Welcome to a practical Zapier tutorial! In this guide, we'll walk through automating the approval of a listing once a provider has paid a listing fee. This tutorial will cover the final step on how to implement listing fees in your marketplace.
Marketplace admins normally need to manually approve listings, which can be time-consuming and delay the provider’s listing from going live. With Zapier, you can automate this process. Once payment is confirmed via Stripe, Zapier triggers the listing approval in Sharetribe, allowing listings to be published automatically upon successful payment. This automation saves you time and effort by eliminating manual approvals. Let’s dive into the technical setup and streamline your marketplace workflow!
What is Zapier?
Zapier is a powerful and versatile tool for integrating different tools into your marketplace. You can learn more about Zapier in our introductory article or through this brief video from Zapier.
If you haven’t read the introduction and the action/event Zapier articles, we encourage you to do so to understand better how Zapier works. But if you want to dive straight into action, feel free to read on!
What do you need for this tutorial?
External accounts
Stripe Payment Page
Set up a Stripe payment page to collect listing fees. This page will handle the payments before triggering the listing approval process.
Zapier Account
Create a Zapier account if you don’t already have one. You can sign up at www.zapier.com.
During registration, Zapier may ask which apps you plan to use. You can enter Sharetribe at this point or add it later.
How to set up your marketplace
Your marketplace must be configured in a certain way to support this Zapier information. Learn more about how to set up your marketplace in our guide to charging a listing fee.
Here is how you should set things up in brief:
Listing Approval Feature Enabled
Ensure that the listing approval feature is enabled in your Sharetribe marketplace.
Dynamic Parameters Set Up
Add the Listing_ID and Email Address as dynamic parameters to the listing approval CTA button. This is crucial to ensure that the correct listing ID and email address are fetched during the Zap process so the correct listing is approved and the right listing owner is notified.
Marketplace Activity
Your Sharetribe marketplace (test or live) should have at least one listing in a pending approval state so that Zapier can perform the actions and test whether they work. If you don’t have any recent listings, create one now to ensure there’s data for Zapier to process.
With these requirements met, you’re ready to get started! Let’s begin.
Getting your Integration API key from Sharetribe Console
You'll need Integration API keys to connect your Sharetribe marketplace to Zapier.
Navigate to Build > Advanced > Applications
Click on "+ Add a new application"
Give the application a descriptive name (like Zapier), and select "Integration API".
Click "Add application".
Important: Copy and paste the Client ID and Client secret to a safe place, like a password manager.
Think of the Client ID and secret as passwords to your marketplace that can be used through other services. Note that you won’t be able to ever see the Client secret to this application again in the Console under any circumstances. Make sure you copy it to a secure place. If you lose it, you will need to create a new application.
Creating the Zap, step by step
(Optional) Importing the Zap template
Go to www.zapier.com and log in with your account (or create a free one if you don't already have one)
Open the pre-made Zap for automatically approving a listing here.
Click on "Try this Zap."
Step 1: Find the payment in Stripe
First, locate the payment in Stripe that will be used as the trigger for approving the listing in Sharetribe.
In the Setup section, select the Stripe as the app
Select "Checkout Session Completed" as the Trigger event
Connect the Stripe account where you have you’ve set up the listing fee payment page/ product.
Click Continue to move to the Configure section
Select "True" in the would you like to use test mode data for the test sample field.
Click Continue to move to the "Test" section
Test the trigger, and make sure it finds a recent Stripe payment. You can perform a Stripe payment in Test mode (Learn how here).
Test payments in Stripe (payments using test credit card credentials and the test checkout page) do not work as triggers in Zapier. This means you will not be able to test the fully automated workflow while Stripe is in Test mode. Only Live mode payments on a live checkout page can trigger a Zap. Nevertheless, you can use Stripe’s test data only if you are finding the record it creates in Zapier manually while testing your Zap.
Step 2: Approve listing
Once the Zap is triggered by Stripe after a successful payment, the next step is to approve the corresponding listing in Sharetribe.
In the Setup section, select Sharetribe as the app
Select "Approve listing" as the Action event
Connect your Sharetribe account
Click Continue to move to the Configure section
Select "Client reference ID" as the Listing ID.
Select "True" in Expand the response to "Return the full resource?"
Click Continue to move to the "Test" section
Test this action to confirm that Zapier finds the listing pending approval, corresponding to the payment made.
Note: Providers are not automatically notified when their listings are approved. You'll need to collect details about the approved listing to send them an email notification.
Step 3: Collect listing details
In the Setup section, select Sharetribe as the app
Select "Show listing" as the Action event
Connect your Sharetribe account
Click Continue to move to the Configure section
Select "ID" in the Listing ID.
Select "No" in "Should this step be considered a success if no search results are found?"
Click Continue to move to the "Test" section
Test the trigger and make sure it shows all the information related to that listing (such as the Listing Title)
Step 4. Notify provider about the listing being published
In the Setup section, select the Gmail, or any Zapier-supported email tool you use for sending notifications email notifications from your marketplace
Select "Send email" in Action event
Connect your email account
Click Continue to move to the Configure section
Select "Customer Details Email" in the To/receiver email address field.
Fill in the "From" and "From name" with your marketplace email address and name
Select plain in the body type
In the Body field, write the message you want to communicate to your users when their listing has been approved. You can add variables by clicking on the + icon such as the Listing title so that each provider sees the title of their own listing. For example, you could write the following:
Hi there,
Thank you for your payment! Your Listing Title has now been published to the marketplace! You can now see it live here: yourdomain.com/l/listing_ID
Best regards,
The Marketplace team
By following these steps, you’ll automate the listing approval process and notify providers when their listings are published.
Final thoughts
Thanks for reading this tutorial about creating a Zap for your Sharetribe marketplace to automatically approve a listing after the listing fee is paid.
Another way to monetize listings would be to charge a subscription fee for posting rights. In exchange for a recurring payment, a user is given posting rights. When they unsubscribe, you revoke their payment posting rights and close their open listings using the Sharetribe-Zapier integration.
Learn more about the Sharetribe-Zapier integration or review all our Zapier templates for automating marketplace workflows.
Learn more about the possibilities to monetize with one-time fees or possibilities to monetize with subscriptions.
Please get in touch with us from your Console or from the bottom right section of this page from the chat widget if you have any questions about this guide, or anything else. We'll be happy to help!