Connecting Buyers (public app) to ONE Seller (admin app) at sign-up

I’ve been using an unwieldy setup and onboarding process for a sales tool. Individual Sellers have a specific customer base, not a global pool of Customers.

I’d love to roll my fragmented process into one sheet but I haven’t found a way to easily connect Sellers with their respective Buyers and vice versa.

Sharing my thought process so far. If you’re working on something similar or ran into the same roadblocks, chime in?


A. Admin App

User: Individual Seller.

Currently, there’s an Order Form tab where components need to remain customizable to meet the Seller’s specific offerings and competencies. E.g., some sellers deliver, others offer pick-up only so the related component would be removed.

Relatedly, most Sellers prefer to manage stock availability and add new products from within the app. That option would also need to be preserved.

Potential Approach:

  • Enable email whitelist.
  • Per-user data filtering on Seller-specific lists
  • Per-user screen for Order Form
  • Generate unique QR codes in sheet for Seller (maybe)

B. Public App

Users: Seller’s specific customer base. These Buyers should only see data specific to their Seller, not all Sellers.

Potential Approach:

  • Enable email whitelist.
  • Per-user screen for Order Form
  • Filtered in-line lists to show correct Seller.

C. Connecting Buyer with Seller

Buyers choose from a list of Sellers during sign-up

  • Option A: Choice component. Easy to implement but Buyer may very well choose another Seller. Seller loses their existing or potential customer. Will get messy quickly.

  • Option B: Seller shares a unique identifier with Buyer who’s signing up for the app. Buyer inputs identifier when signing up. Requires exact match and relies on Buyer recollection.

Would be awesome…

Auto-generate QR codes for signed-up Sellers. Seller shares QR code with Buyer who then uses it during sign-up. To my knowledge, no way to pass encoded info back to Glide to match Seller with Buyer. Sigh.

Double awesome…

Option to add components to sign-in screen to enable multiple entry options:

  • [Login]
  • Sign up as Customer
  • Sign up as Seller

/ FIN

Just some random thoughts on this. Before I read it, I had thought of the unique code idea to link the buy to the seller.

  • You could have a screen with a text entry field set to fill a user specific column. This entry field will be used to enter a code.
  • Then use that user specific column to create a multiple relation to the sellers list. You could then display an inline list of the matching seller that matches that code.
  • Alternately, you could make the relation a single relation, then use a lookup to pull back the Seller name.
  • Once a match is found, you could display a form button and have the buyer click on the form to submit their email and the seller code to a sheet.
  • Finally, you could build a relation and lookup in the sellers sheet or products sheet to link to the form response sheet and pull back an array list of all buyers emails associated with that seller.
  • Then you can use the list of emails to filter by signed in user.

This should allow for a single buyer to be linked to multiple sellers.

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Thank you for your thoughts! Admin rights and per-user data is new territory so I’m… digesting.

There’s currently one global app. If I can get this working, I plan to activate all Admin functionalities in it, then duplicate, and set up the duplicate as the Public App based on @George_B tips here. Guidance from Glide points to the reverse process so I’m a bit conflicted.

For now, I have a duplicate of the app where I’d set up a “Seller” sheet and “Buyer” sheet. That seems aligned with your thoughts so far.

You could have a screen with a text entry field set to fill a user specific column. This entry field will be used to enter a code.

In terms of signup flow, since this text field can’t be built into the main sign-in/up screen, how would I force a Buyer to start on that screen and not meander to others? Maybe other screens can be “locked” until they’ve signed up?

If I understand correctly, you’re suggesting that the Buyer (public) App would be set to public with email and this process is a substitute for the standard sign-up/login screen, correct?

Shouldn’t matter which way you as far as creating one app and splitting it. Whatever seems more efficient for you. In the long run it would be more ideal if you could keep all functionality in one single app, but that all depends on your situation.

To control the user meandering around other tabs, you could create a relation from the user profile sheet to that form response sheet that contains the buyer and seller information. Then you could use that to set visibility on all of your components on each tab. If the relation is not empty, then show the components, otherwise hide them. You could add some text that’s only shown when the relation is empty to indicate that the buyer needs to first select a seller. Otherwise with my earlier post, any lists will be empty because the user will not be part of the filter. There’s a lot of ways to handle it, but I think it would be possible. You can’t stop them from clicking on other tabs, but you can prevent them from seeing info on those tabs.

Thank you for this Jeff! I’ll give it a go, one piece at a time.

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