I’m having trouble setting up a polling trigger in Zapier using the Web Builder platform. I want my custom API to automatically send data to a Google Sheet every few minutes, but it’s not working.
Here’s what I’ve done so far:
- Set up API key authentication in my Zapier app
- Created a polling trigger that hits my endpoint every 5 minutes
- The test connection works fine and returns this sample data:
[
{
"user_id": 42,
"full_name": "sarah",
"email_address": "[email protected]",
"login_name": "sarah_dev",
"date_created": "2018-04-12 09:30:22",
"date_modified": "2018-04-12 09:30:22",
"user_type": "MEMBER"
}
]
- Connected it to a Google Sheets action that should create new rows
- Both the trigger and action test successfully
- Turned the zap live
The problem is that my spreadsheet never gets updated with new data, even though I know there are new records in my database. The manual test works perfectly, but the automatic polling doesn’t seem to be running.
I’m getting some warnings about using HTTP instead of HTTPS and API key setup, but I’m not sure if that’s causing the issue. Has anyone experienced similar problems with Zapier polling triggers not executing automatically?
the polling’s prbably working fine - it’s just not catching new recs. zapier needs a unique ID for each record to track what it’s already processed. without that ID, it can’t tell what’s really new. check that your API response has a consistent unique id for every record.
Check if your API endpoint returns timestamp fields in a format Zapier can actually use for deduplication. I had this exact problem - my polling trigger tested fine but never fired automatically. Turns out my date_modified field wasn’t being recognized by Zapier’s polling system. Automatic polling needs those timestamp fields to figure out what’s “new” since the last poll. Try switching your date fields to ISO 8601 format like “2018-04-12T09:30:22Z” instead of whatever you’re using now. Also check your Zapier app logs in the developer dashboard - you might have silent errors during polling that don’t show up in manual tests. The polling mechanism is way stricter about data validation than the test interface.
Had the exact same problem with my polling trigger. That HTTPS warning isn’t just a suggestion - it’s critical. Zapier won’t do automatic polling without SSL, even if your manual tests work fine over HTTP. The polling just silently fails in production. Get SSL working on your API first. Then check your Zapier task history - there’s probably error messages hiding there that don’t show up during manual tests. Also make sure your live API response matches your test data format exactly. If the structure’s even slightly different, Zapier will reject the whole polling request.