Welcome to the world of automation! This article introduces Zapier and how it can be used with your marketplace. The next article in the series shows you how to get started, and the following one dives deep into how to use the Zapier and Sharetribe integration.

Prefer to get your hands dirty? Pick one of our tutorials and templates to start automating your marketplace operations today.

If you ever wanted to do something in one software as a result of an event happening in another software, then Zapier is the tool for you. Zapier connects different apps and services to automate repetitive processes without any coding. It enables different software to communicate and work together. The Zapier and Sharetribe integration connects your marketplace to thousands of apps and can be used to automate countless different workflows between these apps and your marketplace.

The Zapier and Sharetribe integration can help you automate repetitive administrative tasks and create powerful new features for your users -- all without having to write any code

While Sharetribe handles the core functionality of your marketplace, Zapier acts as a bridge, connecting your platform to thousands of other tools (like Mailchimp, Stripe, Google Sheets, and Slack). By moving data automatically between systems, you can create seamless workflows that save you time and enhance the user experience.

The Zapier and Sharetribe integration can do various kinds of repetitive work for you automatically. The integration can recognize when a new user signs up, glean their contact data from your marketplace database, and send it to another system, like a mailing list tool, for ingestion. This task now gets done automatically and instantly, anytime of the year, day or night.

Here is a breakdown of just some examples of what you can achieve, categorized by the problems these automations solve. You can find links to all of these tutorials from our collection of tutorials.

Your marketplace comes with built-in email notifications, but sometimes you need more immediate alerts or specific updates for your admin team. Zapier allows you to expand your communication channels to include SMS or team-chat alerts (like Slack) based on marketplace activity.

What you can do:

Many marketplaces rely on subscription models or vetting processes. Zapier allows you to control who can do what on your platform based on actions taken in external systems (like a payment on a landing page or a form submission).

What you can do:

Manual data entry is prone to errors and eats up valuable time. A classic use case for Zapier is taking data from your Sharetribe marketplace and instantly piping it into your CRM, accounting software, or marketing tools.

What you can do:

You can use Zapier to smooth out the actual buying and selling experience, particularly for niche marketplaces dealing with digital goods or tight schedules.

What you can do:

While the Zapier integration is powerful, it is important to understand what it cannot do.

Get automation-inspired by our Zapier templates and tutorials.

Zapier is a no-code software tool. It provides an interface where you configure automatic workflows called Zaps without any coding. These automations begin with triggers in an application, such as an email being received in your Google inbox or a new form being submitted via Typeform.

The possible triggers depend on the kind of events that take place in the application. Triggers from your Sharetribe marketplace, for example, are events that happen in your marketplace, such as a user signing up or a new listing being posted. With Zapier, these events serve as the initiation, or trigger, for an automatic workflow, or Zap.

Zaps progress through actions. Actions are the changes performed by Zapier in your marketplace or another application after the trigger event occurs. Triggers start the Zap, actions determine what actually happens during the Zap workflow.

Zaps can have many actions weaving together different apps and data or only only a single action. In your Sharetribe marketplace, Zapier can perform actions like changing the published state of a listing or retrieving a customer’s contact email from the marketplace database.

Actions are commonly used to transfer information from one application to another as part of the Zap automation. This is done in Zapier by mapping the data from one application to the fields available in another application. By manipulating data from one application to another in this way, you are creating an integration between these different systems, configuring them to work together through Zapier.

Learn how to get started with Zapier by creating your Zapier account and connecting it to your Sharetribe marketplace.

If you want to jump straight into creating Zaps, check out our templates and tutorials for inspiration on guidance for automating your workflow.