Monetizing providers' access to customers can make a lot of sense. Especially on some service marketplaces where customers can bring a lot of value, providers may be ready to subscribe to get access to your customer base. Usually on these types of marketplaces, each provider has one listing that works as their public service provider profile.

In this article, we’ll learn how to set up a supply-side subscription. In practice, this monetization method means setting up a subscription fee for posting rights.

When a provider (supply) subscribes, they get to create a listing. After they unsubscribe, their posting rights are revoked and the listing is closed. Customers no longer have access to the listing and can’t book or make purchases from the provider.

You can support this flow with manual action or automate each step through Zapier.

First, set up a subscription page for providers to pay a recurring fee. There are many subscription payment systems you can use, but we recommend using Stripe.

Sharetribe has a built-in payment system that enables customers to pay providers through your platform, but a subscription fee works differently, requiring payments between users and your platform directly. This is why you need to set up a separate subscription payment page.

Follow our detailed guide on how to set up subscription payments with Stripe.

Enable the “Restrict posting rights” in Console > General > Access Control. Learn more about restricting posting rights

In practice, this means that if any user clicks to post a listing on your marketplace, they’ll land in a paywall page. In the next section, we’ll modify the content and call-to-action of the paywall page to match your specific monetization flow.

Once you have a subscription page and posting rights enabled, you need to communicate to providers can create a listing. Here’s how:

When someone subscribes, you should grant them the posting rights they paid for.

You can do this manually per user in Console > Manage > Users. The manual process entail setting up a notification to yourself when someone subscribes, navigating to Console, and giving the user posting rights.

You can also automate granting posting rights with Zapier. Follow this Zapier tutorial: Grant permissions after a subscription fee is paid.

The Sharetribe action you’ll be automating with Zapier is “Grant permissions” and the configuration you'll need to modify is “Permission to post listings”. The tutorial takes you through the setup step by step.

If you want to automate the supply subscription fee flow through Zapier, you’ll need to send the subscriber’s listing ID to Stripe.

Follow this Zapier tutorial to set up the automation: Store provider's listing ID in Stripe. This Zap makes sure the correct listing gets closed when someone cancels a subscription.

When a user cancels their subscription, you will want to revoke their permissions. You should also close the provider’s listing when they unsubscribe. After losing their posting rights, the provider can’t republish the listing. Instead, they’re prompted to subscribe again if they try to do so.

You can manually revoke posting rights in Console > Manage > Users and close the listing in Console > Manage > Listings.

Or you can automate revoking posting rights and closing the listing through Zapier. This means setting up a Zap that triggers these actions after a subscription ends: Revoke permissions and close listing when a subscription is cancelled.

Please note that for this last Zap to work, you need to have the Zaps from steps 4 and 4.5 of this guide working as well.

Supply-side subscription can be a great option for monetization, especially for service marketplaces where listing double as the service provider's profile.

Learn about other monetization models possible in Sharetribe in Help Center's monetization folder.