After searching for our test listing as a customer and viewing the listing page, we test a transaction. Transactions in your marketplace occur anytime a customer and provider interact, such as through messages, booking requests, inquiries, or purchase orders. We’ll test how that works in this tutorial through a booking request.

On the listing page, we’ll use the right-hand order panel to start a transaction.

If your test marketplace is about making bookings, then you’ll select a start date and end date for the booking period. You will select starting time and ending time if you’re working with hourly bookings. The calculated price will be a function of the booking length (number of time units) multiplied by the price per time unit. You may have nightly, daily, or hourly units depending on choices made when creating your Console account.

Product listings are instead asked to select their fulfilment preference if both pickup and shipping were enabled by a provider. If only one of these options is available to a customer, this is made visible in the order panel. Customers select how many units of the product they wish to purchase up-to the amount of available stock. The calculated price is a function of unit price multiplied by the number of units, plus any shipping fees that apply.

Customers looking at listings where no online payment is involved are invited to send an inquiry.

Regardless of the listing type that you are testing as a customer, the next page you see is the checkout page.

The checkout page lets the customer review their order, enter payment details, add a message to the provider, and confirm.

Since we are testing, we need to use test payment data. Real payment data, like your own credit card details, will not work in Test environments.

Again, you can use the “Fill in test details” button to quickly fill in test credit card details.

If you are purchasing a product that needs to be shipped, your order page will include a form for shipping address.

At the bottom of the order page, you’ll have the option to send a message. If you are starting a transaction on a listing where no online payment is accepted, then you must send a message as part of the inquiry.

After confirming the transaction, you are redirected to the order details page. Here you can review your order, see what has happened in the transaction so far, see what next steps are in the transaction, read past messages, and send new messages to the provider.

Time to switch back to our provider session to see how providers experience and engage with customer requests.

In the browser or window running your provider session, refresh the page. Make sure you are still logged into your test provider account. If not, log back in by pressing “Log in”.

Press “Inbox” from your top bar. This takes you to the Inbox page, where you can find all requests you received about your listing. There you will see the request you just made as a test customer.

Clicking on the order opens the order page from the provider’s perspective. Different listing types require different next steps from the provider after a customer initiates a transaction. Providers selling products are told to deliver the product and indicate when done. When there is no online payment, providers should respond to the customer’s inquiry using the built-in messaging system. As a provider in the booking flow, our next available action is to accept or decline the booking request.

You may also note the order breakdown in the right hand menu. In addition to call to action buttons, it contains information about the earnings they will make and the commission fee you are charging for that transaction. Your Test marketplace comes with a pre-configured fee of 10%, which is something you can change anytime from Console>Transactions>Commission.

Customers and providers conclude their transaction by leaving a review. Both parties in the transaction can leave a review. To test how reviews work, you’ll need to work through the transaction steps of the product or booking transaction.

In a booking transaction, customers and providers can leave a review starting 2 days after the booking period time has passed. In a product transaction, both parties can leave a review after the customer marks the order received. There is no review process in transactions only involving messaging.

You can learn more about the steps and stages involved in a transaction in this article.

In this tutorial, we are working with a booking transaction. To see how reviews work, we’ll need to wait for the booking period to conclude. The transaction will automatically update when the booking period ends, inviting both users to leave a review.

You can login as both the customer and the provider to check-out how this looks and works. One thing you’ll notice is that the reviews you leave are not published until both users complete and publish their review.

Reviews received are published to a user’s profile page. Reviews are also visible from the listing page of the provider for reviews of transactions originating from that listing.

This five part tutorial focused on testing the marketplace as a customer and provider. As a provider, we created a listing using the listing creation form, filling out different sections and fields depending on configurations in Console and publishing. Then, we tested the other side of the marketplace experience by searching and discovering the listing. Finally, we transacted, connecting the customer and provider through a booking, purchase, or inquiry in the Inbox.

You probably have lots of ideas on how you want to adjust the key features you just tested. The building tutorial will introduce you to how to use no-code tools to configure how your marketplace should look and work.

Get started with the building tutorial.