Building a marketplace for wholesalers

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1

Hi all

I am a distributing company building a procurement marketplace for my industry where buyers can interact with sellers.

My distributing company will be the first seller (market maker) and onboard my customers with the intention to onboard more buyers.

I want to know if Softr will be suitable front end with Airtable as back end for what I am trying to achieve:

  1. Receiving multi product (line items) enquiries from logged in and non signed up Buyers;

->logged in users would have options to select delivery address and prefilled data such as what preferred unit of measurement (UOM) is (for quantity requesting etc).

->Need a Bid Price per line item (optional)

->Need quantity per line item

->Need option to either search:
a) dynamic full product description name,
b) dynamic product fields (e.g. size, grade etc,)
c) text fields (if product not in system or buyer unsure of product name in platform)

  1. Chat Functionality:

->(pre order) Bidders can negotiate and discuss product specification etc via chat tool within enquiry.

→ (post order) Buyers can chat with sellers for asking for order updates, documentation etc

Note: payment integration not required at this stage due to buyers on credit terms.

Appreciate your help.

2

Yes, this is totally doable. The chat implementation will depend on what you have in mind for the user experience (real-time chat like WhatsApp or an async exchange). Chat is not a native feature in Softr but there are workarounds. Rest of the requirements are not an issue.

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3

Thanks.
Chats would need to be alerted to Users email as that’s where majority of communication is done currently.

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4

Okay, that kind of chat should be no problem. But I’d like to point out that most of what you described requires DB (Airtable) magic. Softr typically acts as the user interface layer.

5

Okay, I have Airtable setup so I will try build out front end using Softr.

How would I make the enquiry/bid work? (I.e. setting up users based on User preferences?)

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6

For Bid system you’d likely have a bid represent a conversation and have a bids table and messages table linked to bids and users.

Here is docs for chat: Peer-to-Peer Chat – Softr Help Docs

7

Hi Sahil
I have DB (Airtable) magic. How would you recommend setting this up? Is there an app that would work better which I can embed into Softr?