The knowledge base below lists some of the most common custom features that have been built in Flex marketplaces with custom coding. If you’re not a developer yourself, you’ll need to hire one to help build your marketplace. You can use the information below to help you when preparing feature requirements for your developer.

Knowledge base

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Information

The knowledge base currently contains only a subset of features commonly built in Flex marketplaces. If you’re looking for a particular feature, but do not see it on this list, it is likely we have not added it to the knowledge base yet, but most likely it is still fully doable. Please feel free to reach out to hello@sharetribe.com if you have any questions about possibilities, complexities, and approaches of the features you have in mind for your marketplace.

How to prepare requirements for successful development

The first step to hiring a developer to build your marketplace is to make them understand what you would like to build. With Flex, the fastest way to do this is by describing changes you would like to implement on top of the starting development templates. We recommend using the user journey framework to communicate these changes, creating flowcharts depicting steps users like buyers or sellers take to achieve a particular goal. We share some tips on how to prepare Flex user journeys here.

In describing your requirements using user journeys or another approach, you will cover how your marketplace works. Certain use cases are already supported in the Flex Templates, while others require the development of custom features. This knowledge base shares the list of common features and their typical names to help you find them. Note that this list is work in progress and does not reflect every feature possible on Flex.

Typical starting functionality gives you an example of how this feature can work. Usually we are describing how the feature works at its simplest implementation.

Depending on the feature, developers might need additional information to build the feature. Considerations for development shares some of the information they will need in order to implement the feature. It also tells you more about the technical considerations that go into building the feature to give you more context about the preparation and work required.