What's new in Sharetribe

🚀  New feature: New built-in email notifications

Sharetribe three new built-in email notifications, sent when a user is approved or their permissions have changed, and when a listing is approved.

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🚀  New feature: Disable and enable built-in emails

You can now disable and enable most of the built-in email sent from your Sharetribe marketplace. Decide which automatic emails get sent to users take more control ove your marketplace messaging. 

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🚀  New feature: Use a non-Stripe-supported currency

Choose any currency from around the globe for your marketplace if you’re not using online payments. Enable your local currency and connect buyers and sellers using the free messaging transaction process type and let users handle payment off platform.

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🚀  New feature: Onboarding mode

You can now create a pre-launch onboarding mode. Restrict access rights in your marketplace: let users sign up and add listings, but not see content created by others. When you have enough listings, give users full access, launch your platform, and start facilitating transactions.

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🚀  New monetization methods: Automate subscriptions and lead fees

You can now add subscriptions for viewing, posting, and transaction rights without coding. Grant user permissions automatically through Zapier when someone subscribes—and revoke them when they unsubscribe. You can also build a simple lead fee flow, where providers pay to contact a customer about their request.

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🛠 Improvements:

• You can check a transaction's payout state in Console on the transaction management page.
• Providers can now discard listing drafts themselves.
• New Zapier Sharetribe app version (v0.8.1). The previous state and permissions of a user have been added to the "User Events" trigger. This allows building automations to react to a change in a user state or permissions changes.
• Providers now add their bank account number in Stripe's Connect Onboarding interface instead of in the marketplace's user interface.

🚀  New monetization methods: Automate subscriptions and listing fees

You can now monetize your Sharetribe marketplace with membership subscriptions or listing fees. These new supported monetization models are possible following recent releases of new access control functionality and Zapier-supported actions. Automate user and listing approval through Zapier when someone makes a payment in your chosen payment service.

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🚀 New feature: Restrict transactions to specific users

You can now restrict transaction rights on your marketplace. Decide who can initiate transactions and conversations on your marketplace. Restrict transactions to users you've reviewed, whose ID is verified, or who have paid a subscription. This feature can be enabled in Console in your access control settings.

🚀 New feature: Add a call to action to access control pages

Add a call to action to direct users to take a certain action to get access to your marketplace, receive restricted user rights, or to get a listing published. When you limit access or user rights in your access control settings, you can now enable a call-to-action button and add a link to a payment page, ID verification site, or another action you want your users to take. The link can contain dynamic parameters.

🚀 New feature: Automate more actions in your marketplace through Zapier

You can now automate actions that were previously only possible manually in Console with Zapier. With the latest version of the Zapier Sharetribe app, you can use Zapier to change the state of a user (approve), listing (approve, open, close), or transaction (transition) in your Sharetribe marketplace. You can also update a user's permission (to view or post listings, and initiate transactions). Update your Zapier Sharetribe app to v0.8.0 to get access to the new features.

🚀 New feature: Restrict listing viewing rights to specific users

You can now restrict rights to view listings on your marketplace. Decide who can view listings on your marketplace. Restrict listings viewing rights to users you've reviewed, whose ID is verified, or who have paid a subscription. This feature can be enabled in Console in your access control settings, in combination with the private marketplace feature.

🚀 New custom field type: YouTube video

Add a new Video custom field type to user or listing data. The Video field lets users embed a YouTube video to their listing or profile page. Users only have to add the URL of the vide video and it will be automatically embedded on their listing or profile page.

🚀 New feature: Customize the color used in email notifications for buttons and links

You now have more control on your branding and color scheme. In addition to the marketplace color and primary button color, you can now change the email color, used for buttons and links in email notifications sent from your marketplace. This can be configured in your branding settings.

🛠 Improvements:

• You can now make content block images clickable links in the Pages CMS.
• You can change the content alignment (text and CTA) of a block in Pages. The content can be aligned to the left (default), center, or right.
• Updates to the Sharetribe Template technology stack: React v17 and a new date picker for calendar selections are now in use.

🚀 New feature: Make your marketplace private

Limit access to your marketplace to logged-in users only. By default, visitors who haven’t created an account can see listings and user profiles. When you make your marketplace private, users who don't have an account will no longer see listings or user profiles. They’ll be prompted to create an account instead.

🚀 New feature: Approve users who want to join

Turn on user approval and decide who gets full access to your marketplace. Implement subscription payments, verification, personal onboarding, or other requirements before approving users to join your marketplace.

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🚀 New feature: Grant permission to post listings

You can now decide who gets to post listings on your marketplace. Restrict posting rights to providers you've reviewed, whose ID is verified, or who have paid a subscription. This feature is included in a new page in Console called Access control, where you can find settings related to who has access to your marketplace and which actions each user can take.

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🛠 Improvements:

• You can now check the images you've uploaded to content pages, social media metadata, and branding settings directly in Console.
• You can now query a user's own listings though the Marketplace API by the state, availability, public data and metadata, and more. You can also sort the results based on different parameters.
• Sharetribe's Zapier integration was updated to a new version (v.0.6.1). New Zaps will use the new version by default starting August 29th.
• Update to footer settings: the mandatory block ID was replaced with optional block name and anchor link fields.

🚀 New third-party template: Launch your marketplace on mobile with a template by Journeyhorizon

Combine Sharetribe's no-code builder with a mobile app template by Sharetribe Expert Journeyhorizon and launch a marketplace as a mobile app for iOS and Android without coding.

Learn more about the marketplace mobile app template

🚀 New Zapier templates: Automate digital downloads, calendar invites, and PDF invoices

Sharetribe's Zapier integration lets you automate tasks without coding with the help of thousands of third-party apps. We've added four new Zapier templates to our collection of pre-made Zaps. Using Zapier, you can now automate digital download link collection and delivery, send booking confirmation emails with digital calendar invites, and generate automatic PDF invoices with tax information.

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🚀 New feature: User types

Whether you’re building a peer-to-peer, business-to-consumer, or business-to-business marketplace, Sharetribe’s got you covered. With user types, you can create different onboarding flows for providers and customers, limit user fields to specific user types, and enable optional phone number and display name fields.

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🛠 Improvements:

• You can now create non-mandatory user fields.
• You can decide whether a user field will be included in the signup form or available only through the user's profile settings.
• The SEO and social media metadata settings are now easier to find when editing a page.
• You can now access your organization settings (manage your subscription and organization members) more easily through the sidebar menu in the Console.
• You can now duplicate an existing static content page, instead of always starting a new one from scratch.

🚀 New feature: Listing categories

This highly requested feature helps customers search and discover listings on your marketplace. You can have up to three levels of categories on your Sharetribe marketplace and create category-specific listing fields to build a dynamic search page.

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🚀 New design configuration: Primary button color

You can now change the primary button color in Console without coding. This button color is used in the most important user actions.

Learn more about the primary button color

🚀 New custom field type: Number

You can now add a custom user or listing field that collects whole numbers only. A number user field can be shown in the user signup form and user profile. A number listing field is shown during listing creation and on the listing page. It can also added as a filter on the search page.

Learn more about the number field

🛠 Improvements:

• It is now possible to disconnect a provider's Stripe account directly in Console.
• You can now hide unselected listing and user field options on listing and profile pages.
• You can now view, upgrade, and cancel your Sharetribe subscription in Console.
• The text in the editor for marketplace texts, email texts, and built-in email templates is now easier to read.
• Links starting with https:// and http:// in listing descriptions and custom text fields, user bios, custom user text fields, and transaction messages are now clickable.
• When you log in as a user through Console in a Test or Dev environment, you now have full access to the user's profile and actions.
• You can open a listing as the author through the listing management section of Console.
• Organizations with a free trial can now be deleted directly from Console.

🚀 New feature: Google and Facebook login

Add Google and Facebook logins to your marketplace and make signing up a breeze! Users who sign up with Google or Facebook don't need to add a separate password for your site and can log back in at any time using the same social media account. This feature is available in the Pro and Extend plans.

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🚀 New feature: User fields

Collect custom data about your users during onboarding. Add text, number, dropdown, and multiple-choice fields to the user signup form. The user fields are displayed in the user's public profile.

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🛠 Improvements:

• In the footer, the Twitter logo is now the X logo.

🚀 New feature: Add custom links to the top bar

Modify your top bar, one of the most important elements of your marketplace, with custom links. Add links to important pages on your marketplace or on third-party sites. Feature links in the top bar or create a dropdown link menu.

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🛠 Improvements:

• You can modify localization settings directly in Console without contacting Sharetribe support.
• Update to General settings: Marketplace name, domain, outgoing email address, localization settings, and permissions now have their own pages in Console.
• New Hosting mode setting: switch the hosting mode in Console to enable self-hosted configuration.

🚀 New feature: Infinite stock

Infinite stock adds more support for marketplaces selling listings without physical inventory, like digital goods and services. When this stock type is enabled, providers never need to add or manage listing stock.

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🚀 New feature: Turn off default listing fields

Depending on your listing type’s transaction process, you can disable the following default listing fields: location, pickup, shipping, and payout details required before publishing a listing. You now have even more flexibility to determine what kind of listings your marketplace has.

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🚀 New feature: Customer commission

Charge a commission from your customers, providers, or both – without touching a single line of code. You can set a customer commission percentage in Console. The customer’s fee is calculated on the listing page before they initiate a booking or purchase.

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🚀 New third-party integration:  Enhance your marketplace with third-party integrations in the Pro plan

Extend your marketplace with no-code third-party integrations. Create dashboards with Lemonado or automate social media sharing with ShopSync.

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🛠 Improvements:

• Bug fix: marketplace names with an apostrophe (') are now displayed correctly in email templates.

🚀 The new Sharetribe launches in Product Hunt! After a beta period that started in June 2023, the new Sharetribe was now officially released to the world! We had a great launch in Product Hunt: we were the #2 product of the day with over 1,000 votes.

🚀 New feature: Automate workflows with Zapier

With Sharetribe's Zapier integration, you can send data from your marketplace to thousands of third-party apps without coding. Zapier helps you automate repetitive tasks in your marketplace. Zapier is available in live marketplaces in the Pro and Extend plans.

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🛠 Improvements:

• You can now add GIFs from Giphy to your content pages with markdown.
• Fixed a bug that caused the cursor to jump when entering your email in Firefox while logging in Console.
  

🚀 New feature: Limit custom fields to specific listing types

If your marketplace has many different types of listings, odds are that you want to collect different kinds of data about them too. This feature lets you limit custom listing fields to specific listing types. 

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🛠 Improvements:

• You can now add your Stripe publishable key and Map key yourself in Console instead of submitting it via a dedicated form.
• You can now connect your Stripe account to your test marketplace if you want to see how things look like in the Stripe dashboard.
• You can now connect your own Google Maps account to your Test environment to see how Google Maps works before going live.

🚀 New feature: Automatic sitemap

The sitemap plays a vital role in optimizing your marketplace for search engines. Your marketplace now automatically generates a sitemap that includes your content pages and the 10,000 most recent listings.

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🚀 New feature: Several new features in Pages

New "Hero" section template. With the new section template, it's easy to create visually appealing initial sections for your pages.

Adjust background image darkness. With the new "overlay" feature, you can make your background images darker to make the text easier to read.

Anchor links. Link easily to a specific section on your page by specifying an anchor link.

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🚀 New third-party integration: Send your product listings to your social media shops with ShopSync

ShopSync is a third party integration that automatically uploads your sellers' listings to social media and keeps the listing information up to date. ShopSync integrates with Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Pinterest, and Google Merchant Center, where you can manage Google and YouTube advertising.

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🛠 Improvements:

• You can now add up to 1000 content pages with Pages (up from previous limit of 100).
• The "Save changes" and "View page" buttons are now fixed to the bottom of Console, which makes them easily accessible when you're editing your content.
• Bug fix: the fee for "additional items" is no longer displayed in shipping details if stockType = one item.
• Bug fix: creating a custom field that had an ID that clashed with one of the default fields caused an error.
• Bug fix: apostrophes (') and other unusual characters are now displayed correctly in page title.
• Bug fix: Fixed a scrolling bug in Pages that made it difficult to edit a content block with a large amount of content.

🚀 New feature: Edit and translate email notification content without touching code

You can now edit the text content of built-in and transaction-related emails without touching the code of the templates. Editing happens with an editor similar to the one you use for changing marketplace texts. You can use it to make text adjustments or translate the emails to the language of your choice. We have also renamed this editor: previously it was called “Microcopy editor” but now we simply call it Marketplace texts.

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🚀 New feature: GDPR-compliant analytics with Plausible

Earlier, Google Analytics was the only built-in analytics integration in The New Sharetribe. However, since Google Analytics does not adhere to GDPR regulation, it was not really an option for EU-based platforms. Plausible is an alternative analytics tool that’s fully GDPR compliant.

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🚀 New feature: Adjust the size of your logo

It's now possible to change the size of your logo. There are three variants: small, medium, and big.

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🚀 New feature: Upload an app icon

An app icon will show on mobile browsers when you switch between tabs and be the icon if you bookmark your marketplace on your mobile's home screen. In other words, an app icon is for mobiles what favicons are for web browsers.

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🚀 New feature: New "Free messaging" transaction process

It’s now possible to easily create classified ads and other listings that don’t use online payments. Instead, a transaction between a customer and a supplier starts with an initial inquiry, followed by a conversation thread where the parties can agree on the details. In the UI, the process is called “Free messaging”. When choosing “Free messaging”, you can toggle the price on and off.

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🚀 New feature: Multiple listing types

You can now easily have multiple different transaction flows in your marketplace by creating multiple listing types. You can add up to 20 listing types.

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🛠 Improvements:

• Performance improvements to the APIs, leading to faster API response times for responses containing large amounts of data.
• New Integration SDK, version 1.10.0, which enables GZIP compression.

🚀 New feature: Copy no-code changes from Test to Dev environment

No-code content and configuration workflow in Flex works so that changes are made and validated in Test environment and published by copying them to Live environment. However, in order to be able to achieve a good experience for developing custom features, marketplace changes can be copied to a Dev environment too.

🚀 New feature: stockMode API endpoint

The Marketplace API and Integration API /listings/query endpoints now support a new query parameter: stockMode. This allows expressing queries such as "find all listings that either have no defined stock or are not out of stock". This can be useful in marketplaces that have both listings that use availability management (bookings) and stock.

🛠 Improvements:

• New release for Sharetribe Web Template: v2.2.0. This adds bug fixes (most notable was with the inquiry transition, which failed on the checkout page) and more tests for pages that deal with different processes.

🚀 New major UX improvement: New Console navigation

The Console navigation was redesigned completely to better expose the new no-code features and ensure all the most used features are easily accessible.

🚀 New feature: Keyword filter for location-based search

If you want to allow your users to search by both location and keyword, you can now enable a keyword filter on your search page if you're using location search.

🚀 New feature: Google Analytics integration

You can now analyze traffic on your site with the world's most used free analytics service.

🚀 New feature: Google Search Console integration

Google Search Console allows you to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results.

🚀🚀🚀 First pilot users get access to the new Sharetribe 🚀🚀🚀

After 1,5 years of development, we are finally able to give the first pilot users access to our new marketplace builder. At this point, the no-code features of the new Sharetribe are still in an alpha stage, but it still allows you to create a fully functional marketplace without coding, and it comes with all the power of the developer platform you've formerly known as Sharetribe Flex.

You can now configure the following settings of your marketplace without any coding whatsoever:

• Branding. Change marketplace color, logo, and other brand images.
• Layout. Toggle between layout options for search and listing pages, and adjust the listing image thumbnail aspect ratio.
• Footer. The footer section was previously hard-coded in the Template. Configure your footer in a similar way as sections on your pages.
• Listing types. Determine the default transaction process of new listings (purchases or bookings) and further settings.
• Listing fields. Add custom data fields to listings and use them as search filters.
• Listing search. Configure your search type (keyword or location) and default filters (availability and price).
• Commission. Decide the commission you want to charge from each transaction.
• Minimum transaction size. Set a minimum price for listings to ensure that your commission will cover payment processing fees.

A brief history of Sharetribe

Sharetribe launched its first product, Sharetribe Go, back in 2014. It allowed building a simple marketplace website without coding, but it was not possible to extend it with code. In 2018, Sharetribe launched its second product, Sharetribe Flex, which made it easy for developers to build unique custom marketplaces quickly, but there was no way to use it without coding skills. These two products helped thousands of founders launch their online marketplaces.

The new Sharetribe, publicly released in January 2024 after a beta period, combines the best of Sharetribe Go and Sharetribe Flex in one product. It allows you to launch a marketplace in one day, without coding, but at the same time it's possible to customize and extend your marketplace infinitely with code and scale it to any size. It's the ultimate marketplace software solution for bootstrapping but ambitious founders: it will help you take you from your first user to millions.