Set Up Your Customer Portal

Turn FabWise into your public storefront. A polished shop listing, a quote request form that drops leads into your inbox, and an optional careers page — all hosted by FabWise, no separate website to maintain.

Why it matters

Customers find shops by searching online, asking around, or being referred. When they find you, they need to know three things fast: what you can make, whether you're a fit for their project, and how to ask for a quote.

The Customer Portal is a public page on fabwise.app that answers all three. It lives at fabwise.app/shop/your-shop-name, looks like a real shop website, and feeds every quote request straight into your FabWise Leads inbox.

You can run it as your only web presence, or you can use it alongside your existing website to handle inbound quote requests.

Setup takes about 30 minutes if you have your photos and capabilities list ready.

What you get

• A public listing at fabwise.app/shop/your-slug with your logo, tagline, photos, capabilities, hours, and social links
• A Request a Quote form on the listing that creates a Lead in your admin Leads inbox
• An optional Careers page at fabwise.app/shop/your-slug/careers where you post jobs and collect applications
• A URL you can share — Google Business Profile, email signature, business cards, social posts

Your logo and brand color come from Company Settings (they're shared across your whole FabWise account). Everything else — tagline, photos, capabilities, hours — is portal-specific and configured here.

What you'll need before you start

• A short tagline (one sentence describing your shop)
• A paragraph or two of description
• 4–8 photos of your shop, work, equipment, or team
• Your capabilities list (welding, CNC, sheet metal, etc.)
• Materials you work with (steel, aluminum, etc.)
• Industries you serve (aerospace, automotive, medical, etc.)
• Certifications, if any (ISO 9001, AS9100, AWS, etc.)
• Business hours
• Social media URLs, if you have them

If you don't have all of this ready, you can still set up a basic portal in 5 minutes (steps 1–4) and fill in the rest later.

Step 1. Open the Customer Portal admin

1. Sign in to admin.fabwise.app as an account owner.
2. Click Customer Portal in the left navigation. (It's a top-level item — not under Settings.)
3. Click Edit in the top right.

You're now in the portal editor. Changes save when you click Save; the Cancel button discards anything you haven't saved.

Step 2. Choose your portal URL

The portal URL is fabwise.app/shop/your-slug. The slug is the part you control.

1. In the Publishing card, find Portal URL Slug.
2. Type a short, readable slug. Use lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens — no spaces or special characters. Examples: acme-metalworks, northsidefab, precision-shop-123.
3. Click Save.

Pick something you can say out loud. "Go to fabwise dot app slash shop slash acme-metalworks" is easier than "fabwise dot app slash shop slash a-c-m-e-underscore-metal-w-o-r-k-s." Slugs can be changed later, but every time you change them, every link you've shared stops working — pick one you're willing to live with.

Step 3. Fill in branding

The Branding card has two fields:

• Tagline — one sentence customers see at the top of your portal. Examples: "Custom metal fabrication and welding since 1985." "Precision CNC machining for aerospace and defense." "Family-owned sheet metal shop serving Atlanta for three generations."
• Description — a paragraph or two. Tell customers what makes your shop different. Quality, experience, equipment, response time, geography — pick the two or three things you want them to remember.

Your logo and brand color show up automatically — those come from Company Settings. If you haven't set them yet, do that first: Admin → Settings → Company.

Step 4. Add photos

Photos sell. A portal with no photos looks abandoned.

1. In the Photos card, click Choose Files.
2. Select 4–8 images. Each should be a JPEG or PNG, ideally 1200 pixels wide or larger.

What to photograph:

• Your shop floor with equipment visible
• Recent finished work, especially impressive or visually distinctive pieces
• Your team at work (with permission)
• The front of your building, if it's well-marked
• A close-up of a clean weld or precision cut

Avoid: blurry phone snapshots, photos of empty floors, anything taken with a flash. If you don't have photos yet, a decent smartphone in good lighting beats nothing.

Step 5. Set capabilities, materials, industries, and certifications

The Capabilities card has four checklists. Customers use these to filter shops, and search engines use them to match your portal to relevant searches.

Be honest. Don't check every box — check only what you actually do regularly and do well.

• Capabilities: services you offer (Welding, CNC Machining, Sheet Metal, Laser Cutting, Plasma, Waterjet, Bending, Rolling, Powder Coating, Assembly, Prototyping, Production Runs)
• Materials: what you work with (Steel, Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Brass, Copper, Titanium, Plastic, Carbon Fiber)
• Industries Served: which industries you regularly take work from (Aerospace, Automotive, Construction, Energy, Medical, Marine, Manufacturing, Agriculture, Defense, Food & Beverage)
• Certifications: quality standards you hold (ISO 9001, AS9100, ISO 13485, AWS Certified, ASME Certified, NADCAP, ITAR Registered)

Don't check certifications you don't actually hold. Customers ask for proof on first contact, and getting caught padding a list ends conversations.

Step 6. Add business hours

The Business Hours card has a row per day of the week.

For each day:

• Open / Close: set your hours.
• Closed: check this if you're not open at all that day.
• By Appt: check this if customers need to schedule before coming in.

Customers see your hours on the portal listing. If you don't list hours, your portal looks less credible — fill them in.

Step 7. Social links (optional)

If you have a Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube presence, paste the URLs in the Social Links card. Each one shows up as an icon on your portal. Leave blank what you don't have — empty entries don't show.

A shop with a few good Instagram posts of recent work often gets more inbound interest than a shop with a polished website. If you've been posting work to social, link it.

Step 8. Search settings (optional)

The Search card controls how your portal shows up in Google and other search engines.

• Meta Description: a one-to-two sentence summary search engines display under your portal in results. Defaults to your description if blank. Write something different here if you want a punchier search snippet.
• Keywords: comma-separated phrases customers might search for. Examples: "metal fabrication, welding, custom parts, Atlanta." Mainly useful for our internal portal directory — Google itself mostly ignores keyword meta tags.

If you're not sure what to put here, leave it blank. Your tagline, description, and capabilities give search engines plenty to work with.

Step 9. Publishing — choose what's live

The Publishing card has three toggles. Each one is independent.

• Enable portal — turn on the quote request form. Anyone with the URL can request a quote. You need this on for the portal to do anything useful.
• Public listing — list your portal in the FabWise shop directory. Other people can find you by searching capabilities, industries, or location. Turn this off if you only want to share the URL privately.
• Careers page — publish a public careers page at /shop/your-slug/careers and let people apply to jobs you post. See the Careers Setup help article for the full job-posting flow.

The most common combinations:

If Public listing is on but Enable portal is off, FabWise warns you — a portal that's listed publicly but can't accept quote requests is a confusing experience.

Click Save when you're done.

Step 10. Preview your portal

After saving, click View Portal at the top of the page. Your portal opens in a new tab at fabwise.app/shop/your-slug.

Walk through it as if you were a customer who'd never heard of your shop:

• Does the tagline and first photo make me want to keep reading?
• Can I tell what you make from the first screen?
• Are the capabilities I care about listed?
• Is the Request a Quote button obvious?

If any of those is no, go back to the editor and tighten it.

Where leads land

When a customer submits the quote request form on your portal, FabWise creates a Lead in your account. To see incoming leads:

1. Go to Admin → Leads.
2. New leads are at the top of the list.
3. Click a lead to see the customer's contact info, project description, and any files they uploaded.

Leads include:

• Customer name, email, phone
• Company (if provided)
• Project description (free text)
• File attachments (drawings, photos, spec sheets — if uploaded)

You can mark a lead as Accepted (you're going to quote it) or Rejected (not a fit). Accepted leads turn into Customer and Job records you can then track inside FabWise.

For the full lead-management workflow, see the Managing Leads help article.

Sharing your portal URL

Once your portal is live, share the URL everywhere customers find shops:

• Email signature — put Request a quote: fabwise.app/shop/your-slug under your name
• Google Business Profile — set the portal URL as your website
• Business cards — print the short portal URL, not your long contact info
• Social media bios — link to your portal as your "website"
• Existing website — if you keep one, put a "Request a Quote" button that links to /shop/your-slug/quote
• Vendor directories, trade association listings, industry referral sites — same pattern; your portal URL is the canonical link

If you change your slug later, every link you've shared breaks. Pick a slug you can live with and don't change it casually.

Tips for a portal that actually wins work

• Keep the tagline boringly specific. "Custom metal fabrication for the Atlanta area" beats "Excellence in manufacturing solutions."
• Photos matter more than copy. A shop with eight photos of recent work beats a shop with a great paragraph and no images.
• Update photos quarterly. A portal that hasn't changed in two years signals a shop that hasn't either.
• Don't list every capability — list your real ones. A shop that claims twelve capabilities looks less credible than a shop that focuses on four it does well.
• List hours and answer the phone during them. A lead that submits a quote request and doesn't hear back in 24 hours assumes you're not interested.

Troubleshooting

My portal URL goes to a "Not found" page

Two possibilities. First, check that Public listing is on — a portal with public listing off isn't reachable at the public URL. Second, check that your portal_slug is filled in — without a slug, there's no URL at all.

I changed my slug and old links don't work anymore

This is expected. Slug changes don't redirect old URLs. Update wherever you'd previously shared the old URL: email signatures, Google Business, social bios, etc.

A lead came in but I didn't get a notification

Lead notifications come via email to account owners and admins. Check spam — there are no admin-side notification settings to toggle today.

I want to disable the portal temporarily

Uncheck Enable portal in the Publishing card and save. The public page still shows but the Request a Quote button disappears. Re-check it to bring leads back on.

I want to take the portal down entirely

Uncheck Public listing and Enable portal both, and save. The portal URL returns a Not found page. Your settings are preserved — re-enable any time.

Where to find it

• Admin path: Admin → Customer Portal
• Who can edit: account owners and admins
• Public URL pattern: fabwise.app/shop/your-slug
• Quote form URL: fabwise.app/shop/your-slug/quote
• Careers URL (if enabled): fabwise.app/shop/your-slug/careers
• Lead inbox: Admin → Leads