Bulk User Import with Deduplication

📖 8 min read 🟢 Beginner

Creating and importing accounts for your sellers, buyers, and partners is a critical stage in launching a Sharetribe marketplace. TribeOps provides a dedicated user import flow with identity deduplication to prevent account duplicates during migrations.

Step 1: Preparing Your User CSV Sheet

To register new accounts in Sharetribe, ensure your import file includes the following data columns:

  • email: Used as the primary identity key (required, unique).
  • firstName & lastName: User's real name (recommended).
  • displayName: The nickname shown publicly in your marketplace.
  • bio: Profile description or company info.
  • profileImage: URL to the avatar image.

💡 Pro Tip: You can append custom metadata attributes by prefixing headers with publicData. (e.g. publicData.sellerCategory). These will be nested directly into Sharetribe's public metadata store.

Step 2: Configuring Deduplication & Mapping

During step 3 of the import wizard, configure your duplication matching parameters:

  • Import Mode: Choose Upsert (Update existing users, insert new ones).
  • Match Key: Set this to email. The engine will query Sharetribe first for an existing user with this email. If found, it will update their profile data instead of attempting to create a duplicate account.

Step 3: Setting Roles & Permissions

Map the imported users to dynamic database roles in TribeOps. You can assign default permission access:

  1. Choose a default role from your dynamic Roles database (e.g. "Sellers" or "Content Editors").
  2. Select fallback system permissions to apply if a role is not matched.
  3. Specify listing field edit limitations (e.g. restrict sellers from changing the price field).

Step 4: Dry-Run and Validation

Before launching the import, check **Is Dry Run** on the destination settings step. This will run the parser and validation checks without making write calls to the Sharetribe API. Review the validation summary to check for format errors, invalid email addresses, or empty fields.

Step 5: Execution delays for user creation

Creating users is throttled heavily by Sharetribe's CDN WAF to prevent spam. TribeOps automatically applies a strict 30-second delay per user creation to comply with security rules. For imports over 100 users, we recommend letting the background queue worker process the batch asynchronously.