Airtable's ability to give you a form-style interface to input data into a table is incredibly useful when you want to create an easy-to-use tool to help with wholesale order entry. Below you'll find the steps you can take to set up your Airtable-to-Shopify sync for manual order entry, along with best practices on how to set up your Airtable wholesale orders table.

How it works

To facilitate order taking outside of the online store channel Shopify gives us Draft Orders. We will be using Draft Orders to facilitate wholesale order taking via Airtable. Draft Orders can be easily accessed via your Shopify admin interface, and will be converted to regular Orders once you've clicked the "Mark As Paid" button in Shopify.

First step, create your Airtable form to enter Draft Orders

Create a table that will house your wholesale orders. Make sure that the table has all the necessary columns that you'd like to fill out during order entry. Then, for the fun part, create a Form view of your data. Share the link to the form view with anyone who needs to enter wholesale orders, and keep in mind that data can also be entered using the Airtable mobile app.

Second step, configure AirPower to sync your Draft Orders to Shopify

Now that we have Airtable set up, let's configure AirPower to sync the right data to the right place. Open your AirPower app interface and go to the Data Mapping tab. Here, find the Draft Orders section and map all the draft order-related columns in your table.

Now you can enter draft orders using your Airtable form, and when AirPower is running an Airtable-to-Shopify sync it will create or update your Draft Orders as necessary.

Third step, advanced order product entry with AirPower

Orders and Draft Orders need to be linked to a Variant row and a Customer row. Shopify requires that Draft Order line items are created with an order, and that each of these line items is related to a product variant. This will be fairly cumbersome and time-consuming to do manually with Airtable, especially if you are entering a wholesale order whilst visiting a customer, so AirPower has a trick up its sleeve for you.

In your AirPower Draft Orders configuration section you will find a special section titled "Mapping Variant Entry Columns". Here you can specify the names of columns that are linked to your variants. When a variant is selected in such a column AirPower will automatically create the order line items for you during an Airtable-to-Shopify sync. And picking variants in such a manner with your Airtable form is a breeze. For each variant-linked column you'll need to specify a column that stores the quantity of the variant you want in the order.

Fourth step, advanced customer creation with AirPower

If you are entering an order for a new customer you can create the Shopify customer entry right from your Draft Order entry form. To do this, simply map the Shopify fields that start with customer.* to your Airtable columns. When AirPower does an Airtable-to-Shopify sync, if Customer row is not linked to the Draft Order row, then AirPower will create a customer with the information you provided and link to the draft order. Please note that the data in the columns you've mapped will only be used when creating the Customer. After the Customer is created and linked to the Draft Order row the data in these columns will be ignored.

Get started ...

Pro Tip: We've create a template base to get you going with wholesale order entry. Get it here.