex: a 20oz tumbler can come in red/blue yellow, but a 40oz tumbler can come in red/green/white. This is hard to set up in the data tables and I'm not sure how to handle it.

2. Setting up an order form. I've tried both airtable's forms as well as jotform. Airtable forms are limited it looks like, maybe I'm just doing it wrong, but I can't get them to handle input like "20oz tumbler, red, premade" vs "20oz tumbler, green, customized".

The issue I was having with Jotform was that when I linked it to my test airtable's Order table, it refused to acknowledge the Customer field even existed on the airtable side (along with a couple other fields).

I'm 100% open to using other forms/apps for taking orders, but it needs to a)have a free tier, as I'm just testing this for my boss atm, b) have a mobile app that lets you fill out the form and submit it, because my bosses often take orders while on vacation/etc and they're glued to their phones, and c) have airtable integration, or the form integrates to another good database app to keep track of orders.

I currently work at a laser-based small shop, and we are rapidly growing. Issue is, neither of the owners have ever worked a day of retail in their life before this, so they aren't familiar with anything like POS systems, order management, etc. They've had to come up with it all themselves. We're all tearing our hair out because we use Google Sheets for everything.

I've worked in retail before, but never super high up. I'm currently researching POS systems and the like for them. We get a lot of one-off orders, extremely custom orders, as well as bulk/repeat orders. We need something that is able to be accessed from the shop and easy to use for all our staff, but is also easy for our bosses to put orders in while they are out and about, as they often get orders from people they meet on vacation/etc. If it can be easily used via a phone, even better.

Currently we have a master orders sheet that is color-coded to which staff member is assigned the order, price/dates/etc. However this sheet does work for very large bulk orders, so they have to go on a different sheet. We have yet another sheet for selling hats as we need different information for those, and yet another sheet specifically for leather patches. And *none* of these sheets are easily editable from a phone, which means if someone takes an order while away, they have to text the info and/or remember to put it into the sheets later, which predictably results in errors. It's driving us all nuts lol.

I currently work at a laser-based small shop, and we are rapidly growing. Issue is, neither of the owners have ever worked a day of retail in their life before this, so they aren't familiar with anything like POS systems, order management, etc. They've had to come up with it all themselves. We're all tearing our hair out because we use Google Sheets for everything.

I've worked in retail before, but never super high up. I'm currently researching POS systems and the like for them. We get a lot of one-off orders, extremely custom orders, as well as bulk/repeat orders. We need something that is able to be accessed from the shop and easy to use for all our staff, but is also easy for our bosses to put orders in while they are out and about, as they often get orders from people they meet on vacation/etc. If it can be easily used via a phone, even better.

Currently we have a master orders sheet that is color-coded to which staff member is assigned the order, price/dates/etc. However this sheet does work for very large bulk orders, so they have to go on a different sheet. We have yet another sheet for selling hats as we need different information for those, and yet another sheet specifically for leather patches. And *none* of these sheets are easily editable from a phone, which means if someone takes an order while away, they have to text the info and/or remember to put it into the sheets later, which predictably results in errors. It's driving us all nuts lol.