Identity verification helps build trust and safety in your marketplace. By verifying the identities of your users, you can ensure that people on your platform are who they claim to be. This can protect your community from fraud, improve trust between users, and help you comply with legal or financial regulations where applicable.

Many types of marketplaces can benefit from identity verification. Service marketplaces -- such as those for home repairs, coaching, or rentals -- can require providers to verify their identity before they can list their services. Product or peer-to-peer rental marketplaces may ask users to verify themselves before they can make a booking or initiate a transaction. In regulated industries, such as vehicle rentals or financial services, identity verification may even be required by law.

You can set up identity verification without coding on your Sharetribe marketplace. It involves connecting your marketplace to a third-party identity verification service (such as iDenfy) through Zapier and configuring your marketplace’s access control permissions to restrict actions until verification is complete.

This guide walks you through how to add an identity verification process, on a high level, using Zapier and iDenfy. The steps are outlined in more detail in two separate tutorials. You can find part 1 here, and part 2 here.

Before adding identity verification, prepare your marketplace by adjusting its access settings according to how you want to use identity verification. In your Sharetribe Console, go to Build → General → Access control.

Here, you can restrict certain actions, such as joining the marketplace, posting or viewing listings, or initiating transactions, until a user’s identity has been verified. For example, you might allow browsing without verification but require ID verification before a provider can publish listings or before a customer can make a purchase.

These restrictions ensure that verification happens at the right moment in your user journey. You’ll later connect these permissions to your Zapier workflow so that verified users automatically gain access once their identity has been confirmed.

Depending on the identity verification tool you're using, you may need to set up at least two separate pages with the Pages editor: one that the users will see if the identity verification succeeded and another to show if the verification failed.

These pages are required for the Zapier automation to show your users whether the identity verification succeeded or not. These content pages can be very simple in structure. essentially one section with a title and a description is enough here.

You may want to advertise the verification process and share more information in other content pages, like your landing page or FAQ.

To handle the identity verification itself, you can connect your marketplace to a Zapier-supported third party identity verification service.

The Sharetribe team has tested several and believes that iDenfy is a great choice for this use case. iDenfy has great international coverage and offers a well functioning Zapier app.

Start by creating an account at iDenfy and obtaining your API credentials. Then, go to Zapier and connect iDenfy as a new app connection. iDenfy’s Zapier app supports creating new identity verification sessions, checking verification status, and detecting completed verifications. Once connected, you’ll be able to automatically generate a verification link for each new user on your marketplace and later act on the verification result.

Next, create a Zap that starts the verification process when a new user joins your marketplace.

We have a full step-by-step tutorial for this Zap here, but if you're familiar with Zapier, there's a summary of the Zap below.

In short, in Zapier, choose Sharetribe → User created as your trigger. Then, add iDenfy → KYC – Create Identity Verification as your next action. Map the user’s names to the iDenfy fields, link the URL of the two Pages you set up in step #1 to the Success and Failed/Unverified URLs, and set the Client Id to the user’s Sharetribe ID so you can later match verification results to the correct account. Finally, set up the country in which your marketplace operates and which documents you accept. iDenfy will generate a verification link.

Finally, add an Gmail step (or another email app) to send the user a message containing this link and instructions to complete verification. This Zap ensures every new user automatically receives a secure, unique verification request right after sign-up—no manual intervention needed.

After iDenfy has reviewed the user’s documents, you’ll need to update their marketplace permissions automatically. You'll need to create a second Zap for this. Again, we have a full step-by-step tutorial for this here, and a short summary of the Zap below.

First, set iDenfy → KYC – New Identity Verification (Polling) as the trigger. This event fires whenever a verification is completed. After this, add steps for KYC - Get Identification Data and KYC - Get Identification Status. These give you additional information about the recent identification.

Then, create a Sharetribe-powered action "Show User". Here, you'll use the "Customer ID Number" from the "Get Identification Data" step as the User ID, to pull up the user details from the Sharetribe marketplace.

After this, set up a Filter by Zapier step. Here, you can set the conditions on when the user approval takes place. For instance, you can set up a filter that checks that 1) The first name of the user on the marketplace matches the name on their ID; 2) The last name of the user on the marketplace matches their ID; and 3) The approval step was completed successfully.

Then, add a step that grants the user the permissions you want to grant them. Add a Sharetribe → Approve user action if you require manual approval for new users, followed by Sharetribe → Update permissions to grant verified users the ability to post listings or initiate transactions, if applicable. Finally, send a confirmation email to the user, letting them know their identity has been verified and they now have full access. Together, these Zaps close the loop between identity verification and marketplace permissions, automatically unlocking trusted participation for verified users.

By this point, your identity verification process is done. Make sure to test it yourself, to ensure it works exactly as you'd like it to. You can use the iDenfy dashboard to monitor recent identity verifications, and you can also set up the Zaps to send you an email every time a new identity verification is completed.

That's it! Hopefully this high-level guide helps you set up identity verification on your marketplace without issues. If you want, you can check out these articles for further information - some of them were already linked in this tutorial above: