Welcome to a practical Zapier tutorial! In this guide, we'll walk through automating the approval of a user to join your marketplace after they have paid their membership fee.
Marketplace admins normally need to manually approve users, which can be time-consuming and delay user access to the marketplace. With Zapier, you can automate this process. Once payment is confirmed via Stripe, Zapier triggers the approval of the user in Sharetribe, granting them instant access to the marketplace upon successful payment. This automation saves you time and effort by eliminating manual approvals. Let’s dive into the technical setup and ensure your marketplace runs smoothly!
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 better understand 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 the recurring subscription fee. This page will handle the payment before triggering the user 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 membership fee.
Here is how you should set things up in brief:
User Approval Feature Enabled
Ensure that the user approval feature is enabled in your Sharetribe marketplace.
Dynamic Parameters Set Up
Add the User_ID and Email Address as dynamic parameters to the user approval CTA button. This is crucial to ensure that the correct user ID and email address are fetched during the Zap process so the correct user is approved and notified.
Marketplace Activity
Your Sharetribe marketplace (test or live) should have at least one user in a pending approval state so that Zapier can perform the actions and test whether they work. If you don’t have any recent users, sign up as one 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.
(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 user 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 user 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 subscription 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 (payments using test credit card credentials and the test checkout page) do not work as triggers. 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 act as triggers. 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 user
Once the Zap is triggered by Stripe after a successful payment, the next step is to approve the corresponding user in Sharetribe.
In the Setup section, select Sharetribe as the app.
Select "Approve user" as the Action event.
Connect your Sharetribe account.
Click Continue to move to the Configure section.
Select "Client reference ID" as the User 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 user pending approval corresponding to the payment made.
Note: Users are not automatically notified when their account is approved. You'll need to collect details about the approved user to send them an email notification.
Step 3: Collect user details
In the Setup section, select Sharetribe as the app.
Select "Show user" as the Action event.
Connect your Sharetribe account.
Click Continue to move to the Configure section.
Select "User ID" in the User 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 user (such as the first name).
Step 4. Notify user about getting approved to the marketplace
In the Setup section, select 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 "User Email" in the To/ receiver email address field.
Fill in the "From" and "From name" with your marketplace email address and name, and add a Subject title.
Select plain in the body type.
In the Body field, write the message you want to communicate to your users when they have been approved to the marketplace. You can add variables by clicking on the + icon such as the User profile first name. For example, you could write the following:
Hi
Thank you for your payment!
Your account has now been approved on the marketplace. You can now start posting listings and initiating transactions
Best regards,
The Marketplace team
Final thoughts
Thanks for reading this tutorial about creating a Zap for your Sharetribe marketplace to automatically approve a user after the membership fee is paid!
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!