Objective

The purpose of this project is to automate the process of extracting customer information from Gmail order confirmation emails and registering a placeholder product purchase on Gumroad. This system will ensure that customers who have already made a purchase are flagged in Gumroad and are removed from any further email sequences.

Tools

Gumroad: placeholder product here

Gmail: [email protected]

You sold an ItList! 🥂.eml

Zapier

Key Deliverables:

1. Gmail Integration:
   • Set up a system to authenticate and access the Gmail API using OAuth 2.0.
   • Search the inbox for new order emails that match a specific query (e.g., subject: "New Order").
   • Extract the customer’s email address from the body of the email.
2. Gumroad Integration:
   • Authenticate and connect to the Gumroad API using an access token.
   • Create a new sale (for a placeholder product) using the customer’s email address.
   • Ensure that the sale is registered at a price of $0 or predefined as a placeholder purchase.

Desired Flow

(Although, Zapier doesn’t allow this in their Workflow interface)

Step 1: Set Up a Trigger with Gmail (Detect Purchase Email)

1. Create a new Zap in Zapier.
2. Trigger app: Select Gmail.
3. Trigger event: Choose New Email Matching Search.
4. Search string: Use a specific search string that identifies the order confirmation email (either: subject:"You sold an ItList!" or from:[email protected]).
5. Test the trigger: Zapier will fetch a sample email to test the connection.

Step 2: Extract Customer’s Email

1. Add an action: Add a text parsing step to extract the customer’s email from the Gmail body.
   • You can use Email Parser by Zapier or similar tools if the email’s structure is consistent.
2. Set up the parser: Set it to extract the part of the email that contains the customer's email address.

Step 3: Trigger Purchase of Placeholder Product on Gumroad

1. Add a Gumroad action: In the next step, choose Gumroad as the action app.
2. Select the action event: Choose Create Sale.
   • This allows you to manually register a sale in Gumroad for a "placeholder product."
3. Set up the product details:
   • Product: Select the "placeholder product" you want to use. This product should already be created in Gumroad.
   • Customer email: Use the email parsed from the Gmail trigger (Step 2).
   • Charge amount: Set the charge to $0 if you want this to be a placeholder, free purchase (or whatever makes sense for your setup).
   • Purchase date: You can set the date as the current date/time when Zapier triggers this action.
4. Test the action: Zapier will simulate a "purchase" of the placeholder product for the extracted email.