Klaviyo for marketplaces advice?

Hi Jon

Completely understand your use-case here, I’m not affiliated with Klaviyo though I am a custom software developer and we’ve just about completed an integration for one of our clients so I’m fairly familiar with the platform offerings.

Klavyio has two main entities, contacts and metrics/events. The main communication tool is a flow which is essentially summed up as: respond to an event, do a sequence of things, checking conditions along the way (and sometimes varying the email that is sent)

To restate the goal, in your scenario, you’ve got an event (a transaction/order, or perhaps a dispatch notification) and you want to be able to email two different parties (the buyer and the seller) differently - e.g. you might want to notify the seller that the order has been processed, and notify the buyer that the order has been accepted, simultaneously.

Out of the box, as I understand it, Klaviyo cannot do this specifically.

A flow is typically either a transactional flow (support must edit this for you) in which case the flow is typically triggered off an event/metric (a custom message from your platform) and the event/metric contains everything needed for typically a single email.

Or the flow is a contact centric flow which might be like an onboarding sequence and therefore emails multiple different contacts with the same content depending on their properties/state.
That type of flow might be triggered off an original event/metric like new customer created, and send a series of emails spread over time.

You can have a flow which is triggered off an event/metric, and then check contact properties in conditions (which can be custom/user defined) to perform actions, or use data from that event/metric however I think this would quickly get clunky/not scale well with having potentially multiple orders and even perhaps sellers and buyers both overlapping (a buyer might also be a seller)

I think the best way to set this up is to have each of your relevant parties (buyer/seller) as individual contacts that are synchronised across from your platform. 

Then have an event/metric that is sent from your platform that triggers two different flows - one for each of the parties.

However, this does require custom development on your platform/software. 

If it happens to be custom and written in .net we might be able to help here, otherwise you’ll have to contact your existing development team for this.

Good luck!

Gareth Evans, Sniper Systems Ltd
Wellington, New Zealand