I think I might’ve painted myself into a corner here…
My cofounder and I have a freelance marketplace we designed on Sharetribe. It went live about a week ago, and about 250 people have signed up. Sort of. Why sort of? The current pay system is Stripe, which requires users to put their banking info. Naturally a few people have expressed concerns about doing so.
Talking with Sharetribe, they do plan to make banking info optional in the future but also suggested I could implement a PayPal API with a bit of coding. They also suggested a few developers we could reach out to for help. Has anyone on Sharetribe used the PayPal API? Is it hard to figure out, or should I talk to a developer? We’ve assured users that we’d never use their banking info and while I don’t mind waiting for Sharetribe to make the banking part optional, I don’t wanna wait too long and lose interest from users.
This forum is dedicated to the Community Edition of Sharetribe Go. Sharetribe Go is Sharetribe’s older product, which has now been sunset. I understand that you’re working with The New Sharetribe, Sharetribe’s current product. As you’ve noticed, you can get support from our team and if you’d like to discuss with other developers building marketplaces on top of Sharetribe, you can join the Sharetribe Dev Slack workspace at https://www.sharetribe.com/dev-slack.
Indeed, we plan to make adding payment details optional, in the upcoming weeks. I don’t have a specific timeline to share, though. Also, note that this will probably lead to some other challenges, as this means buyers will be able to browse listings but won’t be able to buy from them, until sellers have added payment details. This may be a better approach for your audience (you know them best!) and you could also decide to enable the “Listing approval” feature, to make sure only listings that have payment details enabled are live. Just a heads-up about the downside of that alternative flow!
I hope you’ll hear from other developers about their experience integrating a third-party payment gateway (even if different from PayPal), at https://www.sharetribe.com/dev-slack!