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Email notifications
Email notifications are messages users receive when something important happens on the marketplace (e.g., the user has received a message or a payment on the platform). Notifications get delivered via email.
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Sharetribe Flex sends email notifications to users when specific events occur in your marketplace. There are two categories of email notifications in Flex: built-in email notifications, which relate to user account management, and transaction process emails, which get triggered at specific stages of transactions. For instance, an built-in email notification gets sent when a user changes their email or password or when they need to verify a new email address. A transaction process email can inform the user of a successful payment or a new booking request.
Enable email notifications
Email notifications are automatically enabled in your test and dev marketplaces. However, in your live marketplace, you must configure outgoing email settings for email notifications to work.
Users will not receive email notifications until they have verified their email address. Sharetribe does not send emails to unconfirmed addresses to avoid people flagging those as spam emails, as that can hurt your marketplace's ability to send mail to legitimate users.
Do note that built-in email notifications can not be disabled.
Built-in email notifications
There are seven built-in email notifications, all of which are related to your users' account management. Use the Console to manage the built-in email notifications. You can customise built-in emails using the Built-in email template editor in the Flex Console. You can find the editor in the Console under the Build section.
The email templates use the Handlebars template language. In each template, you can use a set of predefined context variables (such as the name and email of the recipient). You can find all context variables to the right of the built-in email template editor. You can access user extended data through the context variables, if you want to customise email content further.
The built-in email template editor does not include a visual editor, but if you want, you can design your email in any WYSIWYG email editor you find online and paste the resulting HTML into the built-in email editor. You can then preview the email by sending it to your email address by clicking on "preview" and pressing on the "Send a test email" button.
For more information on how to use the Handlebars to customise email templates, see our reference article on email templates.
Transaction notifications
Transaction notifications inform the user of events related to the transaction process. These notifications usually relate to information about bookings and payments, in contrast to built-in email notifications, which are typically actionable and related to account management.
You can update, add, or delete transaction notifications by editing the transaction process. The template sub-directory in the transaction process directory contains all the transaction notification email templates. All transaction notifications use the Handlebars templating language and can be edited similarly to built-in email templates.
In addition to making changes to the content of the transaction notifications, you can change when email notifications get sent. A transaction notification must always be associated with a specific transition. When a specific transition transitions, the transaction notification associated with it is triggered.
Read more about transaction notifications in our tutorial on how to add new email notifications.
Custom notifications through Zapier
Sometimes the built-in and transaction notifications are not enough, and you might need more control over what triggers an email. Examples include notifying your marketplace operators when a user submits a listing for review or sending a provider an email once their listing is published. As neither of these actions is transaction related, you can not trigger them as transaction notifications. Instead, you must listen to events and trigger an email to respond to the correct event.
For building custom email notifications, we recommend connecting your app to Zapier. You can use Zapier to listen for events in your marketplace and react to them using different actions. Zapier also supports sending text messages instead of emails. Read more about Zapier in our guide on how to set up and use Zapier.
If you are unsure how to approach a Zapier integration, do not hesitate to reach out to our support team through one of our official support channels. We will be happy to help you figure out your specific use case and give you some suggestions for implementation.