Welcome to a practical Zapier tutorial! In this guide, we'll go through how you can use Zapier to enable email notifications about new transactions taking place on your marketplace.
A transaction is defined as any attempt to exchange value on the marketplace. This includes free messaging conversation threads, calendar bookings, purchases, price negotiations and custom transaction processes you have on your marketplace.
Building email notifications for new transactions can help you keep track of how your marketplace activity evolves.
This email notification acts as an extension of the built-in email notifications that already exist on the platform, which are directed to end users of the marketplace.
About Zapier
Zapier is a powerful and versatile tool for integrating different tools into your marketplace. You can learn more about Zapier in our introductory article or through this brief video from Zapier.
If you haven’t read the introduction and the action/event Zapier articles, we encourage you to do so to better understand how Zapier works. But if you want to dive straight into action, feel free to read on!
What you need for this tutorial
External accounts
Zapier Account
Create a Zapier account if you don’t already have one. You can sign up at www.zapier.com.
During registration, Zapier may ask which apps you plan to use. You can enter Sharetribe at this point or add it later.
Gmail (or another Zapier-supported email service)
For sending out the email notifications
How to set up your marketplace
Here is how you should set things up in brief:
Marketplace Activity
Your marketplace needs to have at least one recent transaction for this tutorial.
If your marketplace doesn't have a recent transaction yet, go on and perform one, to make sure there's test data for this Zap.
With these pieces in place, let's get started!
IMPORTANT: Make sure the transaction is exactly in the state you want the notifications for (i.e., it was just paid for). This allows you to only get notifications for transactions that have gone through the payment stage, if you want to have such a limitation.
Getting your Integration API key from Console
You'll need Integration API keys to connect your Sharetribe marketplace to Zapier.
Navigate to Build > Advanced > Applications.
Click on "+ Add a new application".
Give the application a descriptive name (like Zapier), and select "Integration API".
Click "Add application".
Important: Copy and paste the Client ID and Client secret to a safe place, like a password manager.
IMPORTANT: Think of the Client ID and Secret as a sort of a password to your marketplace that can be used to access your marketplace data through other services. Note that you won’t be able to ever see the Client secret to this application again in the Console under any circumstances. Make sure you copy it to a secure place. If you lose it, you will need to create a new application.
Creating the Zap, step by step
(Optional) Importing the Zap template
Go to www.zapier.com and log in with your account (or create a free one if you don't already have one).
Open the pre-made Zap for email notifications for admins about new transactions.
Click on "Try this Zap."
Step 1: Selecting the trigger: New dispute on the marketplace
First, we'll set up the trigger, i.e., what kind of event starts this Zap. This Zap will trigger from a transaction transition to a paid state.
Note that if you want to get notified for all new transactions, including message exchanges and transactions that were not yet paid, you can choose 'New transaction' in this step, and skip the next step of this Zap.
In the 'Setup' section, connect your Sharetribe account by entering your Client ID and Client secret
As the Trigger event, choose 'Transaction Events'
Click ‘Continue’ to move to the ‘Configure’ section
Choose ‘Transaction transitioned’ as the ‘Event type’
Click ‘Continue’ to move to the ‘Test’ section
Test the trigger, and make sure it finds a recent transaction transition from your marketplace, where the last transition is confirmed payment
Click ‘Continue with the selected record’ to move to the next step
Step 2 (optional): Use a filter to narrow down potential events to paid transactions only
This step is optional. It is for filtering the transaction transitions so that you only get notified when a payment has successfully been made. Without this step, you would get notified about all new transactions on your marketplace, including those without payment, which could fill your inbox rather quickly.
Edit Step 2 of the Zap
From the pop up menu, select 'Filter'
In the 'Configure & test' section, fill in the following under 'Only continue if':
1. Transaction last transition
(Text) Exactly matches
transition/confirm-payment
Step 3: Send an email
Finally, we'll send out an email from your email account to the email address(es) to which you want to receive the notification. Note that you can send an email to yourself, so if you want to use the same email account for both sending and receiving, that's totally fine.
As the application, select 'Gmail' or the email service of your choice
Fill in the details of the email. This varies depending on what email service you use and what you want the email notification to say. For example you might fill in the following:
To: [Your own address for receiving notifications]
Subject: A new transaction took place on your marketplace!
Body: A new transaction took place on your marketplace. Go to https://console.sharetribe.com/transactions to view its details.
Tip: If you want, you can also include information about the user, listing, or transaction in the email body. For this, depending on the information you want to include, you may need to add an additional step after step 1, which would be 'Show user', 'Show listing', or 'Show transaction', depending on what you're looking to achieve. If you do this, you can use the Plus (+) sign in the email body field to add things such as names, titles, prices, and so on in the email.
What other admin notifications can be built?
As a marketplace founder, you may be interested in being notified of different kinds of activities that take place on your marketplace. New users signing up, new listings being created, or new disputes taking place. You can set up email notifications for each of these.
Finally, it's good to know that if you want to create multiple new admin notification email automations, you'd need to create and enable a separate Zap for each of them.
Final thoughts
Thanks for reading this tutorial about creating a Zap for new admin email notifications about new transactions!
Learn more about the Sharetribe-Zapier integration or review all our Zapier templates for automating marketplace workflows.
Please get in touch with us from your Console or from the bottom right section of this page from the chat widget if you have any questions about this guide, or anything else. We'll be happy to help!