Sharetribe Go is no longer actively maintained, discover The New Sharetribe!

Announcements
1

Hey all!

We have exciting news: we’re introducing The New Sharetribe, our new marketplace builder! The New Sharetribe replaces Sharetribe Go as the easiest, fastest way to build a marketplace (you can learn more about it at https://www.sharetribe.com/from-go-to-the-new-sharetribe/).

This means that Sharetribe Go will no longer be actively maintained. In practice, we’ll continue to bring maintenance and critical security updates for the foreseeable future but add no new features.

Eventually, we will sunset Sharetribe Go. We’ll share more details on that timeline later.

The New Sharetribe brings tons of new possibilities: it combines the no-code capabilities of Sharetribe Go with the flexibility and extensibility of Sharetribe Flex. It relies on technologies that are much more modern that Sharetribe Go’s, providing a better developer experience.

If your marketplace is running on the Community Edition of Sharetribe Go, we hope you’ll give The New Sharetribe a try and consider using it!

You can create an account with The New Sharetribe completely free of charge. Using the platform is free for 14 days.

If you have any questions, let us know below! We’re happy to help.

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Where is the community for The New Sharetribe?

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Hey there @jay!

We decided to sunset the Slack community that was open during the New Sharetribe beta. We’ll look into ways to foster such a Community again in the (hopefully near) future!

Here’s a copy of the announcement Juho posted before we closed the New Sharetribe Slack channel:

We just launched our new www.sharetribe.com site which only features The New Sharetribe. The “Go” and “Flex” brands are no longer visible, and all new accounts are created with The New Sharetribe.

This marks the end of the pilot period which began in early June. The New Sharetribe is now officially out of beta.

I sincerely want to thank everyone who offered their feedback during this period. We’ve already made numerous improvements, and our backlog is full of ideas for improvements for the coming months, thanks to the feedback we’ve gotten from this community.

I’m also hereby announcing that we will be closing this Slack chat next Monday, the 31st. Slack is not the right tool for running a community for a large number of people, and we typically expect 1000+ people to create a Sharetribe account every month.

This experience has taught us a lot about how to foster a great community for founders building their marketplaces with Sharetribe, and we’re hoping to launch a full-fledged community forum for all Sharetribe users in the foreseeable future. We believe there’s a lot of value in the type of peer-to-peer learning that a community like this can foster.

We’re very much hoping to stay in close touch with all of you to monitor the progress of your marketplaces and help you on your path to success. Feel free to initiate a conversation with our team any time using the messaging widget in your Sharetribe Console.

One more time: a huge thank you to all of you! :pray:

9

I want to give some negative feedback.

As a customer, I hate it whenever a company decides to change something that wasn’t requested, and then acts like it’s exciting and positive in the announcement. It’s a form of gaslighting that I resent.

At least do us the courtesy of not insulting our intelligence. Explain what has changed - and be very up-front about anything that you have taken away from the offering.

If your changes constitute bad news from a customer perspective, then don’t hide from that. Be up front. If we customers think you still deserve our business, you’ll get it. But if I have to go looking for the details of those changes because you’ve made them deliberately hard to find, that’s a textbook example of a-hole design and you deserve brickbats for it.

What sucks is that you build something good, then to maximise your profits you change it when people have invested in it.

If the “new” ShareTribe is a better deal, it stands to reason you’d be trumpeting the details until people asked you to pipe down.

“We maybe sorta might eventually get around to kinda replacing support for X, Y or Z” is incredibly poor. This is the province of amateurish startups, not mature offerings to be taken seriously. I hope this is mistaken - at the very least, this kind of communication with your user base is a PR fail. I certainly hope, as a new user who’s just decided to use your offering, that this kind of half-baked capriciousness isn’t typical.

10

Hello John,

and thanks for your candid feedback.

I definitely understand the confusion, frustration, and doubts. Sunsetting Sharetribe Go was not an easy decision, and any such transition period (for any company, I imagine) is not without challenges.

We did our best to communicate things heavily, and I believe we’ve been quite transparent about it. We’ve notified all founders who have been using Sharetribe Go (via email, or banners in their Admin panel), we’ve communicated about this new product on our different channels, and we listed the key differences between Go and The New Sharetribe at https://www.sharetribe.com/from-go-to-the-new-sharetribe/.

Sharetribe Go was a great product, but it had lots of flaws, too. In particular, it was not possible to Extend it easily. All our customers who managed to grow quickly hit the limit of Sharetribe Go. They then had to battle with the Community Edition, build their marketplace from scratch at a very high cost, or stay stuck and/or give up. This was far from ideal, and we couldn’t help Sharetribe’s customer this way.

I don’t think the comment about "maximise your profits " is accurate or fair. Sharetribe is a mission-driven company and even our legal company structure reflects this. You can learn more about this at https://www.sharetribe.com/company/ and https://www.sharetribe.com/balanced/steward-ownership-is-capitalism-2-0/. In order to achieve our mission, we must build a sustainable company and, financially, Sharetribe Go was not allowing us to do it. Keeping Sharetribe Go alive, even when being aware of its flaws, and going bankrupt would not have helped anyone.

I hope you’ll give The New Sharetribe some consideration. It’s definitely still missing a lot of important features and we’re adding new things every month. And if there’s anything missing for you to launch or grow your marketplace, you can build just that customization with the help of a Sharetribe Expert or your own team, instead of being stuck.

Again, thanks for sharing your experience, this will definitely help us do better, too.

1 Like
11

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for your thoughful and detailed reply. Having checked out the details you posted, I take pause and admit that yes, my comments were unfair.

I’ve spent the past few weeks being frustrated by vendors exercising deliberate opacity, and it’s clear that this is common because bewildering the client with BS is a key skill in the arena of sales for software and dev work. It’s especially galling when I come from a background of dev myself, and these days as a procurement consultant it’s rare for me to encounter such obtuse conduct. When all you want is an appreciation of what is being offered and a price, and instead you get riddles, I’m afraid that the result is rapid onset cynicism. ShareTribe was unfairly caught up in my dark mood born of dishonest vendors, late nights, caffeine and time pressure.

It seems from further reading that I’m going to have to self-host in order to get the featureset I need. I’m also just noticing that Stripe is compulsory.

Can I ask a few questions, please?

Background
We want to implement a bookings-based site for a professional gig marketplace.

Implementation

  1. Deposits. We want to take a 10% deposit at the time the booking is made. This is non-refundable. This is important to avoid malicious users making false bookings (and we unfortunately expect this from disgruntled competitors once we launch). I’m sure this is possible - can you give me a nudge in the right direction as to where I need to code this?
  2. Balance.
    (a) (MVP) Take the 90% balance payment at the scheduled start time for the booking
    (b) (Final) Take an imprint of the client’s credit card on booking commencement, then effect the payment when the booking is confirmed closed by the vendor and client (or 2 hours after the scheduled close time, defaulting to processing if no input received).
  3. Set menu of services offered. We don’t want vendors creating new service types, but simply showing that they are offering the services we advertise.
  4. Set pricing. We want to initially restrict vendors from setting their own pricing, and force all listings to be the admin-set price.
  5. Add-on pricing. All services have optional add-ons and these add to the hourly rate.
  6. Booking conditions. All services have various minimum booking periods, travel periods, and surcharges. We need to implement these.
  7. Vendor radius. We want vendors to enter their service area as a radius from their base location. Optionally, it would also be good to create regions and allow vendors to select regions of operation.
  8. Client search. We want the client to enter the date, time, duration, location and select the service they want, and have all matching available vendors returned.
  9. Search flexibility. We want the client to be able to change small details of their search, in order to more conveniently find possible vendors. e.g. change the date +/- a day, change the service to a similar one.
  10. Projects. We want our clients to be able to create “projects”, or groupings for their bookings. These would typically be addresses (our clients are building contractors and our vendors are various service providers to them). Then the vendor doesn’t need to manually enter the same address repeatedly, and we can use the entered dates for the project as start and finish points for booking enquiries.
  11. Upsell. We want to upsell to clients - they come to the site to book certain services but there are extras of interest to them that construction sites normally hire. We want to offer a checklist menu allowing the client to easily book these, too.

The MVP here is the base menu of services, and we think that we can get a viable service running with essentially the out-of-the-box offering, but what’s really important is the booking deposit. I don’t see a way to do this with the SaaS version, so I expect it’s web template and hosting for us.

I’d appreciate any pointers to references, and thanks again for your patience in the face of unfair criticism.

12

I forgot to add a few items.

The default booking process is one which I think will frustrate our clients. Can I check that I understand it correctly? The client browses all services and then has to click into any particular offering and then enter their desired booking dates to check if the thing is available?

If that’s correct, that’s going to lead to an awful lot of wasted time and frustration. We’d need to set ours up to let the customer use their booking interval as a filter, to find who’s available, and then sort the results by rating, and select from there.

Also, we don’t want a back-and-forth waiting for bookings to be accepted by our vendors. Our market needs to have instant acceptance from the vendor - thus, their schedule will be important: if they’re available, they accept the booking. We’ll want to implement a blocking feature in future that will allow vendors to avoid clients, but for the MVP we won’t need this.

Given they know when they want to book their service, it’s

13

Hey @australis,

and thanks for your message. I really appreciate that you took the time to share your experience and mindset when first reacting to our messages. I’m glad to see that things have been clarified now, and I hope you’ll be able to move forward with Sharetribe for your marketplace project. I’m sure you’ll find The New Sharetribe full of possibilities!

This forum is dedicated to the Community Edition of Sharetribe Go, which is now sunset. In order to support you, it’s best if we continue this discussion at hello@sharetribe.com or via the messaging widget in the bottom right corner of your Console. If you’d like to interact with other developers building a marketplace with Sharetribe, you can also join the Sharetribe Dev Slack workspace.

In a nutshell, all the features and customizations you’ve listed are possible with Sharetribe, yes. As they are all unique to your own marketplace, they can be achieve with code. You’ve listed a lot of customization ideas, so it’s good that you have some prioritization in mind! Otherwise, there’s a risk that you’ll spend weeks or months building things instead of launching fast to learn from your first users :wink:

when it comes to the search, it is possible to enable an availability calendar search. This feature is available out of the box, and I noticed that you’ve already enabled it on your own Test marketplace. As you’ve probably noticed, visitors can then select some dates to filter listings and see only those available on that/these day(s).

If you’d like some support on a specific feature you’re building, shoot us a message at hello@sharetribe.com or via the messaging widget in the bottom right corner of your Console and our team (in particular Sari and Aleksi of the Developer Advocacy team) will be able to help and share technical tips.

Keep us posted there!