How can a non-technical founder build custom features on Sharetribe with as little money and time as possible? The key: making full use of the no-code features and existing design. This article describes the best practices to make sure your custom code requirements are met as efficiently as possible.

You will rarely, if ever, hear “no, that’s not possible” when discussing a custom feature for Sharetribe. Sharetribe’s headless approach means you can build what you need with custom code.

The flipside of limitless possibilities is that it can quickly become expensive. A full redesign and reworking of workflows is not cheap, if you’re not a developer yourself (and even if you are, it will take a long time—and your time has a value too).

Thankfully, Sharetribe provides you and developers many tools that make custom coding as affordable and fast as possible:

The rest of this article describes these parts of Sharetribe in detail. We explain how to use them in the most efficient way to minimize custom development costs.

The first step: use Console to build your marketplace without coding. The more you can set up your marketplace in Console, the less you need to build with code.

If you just created your account, use the Test environment to configure your marketplace to be as close as possible to what you want it to be. Create listing fields and categories, set up a landing page, and configure your sharing details.

Unsure where to begin? Start with the setup tutorial.

To maximize efficiency towards launching, you will need to utilize your marketplace’s no-code functionality as much as possible. This may require adjusting your expectations for how things should work to match how they do work. Though Sharetribe’s no-code features may not always work exactly as you want them to (which is why custom coding is an option), they offer a great starting point.

So, wherever you can, use Sharetribe’s no-code features and don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Initially working with limitations of no-code will take effort, thought, and creativity, but it will save you money on development services.

As you set up and possibly even run your no-code marketplace, keep track of the things you want to change or features you want to add when the time to go from no-code to code comes. Instead of starting a huge project to build everything you want to add to your marketplace, consider: what are the most important changes or features right now? Essentially, you need to decide what is the most critical new feature in achieving your next business goal.

And then, it’s time to start custom development.

Your no-code marketplace is the starting point for custom development. Extending what you have rather than changing it is the most efficient way to get into custom code.

A developer using Sharetribe will begin custom development by downloading the marketplace codebase template (called the “Sharetribe Web Template”) and use it as the base of their work. From the get-go, that codebase will look and work exactly how you configured it in Console.

Using the same design and user journeys when implementing your custom functionality ensures that the developer can maximally leverage what Sharetribe offers out of the box. They don’t need to rebuild anything that exists already, focusing instead on only new capabilities and features.

A user journey represents the ways that users navigate between different parts of your marketplace to accomplish a goal. This means experiences like sign-up, listing creation, search and matching, transactions, and reviews. And since you’re running a marketplace, it has different user journeys for customers and providers.

The less you change the default user journeys of Sharetribe, the less custom code you need to build.

For example, you want to include a PDF upload in listing creation. Keeping the same user journey means keeping the same overall listing creation steps and adding a new step for digital file uploads to the flow.

Design refers to the look and feel of your marketplace. The placement of components, style, the font, the layout of individual pieces on a page are all part of your marketplace design. Your Test environment uses the default Sharetribe design.

You can save a considerable amount of time and money when leverage the existing look and feel of Sharetribe as long as possible. This means not changing the font, layout, or styles. Creating a fully custom design is possible, but this will likely be a more costly process than changes to functionality. You may want to hire a designer to first create the new design, after which the developer needs to build components like buttons and re-arrange layouts, all with code. This adds up to a lot of hours quite quickly.

Even here, the best practice is: extend what you see, don’t change it. To continue the example of a PDF upload from the previous section, extending the existing design means re-using the default buttons or font to create the interface where users upload the file.

The Sharetribe Developer Platform is a collection of developer-facing tools that Sharetribe provides for—you guessed it—developers.

It includes:

Developers leverage Sharetribe by writing custom code that uses the pre-created tools in Sharetribe Developer Platform to deliver core marketplace functionality faster. While your developer will be the one leveraging these tools, as a founder, you can help them by creating clear requirements that enable the developer to use the Developer Platform fully.

This may mean that your features do not work exactly how you envisioned. The upshot is that they will be built affordably and they will be robust.

Here’s an example to show how Sharetribe helps you hit the ground running with development. Say you want to build a bidding process for your eBay-style product marketplace.

Without Sharetribe, your developers would need to build out a state machine that keeps track of the bidding logic. They’d need to design, implement, and test a system where customers can bid during some period of time, where a winning bid is chosen after such a time, and where that bid is processed, not to mention everything that happens after like payments, reviews, and refunds.

Sharetribe’s developer platform gives them this system out of the box. All the developer needs to focus on is implementing the exact steps that should happen and how, rather than worrying about the infrastructure that underpins it.

It can be challenging to understand how the Sharetribe Developer Platform works if you are not a developer. And you don’t have to. Sharetribe and your developer are here to help you leverage its functionality regardless.

You can book a call with our team through Console to discuss your requirements and ask us how the most efficient solution should be built on Sharetribe. We’re knowledgeable about how our tools work technically and trained in distilling this information to no-code founders like yourself.

However, if you’re interested in learning more about the tech, you can! Delve into our technical documentation, where learn more about how the developer platform works by reading the reference guides. You can also try how things work for developers by setting up your own web template.

Follow the low-code tutorial to experience Sharetribe as a developer or read the technical guides.

This article introduced a framework for how you can use Sharetribe to build features with custom code as efficiently as possible.

Ready to hire a developer? Visit the Expert Marketplace to hire from Sharetribe's network of vetted developers.

Want to understand custom development better? Learn how it works, explained for non-developers.