This article dives deep into how the Zapier and Sharetribe integration works. It introduces the different triggers and actions available in the integration and explains how they work and how to use them.

This article will use Zapier-specific terms like "triggers" and "actions." For a thorough review of these terms and concepts, review our introduction to the Zapier and Sharetribe integration.

Triggers are events that, when they occur, initiate a Zapier workflow. The Sharetribe-Zapier integration can recognize several different kinds of events in your marketplace and use them as triggers for a workflow.

There are 3 categories of triggers available: Listing events, User events, and Transaction events.

Think of Listing events as anything that happens to listings, which typically represent products, services, or items, on your marketplace:

User events are all about the actions of your marketplace users. These events can help you automate tasks related to the registration, updates, or deletion of user profiles.

Transaction events occur whenever two users interact through a listing, including events like starting a purchase, approving a sale, or leaving a review. Since transactions usually involve many steps (called “transitions”), you configure whether Zaps trigger at the beginning of a transaction or a later point.

Actions follow triggers. They determine what happens during a Zap. Zaps can have one action or many. The actions available to your Zap depends on the Zapier integration the application you want to use has built.

The Sharetribe-Zapier integration has two types of actions: Create actions and Search actions.

Create actions let you change the state of a user, listing, or transaction using the Zap. By default, these actions (specifically, the changes they cause) are only available to the marketplace admin through Console. Using these Zapier actions enables you to automate the task of completing these tasks in Console.

Create actions always need the ID of the resource (user, listing, or transaction) they should change.

The following Create actions are available:

Search actions look up a particular resource (user, listing, or transaction) in your marketplace and return all its information for use in your Zap. You need them because the Zap workflow is only aware of the information that has been explicitly given to it while, for your automation to work, you often need to bring in additional information to complete required steps.

To illustrate how to use a Search action, consider a Zap that sends an email reminder to a customer 24 hours before their booking. The Zap starts (triggers) when a transaction initiates, which makes data about the transaction, such as the booking start time, available to the Zap. To complete your Zap, you also need information about the user who made the booking, like their email. Search actions (in this case, the Show user action) find such needed information in your marketplace and return it to your Zap workflow for use in subsequent actions.

Search actions always need the ID of the resource (user, listing, or transaction) they should find and return information about.

The following Search actions exist:

Each Search action can be used to search and retrieve further more information about users, listings, and transactions by including relationships. Relationships allow you to include data related to the searched-for resource, but which is not directly stored to the resource itself.

Using Search actions brings in information about the user, listing, and/or transaction (and their relationships) into your Zap workflow that you can then use in subsequent actions.

Zapier has several actions to help you create more complicated workflows. You will use at least two frequently when working with Sharetribe: Filter and Formatter.

Filter actions specify the conditions under which the Zap should proceed or stop. This is necessary when you do not want a workflow to proceed under all conditions. A listing being created, for example, involves several different events on your marketplace. Filter actions can be used to specify what exact event is relevant to your workflow (and what events should be ignored).

Formatter actions format the data in your fields. You can use them to transform how the data looks or the format it takes. Consider booking start time, for example, which includes a lot of detail (year, month, day, and time of day down to the second). If you want to use this information in an email, likely you’ll want to make it more human-friendly (i.e. less detailed) and the Formatter action would be used to do so.

Here are a few additional things to keep in mind when working with Zapier.

To configure a trigger or action step, you always need to complete 3 parts in it: setup, configure, and test. The details of these parts differ based on what kind of app you are using, and what kind of trigger/action you are setting up. Below is one example of how these parts of the process work.

Setup involves choosing the app, the trigger or action you want to configure, and the account in that app. If you want to use one of the triggers or actions mentioned in this article, then you'll select Sharetribe as the app.

The setup screen. Here, you can see the following components:

(1) (Optional) Update. You'll only see this section if the app you're using has been updated. Follow the instructions to update the app, if you want. Updating the app is generally not needed, except if you want to take some newly released features into use.

(2) App selection. Here, you can choose which app to use for the trigger or for the action.

(3) Action event. This lets you choose what kind of trigger or action you want to use. In this screenshot, the setup screen is for actions; it will be slightly different for triggers.

(4) Account selection. Many apps require you to log in to a specific account to perform an action. You'll likely see some variation of this when setting up a step.

Next, you configure the trigger or action in the Configure section. You choose what exactly the Zap should be doing when the trigger or action happens.

The configuration screen. This will differ based on which trigger or action you are performing. Often, it will have at least the following kinds of components:

(1) A mandatory component. In this case, we're updating the permissions of a user in Sharetribe, so the action requires information about which user's rights to update. This part will differ based on what kind of action/trigger you're configuring.

(2) Optional components. Again, these differ based on what you're looking to do with the trigger/action. For example, here, we've told the step which user's permissions we want to update in step (1), and step (2) decides what specific permissions we want to update.

Finally, you must test that the chosen trigger or action can happen. Zapier pulls in test data from your marketplace, tries to perform the trigger or action, and tells you results. In order to complete this step, you must have relevant data in your marketplace for Zapier to perform the configured task. You can generate relevant data by testing your marketplace if you’re just starting out.

The test screen. Again, this will differ based on what you're testing, but generally, you'll see some variations of these components:

(1) Data in and data out selection. Here, you can see in the 'Data in' tab what kind of data the step used to perform the trigger or the action, and 'Data out' shows what the output is.

(2) Details of the data input or output. Here, you can make sure that the correct information was entered and/or given out by the step.

(3) Retest step or continue. Here, you can test the step again if you re-configure the step, or want to test it with some new data (for example, a different transaction or a different user of your marketplace). Alternatively, you can continue if everything in this step is performing as you need it to.

When you first start building your Zap, you will be working with your Test environment and the test data therein. Once this Zap is completed and you are ready to use it with your real users, you will need to connect it to your Live environment, in addition to setting it live in Zapier.

Therefore, marketplaces using Zapier in the Live environment should have at least two connections to Sharetribe in Zapier: a connection to the Test environment and a connection to the Live environment.

Connecting to your Live environment happens exactly the same way that connecting to your Test environment. The only difference is that you are working in your Live environment and using the Client ID and Client Secret that represent your Live environment. Review how to connect Zapier and Sharetribe.

When Sharetribe releases new functionality for the Sharetribe-Zapier integration, a new version of the integration is created. Zapier will prompt you when such an update is available. You can see this in the screenshots above -- in the component (1) of the first screenshot.

You must update your Zaps to use the newest version to take its new functionality into use. You will need to update the version in every step where you use Sharetribe as the Zapier app. This will be any step where you are using the Sharetribe actions or triggers listed in this article.

You may also need to re-connect your marketplace and Zapier when taking the new version into use. Review how to connect Zapier and Sharetribe.

Most Zaps are going to connect your marketplace with external software applications: something happens in one application, perform some change in the other application. An event on your marketplace can serve as the trigger for a Zap causing change or action in another system. Or, events in the external application can trigger a Zap that changes some state or information in your marketplace. Moreover, in your Zap, you can take actions changing something in Sharetribe and/or take actions that change something in a different software, perhaps using data from your Sharetribe marketplace via show actions.

The available triggers and actions for any given application depend on the integration that application has with Zapier. The best way to see the possible triggers and actions Zapier supports in an application you want to use is to search for that application on Zapier's homepage. The resulting page includes a “Trigger” and "Action" section showcasing what the integration can do. It is a good idea to check these before building your Zap to make sure Zapier can achieve what you need it to do in the external application.

You now have all the conceptual knowledge needed to build your first Zapier workflow. Check out our templates and tutorials for inspiration on guidance for automating your workflow.