n8n Gmail Order Extractor: GPT-4o-mini to Google Sheets

Turn Gmail order emails into structured spreadsheets automatically

The n8n Gmail Order Extractor (GPT-4o-mini to Google Sheets) workflow monitors your Gmail for incoming order messages, extracts order headers and line items with OpenAI (vector stores + GPT-4o-mini), then exports results as CSV files to Google Drive and logs each order to Google Sheets.

What this workflow does

• Checks new Gmail messages every minute and routes emails based on MIME type (attachments vs. other formats).
• For attachment-based orders: downloads attachments from Gmail, uploads them to OpenAI Files, creates an OpenAI vector store, and attaches the uploaded files to it.
• Waits for vector store processing, then queries GPT-4o-mini using file search against the vector store to extract structured order details and all line items as JSON.
• Converts extracted items into CSV, then uploads the CSV to a specified Google Drive folder.
• AI fallback handling: if the extraction indicates an error, it calls the OpenAI Chat Completions API as a fallback parser, converts results to CSV, uploads to Google Drive, and logs the order link and key customer/order fields in Google Sheets.
• Secondary pipeline for forwarded iPaper emails: triggers on forwarded iPaper order emails in Gmail, parses email text with custom logic, exports line items to CSV, uploads to Google Drive, and appends an order log row to Google Sheets.

Use cases

• Automatically capture orders sent via email with attachments and keep an up-to-date fulfillment spreadsheet.
• Normalize order line items into CSV for inventory, shipping, or reporting pipelines.
• Reduce manual copy/paste from customer emails to Google Sheets and Drive.

Technical details

• n8n triggers & nodes: Gmail, if, set, code, wait, limit
• OpenAI: OpenAI Files + vector store, then GPT-4o-mini with file search; fallback via OpenAI Chat Completions API
• Exports & logging: CSV uploads to Google Drive and order logging to Google Sheets
• Setup: add Gmail OAuth