Email texts refer to the text content of every email notification sent by your marketplace. There are two types of notifications: built-in email notifications for account management events and transaction email notifications for events during a transaction.

You can learn more about what you can do with this feature in this article. The rest of this guide teaches you how to use the Email texts editor.

Texts from both types of email notifications are found in your Email text editor in Console>Build>Content>Email texts. Here you can edit every piece of text or punctuation used in your marketplace’s email notifications.

Best practice for editing Email texts is to identify the email you want to edit, identify the part of the email you want to edit, and then edit the text content of that email part. We’ll walk through how to do each step in detail below. First, let’s understand how Email texts work.

The editor contains texts for every email that your marketplace can send. The texts are broken down by the email being sent and the different pieces of text in the email, like the title or call to action button. There are multiple different texts for every email, as every email is composed of multiple sections. We discuss the different sections of an email below.

All the content of your notification emails exists in the Email text file seen in the Console editor. The entire file is enclosed in a set of curly brackets { }, an open bracket { at the beginning and a closing bracket } at the end.

Each piece of email text is separated by a comma (,). Most take up one line of the editor, but some are longer and take up two lines.

Each piece of Email text contains two parts: a key and a value. The “key” points to the email and the place in the email where the text appears. The “value” is the text that actually appears in the email and part described by the key. Both the key and the value are enclosed by double quotation marks (“ ”). They are separated by a colon (:).

The key and value together are an Email text. Every unique Email text is separated by a comma (,).

Now that we know how Email texts work, let’s identify the email we want to change.

Before looking at texts, you will want to know what email notification you are editing. The Email texts editor does not have information about who receives the email and under what circumstances it is sent. To understand this context, you should:

Remember you do not need to edit every email. Certain transaction emails may never be sent by your marketplace if you are not using their transaction process. Others may not be sent very frequently or their default texts suit you fine.

To know what email and what text within the email you are editing, you need to look at the key. The first part of the key, before the period, points to the email you are editing. This is the unique email name.

Visit this article for a list of all the emails that your marketplace can send, which will help you find the email you want to edit. Read below to better understand the section of the email you are editing.

The second part of the key (after the period) tells you what section of that email you are editing. This maps to a specific area within the email where the text will appear.

Most email notifications include these sections:

In addition, most notifications have their unique sections too. For example, "UserJoined.Greeting" refers to the initial paragraph of the welcome email, while "PurchaseNewOrder.MarkAsShipped" refers to a paragraph that, by default, reminds the seller about shipping the product the customer ordered.

Certain parts have affixes at their start or end that further contextualize the email text. These affixes account for different choices providers and customers make during a transaction, such as a customer choosing if they want to pick up their order or have it delivered during a product purchase transaction.

To illustrate different sections of an email, look at the image below. The email is “PurchaseNewOrder,” the email notification sent to the provider after the customer purchases from them.

The actual text of an email notification exists in the value part of an Email text. Whereas the key points to where the text goes, the value is the actual text that gets populated there. Editing the value changes what text appears in your email.

The value is always enclosed in double quotation marks (“ “). The value is always written after the colon (:) that follows a key. A comma (,) is placed after the quotation-mark-enclosed value, denoting the end of the Email text piece.

To change the text, click into the editor and add, remove, or modify the words, phrases, and punctuation to suit your goals. After making a change, press the “Save changes” button to save the change.

In addition to text, numbers, and punctuation, you can use simple and complex arguments in your Email texts. Arguments allow you to express what text should appear depending on the context of the email. For example, you can use arguments to pluralize words so that your emails show the right texts for whatever situation occurred in your marketplace.

You can learn more about arguments and how to use them in this article

You can use the search text function (Ctrl+F on Windows and Cmd+F on Mac) to help you find the Email text you want to edit. Make sure you are clicked into the editor (cursor appears in the editor) to trigger a search of all the Email texts. Press “Enter” to search for the text you entered into the search tool.

If you are making many changes, consider using a third-party editor for the task. Plain text editors like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac have more advanced features like Find and Replace to speed up your work.

To edit Email texts in a third-party editor:

Yes, you can, but it requires you to customize your marketplace with code. With Sharetribe Developer Platform you can use advanced tools like the CLI to edit your transaction process, including adding or removing any email notification that you want.

No. You must use another tool for sending such emails. Your marketplace only sends email notifications by default. To send different kinds of emails, such as a newsletter or support emails, you must use a different email sending service. You could, for instance, use Mailchimp to send a newsletter. There are multiple ways to integrate such tools: you can manually populate your user data into the third-party tools, use Zapier to send the data there automatically, or make a bespoke integration with custom coding.

By default, you can only send email notifications in a single language because there is only a single Email text file. This file may be in any language you want. If you want to send email notifications in multiple languages, then you will need to work with custom code to create email notifications in additional languages.

If you remove an Email text, then the removed Email text will revert to a hard-coded text in English. Your emails either use the Email texts you setup in your editor, or an English default for any missing texts. This is true even if you only remove part of a text, such as only the key or only the value.

Yes, you can find it here.