we receive a lot of messages by email that are sent through an onsite messaging system by the marketplace. These marketplaces are sites like ebay, amazon, kaufland, metro etc.
For various reason they won’t let their customers directly contact us as a seller. In most cases the marketplace has some kind of messaging system where both parties can communicate. The message sent through this system is forwarded by email and when you reply to this email, it will automatically pick up your answer to display in the message thread and also notify the other party of the reply.
To make this work for ebay, it is necessary to enable the option “Email - full quote” as the “message id” ebay uses, is at the bottom of the email. Without a full quote, ebay does not know to which ticket/message thread the reply belongs.
But the subject lines of these messages are still different in a lot of cases. The first message says “ticket opened” in the subject line. Following email might have something like “New message” or “New document upload” in the subject line.
The problem is, that each message is opened as a separate ticket in Zammad as the subject line is not the same each time and a Zammad Ticket ID is missing in these incoming messages.
To prevent this from happening, we had hoped the “Additional follow-up detection” setting would help. But that didn’t make any difference.
I hope someone has an idea how to fix this issue. Right now almost each new message of a buyer will create a new ticket in Zammad and it is a lot of additional effort to merge there tickets.
Any help is much appreciated. Thanks a lot for all you ideas!
Without clear references to Zammads own ticket references it is impossible to detect follow ups.
That being said we had sponsored follow up improvements for e.g. service now.
However, as especially ebay and amazon tend to shuffle their IDs in between each communication this probably won’t help too much. I cannot provide any useful hints if the follow up detection issue you experience doesn’t happen on ebay end but Zammad end. I’m sorry.
The only option I’d see is independent communication channels for each plattform.
We had some requests on this regard, but they never survived our question of “what should it do”.
You can create a detailed feature request on this board or contact our sales team if you want to talk about possible sponsorings.
For some automated systems, where the subject could be different, but are infect related to the same source, i set these headers, which zammad makes them group in a single ticket. I’m not sure if ebay/amazon would rely back these id’s. But maybe you can set/overwrite them using a filter on your receiving mailserver.
Another option would be, if zammad would allow to provide an optional RegExp on the subject line to identify an ticket, e.g. ^Ticket-Ref.Bestellung\s(.)$, so that the unique ticket id would refence the value of the first capturing group (MD3K…).
Thanks for your answers. I like the idea with a RegExp on the subject line where you could than trigger a merge-action. This would be a nice enhancement for a lot of different scenarios.
Long term we might need a separate channel for those marketplaces as most of them use their own kind of messaging system and the issues we are seeing are coming from them. Just to name a few:
In a reply to the customer, the Zammad ticket number is added to the subject line. It can also be added in the email body. When the customer then replies through the message system of that marketplace, the original message (with the ticket number in the body) is not part of the email anymore and the subject line is either a complete different subject as the initial email or it is the same but it missing the Zammad ticket number but only has specific marketplace ticket IDs in there.
Original reply from Zammad is not included when a customer answers. Only the customer’s reply is included in the mail.
Until there is a full integration, I might build something to add tickets through the API using an automation service like Integromat.
But just 1 question about the follow-up recognition:
When someone sends the same email twice, is it somehow possible to automatically merge these two tickets or to ignore the second one?
See screenshots below: Any change these tickets get linked together automatically? The sender mail adress is identical and the second and third subject line is identical as well. Only the original email subject ist missing the word “Betreff”.
Maybe the regexp idea could be expanded, to be applied on both subject and/or body part of the email.
Maybe in combinations with a possible “if” condition, so you can create different rules based on the originating domain.
And that you can specify which field/variable the result of the RegExp should map to, so you can extract the customer information from the e-mail body, and map it to a customer in zammad.
For example;
if From: .*@ebay.com Then match on subject: ^Ticket-Ref.Bestellung\s(. )$ yields Ticket reference
if From: .@ch24.de Then match on body: ^Customer: (.)$ yields Customer reference.
For me tickets were only grouped into 1 ticket, when the Message-Id and References Header matched, even when the subject line was exactly the same.
I did set references setting in the email configuration;
Another option might be, if you’re able to process the email in another way (e.g. on your receiving mail server). Is to rewrite the "From: " header, with a dummy email representing the customer, but leaving the Reply-To header as is.
For example if the email is;
From: ticket@ebay.com
Reply-To: ticket@ebay.com
To: you@domain.com
Subject: order
I’m not sure if that would work, it’s pure speculation. but maybe it’s a helpful thought.
Additionally i remember a recent bug fix on Message-Id processing, i cannot find the referencing issue in github unfortunate, but i believe it was fixed in the 4.x line of zammad. so if you’re running an older version it might be worth to upgrade.
I cannot provide a lot on this topic right now, but to this part:
Zammad does that already actually, but this has some conditions:
The sender / customer has to be the same person
The subject may not be different
Don’t pin me down on the timings behind it - but I believe it was roughly 24 hours or less Zammad would care for these duplicates. Systems like ebay usually have an unique and random mail address on every mail they sent to the seller - right?
At least for customers it’s that way on Amazon based communication.
This would “trick” our technical approach which is why it may not work for you.
