Forget the title for a moment. I’ll describe my goals instead of what I think is my solution.
I own a courier service that delivers various things (flowers, medicine, restaurant food etc). I want to give my clients email updates on delivery progress for the sake of good communication as well as for transparency on delivery timing performance.
However, based on which type of client/ product, I want the updates to be triggered at different stages of the route and, ideally, to say different things.
For example, when we are picking up a food delivery, I want the restaurant notified when driver is eg. 7 minutes from arriving for pick up (some temperature sensitive food items aren’t cooked until the last minute). On the other hand, a florist doesn’t need an update for “almost there for pick up”. It has no value to them.
(Onfleet has all the different “stages” of a delivery as usable triggers)
I’m using google sheets to “feed” my onfleet dashboard. (successfully set that up with Zapier as of yesterday (yay me).
What I think my solution is, is to facilitate character-based identifiers eg. CodeRest (to identify a restaurant delivery) in the “pick up task details” field and/ or the “drop off task details” field. Using google sheets I can create formatting/ automation so that, by simply writing a client or restaurant ID in a google sheets cell, another cell will be populated with, one, the identifier for a restaurant delivery (CodeRest) and, two, the restaurant’s email address. (this cell being the cell/ column that the “pick up task details” field in onfleet pulls from. (pardon my amateurish terminology)
Another example of usage (for more context) is the delivery-complete update. For food deliveries, I may want to include a link to google reviews. For a medicine delivery for which, generally, a customer receives it weekly, the customer doesn’t need a delivery-complete email at all, but the pharmacy does (for aforementioned delivery-timing transparency)
My questions are (and feel free to answer just one of them or give random advice):
- For achieving my goal, is my proposed solution generally correct?
- Is this a Webhooks matter? (I saw a zapier onfleet-to-gmail automation and wondered if that’s all I need)
- Should I get the help of a programmer? If so, for which language? (in Onfleet API info, they listed multiple coding languages to use with webhooks. I don’t know anything about coding. I am simply a pretty decent problem solver (if that’s enough to set Zapier up for what I need to do))
- If I can do this myself, which zapier or other webhooks information pages should I read/ videos to watch to get acquainted with my project?
- When I completed my Zapier Googlesheets-onfleet automation, a next step was suggested to do webhooks from within the same place I was working on the sheets-onfleet automation. Should I be doing Webhooks right in there or starting a new Zapier automation?
Thanks!!
