After finding our test listing as a customer, we can test a transaction. Transactions in your marketplace occur anytime a customer and provider interact, for example through messages, booking requests, inquiries, or purchase orders.

In this tutorial, our example is a booking request, but your marketplace can also be set up for purchases or free messaging depending on the answers you gave during onboarding.

On the listing page, we’ll use the right-hand order panel to start a transaction. The panel’s layout will depend on your transaction type.

If your test marketplace is for bookings, customers select a start date and end date for the booking period. If you’re working with hourly bookings, specifically, customers select a starting time and ending time within one day. The calculated price will be the booking length (number of days, nights, or hours) multiplied by the price.

If your test marketplace is for products, customers select the number of items (if there’s more than one in inventory) and the delivery method (if both shipping and pickup are enabled for the listing). The calculated price is the product price multiplied by their number, plus any shipping fees that apply.

If your test marketplace has a free messaging transaction process, customers are invited to send an inquiry.

Once you’ve chosen your booking or purchase options, click the checkout button below the order breakdown. The next page will be the checkout page, regardless of the listing type that you’re testing.

On the checkout page, the customer can review their order, enter their payment details, add a message to the provider, and confirm the booking, purchase, or inquiry.

We can use test payment data in the test marketplace. Real payment data, like your own credit card details, will not work in test environments.

Click the “Fill in test details” button to add test credit card details on the checkout page. You can also save the card details for future transactions in the customer’s details.

For products with shipping as the delivery option, the checkout page will include a shipping address form.

At the bottom of the checkout page, you’ll have the option to send a message.

If your listing uses the free messaging transaction process, you need to send a message as part of the inquiry. For the booking and purchase processes, leaving a message is optional.

After all details are in, confirm the transaction. After that, 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.

It’s time to switch back to the provider profile to move this transaction forward and see how providers experience and engage with customer requests.

Navigate to the Manage users page in Console. There, open the provider account details. On the top left, click on the three dots. Next, click “Log in as user,” which will sign you in as the provider. In your Test marketplace, you have full access to user profiles and actions through Console. In a Live marketplace with real users, you will have limited access. You can use this feature to switch between the customer and provider profiles to conclude this tutorial.

On your Test marketplace, click “Inbox” in the top bar. On the Inbox page, the provider can find all booking or purchase requests or inquiries on their listings, including the request you just made as a test customer.

Click the request to open the order page from the provider’s perspective.

Different listing and transaction types have different next steps after a customer initiates a transaction.

In the booking flow, our next available action is to accept or decline the booking request.

In a purchase flow, the next available action would be to deliver the product and indicate when that’s done.

In the free messaging flow without online payments, providers can respond to the customer’s inquiry using the built-in messaging system.

The order page also includes an order breakdown. It contains information about the earnings the provider will make and the commission fee the marketplace charges for the transaction.

Your Test marketplace comes with a pre-configured fee of 10%, which is something you can change anytime in Console > Transactions > Commission. You can also define a customer commission.

Customers and providers conclude a transaction by reviewing each other.

Reviews are only available in the booking and purchase transaction flows. There is no review process in transactions that use free messaging without online payments.

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.

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. Learn more about the steps and stages of a transaction.

You can log in as both the customer and the provider to check out how reviews work. The reviews are only published when both users have published their review, or when the review period is over after 7 days.

Reviews are published on user profile pages and listing pages.

This five-part tutorial focused on testing the marketplace as a customer and provider. As a provider, we created a listing. Then, we tested the other side of the marketplace experience by searching and discovering the listing as a customer. Finally, we transacted, connecting the customer and provider through a booking, purchase, or inquiry, and concluded the tutorial by leaving reviews.

You might already have ideas about how you’d like to adjust the key features you just tested. The building tutorial will introduce you to using no-code tools to configure your marketplace's look and function.

Get started with the building tutorial.