Partner portal (v1)
Self-serve lookups for distributors
Client
~35 staff internally; ~40 active partner accounts ranging from two-person shops to mid-size retailers.
How we engaged
Websi-owned build with weekly reviews from the operations manager and occasional input from finance on what partners were allowed to see.
Stack & tooling
- Airtable (bases, views per role, automation for notifications)
- Softr (authenticated portal, forms, list/detail layouts)
- Email notifications for requests requiring human approval
A regional distributor’s partners were flooding ops with ‘where’s my order?’ emails. We modelled roles and data carefully in Airtable, then shipped a constrained Softr portal with approvals for anything sensitive.
Starting point
Partners had a static PDF price list and emailed a shared inbox for stock checks and ETA requests. Ops replied from memory half the time. During peak season the inbox became a bottleneck and mistakes crept in when junior staff answered without checking the latest sheet.
Challenge
Finance was nervous about exposing cost or margin-adjacent fields. Partners had wildly different tech literacy. The business couldn’t justify a full custom React build yet.
Approach
Started from permission matrices on paper: role → tables → fields → actions. Built Airtable views that enforced those boundaries, then mirrored them in Softr with explicit empty states (“No open orders” with next steps). Anything that changed pricing or credit went through a simple approval queue instead of auto-applying.
Outcomes
- ✓Tier-1 enquiries shifted to self-serve lookup for most partners within the first month
- ✓Ops could see which partners hadn’t logged in yet and nudge them with one email template
- ✓Documented when to graduate to custom auth or React if partner count or rules outgrew Softr
Constraints & non-negotiables
Limits shape what ships now vs later — these were ours on this job.
- · No SSO in v1—magic links and strong password policy only
- · Peak season freeze on schema changes for six weeks after launch
Phases
Order and emphasis change by client — this is how this one ran.
- 1
Weeks 1–2 · Permissions & data model
Field glossary, role matrix, kill list of fields partners must never see.
- 2
Weeks 3–5 · Portal build
Softr screens, forms writing to the right tables, approval flow for sensitive updates.
- 3
Weeks 6–7 · Pilot cohort
Five partners live; fix confusing labels and broken mobile layouts.
- 4
Week 8 · Rollout + training
Short Loom library for partners, cheat sheet for internal staff on handling edge cases.
What actually worked
Treating Airtable like a real database—single owner of schema changes, named views per role—meant the portal didn’t leak data by accident.
Real delivery patterns; names and details blended for confidentiality. Happy to walk through a comparable scope.