Building custom code never starts from scratch with Sharetribe. Your no-code marketplace serves as a starting point for custom coding. Even when parts of your marketplace are custom coded, you’ll be able to continue using Sharetribe's no-code tools to modify others.

Since custom coding requires a developer skillset, you can hire an external developer to help you make your marketplace unique.

This article goes through the most important things a no-code founder should know about custom coding with Sharetribe. Getting familiar with the basics of how developing with Sharetribe works helps you understand how your custom-coded marketplace will work and communicate with developers.

Here are the main points in a nutshell:

The no-code setup you make in Console serves as the starting point for custom development, testing, and building your marketplace. You should take your marketplace setup as close to your ideal setup without coding.

This guarantees that custom coding is only needed for truly unique functionality, saving you both time and money. We’ve written more tips to help you extend your marketplace with code the most efficient way, if you’d like to learn more.

Sharetribe’s unique architecture and components make it fast and easy to build a unique, custom marketplace.

The codebase that already powers your no-code marketplace can be downloaded and self-hosted, while keeping it connected to your Sharetribe Console and Sharetribe’s backend.

The downloadable codebase is called the Sharetribe Web Template. It is a frontend web application template. It’s both modifiable with Sharetribe’s no-code tools and extensible with custom code. Your no-code Sharetribe marketplace is powered by this same template!

Moreover, the Template is open source, so you can use it for commercial purposes as-is and you own any customizations you make to it. Even if you move away from Sharetribe, the code is yours to keep and reuse.

You don’t need to use the Sharetribe Web Template and your no-code marketplace as the starting point to your custom-coded marketplace. You can build a frontend application from scratch and connect it to your Sharetribe Console account.

The most common need for building a fully custom frontend is building a mobile app. While Sharetribe Web Template is fully responsive and works great on mobile browsers, a dedicated mobile app requires its own unique codebase. Sharetribe’s partners have built ready-made third-party mobile templates that can help you get to the market fast.

No matter how you decide to build your frontend application, developers will leverage the Sharetribe Developer Platform to power it. The Sharetribe Developer Platform includes several tools, like a CLI (command line interface), multiple APIs (application programming interface), and a JavaScript SDK (software development kit) to make building unique features much faster.

You don’t need to know what these terms mean or what they do, but if you want to dive into technical terminology, you can visit technical terms reference.

Sharetribe Developer Platform enables developers to focus on building frontend functionality while letting Sharetribe handle backend functions such as data storage, scaling, security and backups and resource intensive operations like search queries or transaction processing.

In this section, we’ll discuss the differences between running a no-code Sharetribe marketplace and a custom-coded Sharetribe marketplace. While this section is quite technical, don’t worry: when you work with a developer, they will be there to help you every step of the way with hosting, maintaining, and upgrading your custom code.

To have custom code in your live marketplace, you need to self-host your marketplace frontend. You can use solutions like Heroku, Render, Google, or AWS to host your frontend application.

Owning and hosting your own frontend code enables you to use custom code. It gives you full control of how your marketplace frontend works. At the same time, Sharetribe continues to host your marketplace backend and take care of backend operations like hosting your data, maintaining performance, scalability, data security, compliance, backend software updates, and so on.

In practice, this means switching your Sharetribe account from no-code mode to custom code mode. Custom code mode enables you to connect your own frontend application that you host to Sharetribe’s backend via APIs. In no-code mode, Sharetribe hosts both the frontend and backend code that powers your marketplace.

When you host your own code, you become responsible for maintaining it. Specifically, you are responsible for maintaining the frontend codebase that you customized. Sharetribe continues to host and maintain your marketplace backend.

There is no one standard way to perform this maintenance. The need to maintain your marketplace codebase is driven by evolving web and mobile technology, such as new browsers, more powerful development languages, or evolving security requirements.

Neglecting code maintenance runs the risk of degraded performance. Load times may slow or inadvertent crashes can become more common.

The need to maintain must be weighed against the need to build. Generally, there’s two different approaches to maintenance: consistent, frequent maintenance and updates or bigger maintenance every two years. The actual need highly depends on what you’ve built. Discuss with your developer how maintenance should be accomplished alongside your other business priorities.

Sharetribe releases are automatically merged into a no-code marketplace that are fully hosted by Sharetribe.

When you host your own code, you must choose which new feature releases from Sharetribe you want to add into your customized codebase. New Sharetribe releases may be in conflict with the unique changes that you’ve made, so adding them automatically could lead to things breaking or undoing your custom code.

Instead, you need to integrate new releases into your marketplace through a development process called merging, where two similar codebases are compared for any conflicting code.

Any conflicting code is resolved by adjusting your custom codebase. The effort required to merge a new release from Sharetribe depends on how many conflicts there are, which, in turn, depends on the custom code you built. The scale can be anything from no conflicts (easy to add) to so many, that it’s good to consider if that particular feature is worth adding.

You do not need to add every feature Sharetribe releases. Sharetribe may release features not relevant to your marketplace, which you can choose to ignore.

Running custom code in your Live environment requires the Extend plan.

You can switch to custom code mode and start writing custom code on any Sharetribe plan, including on the free trial and Build plan.

When you're ready to publish your custom coded changes in your Live marketplace, you need to upgrade your subscription to Sharetribe's Extend plan. The Extend plan is the only Sharetribe plan that includes the ability to use Custom code mode in your Live environment. You must use the Extend plan for as long as you want to use custom code features in your marketplace.

Working with code changes how you use your Console’s environments, even if you’re not the developer.

So far, you’ve built your marketplace in the Test environment, and if you’ve launched, run your marketplace in the Live environment. Customizing with code introduces the Development environment into your workflow. Primarily, the Development environment will be used by developers to build and test the custom-coded version of your marketplace.

This article describes changes to how your marketplace works when you customize with code.

Learn more about the costs of customizing with code to consider if the investment required in custom code makes sense for your marketplace business’s next steps.

Learn more about how building custom code happens.

Ready to customize with code? Connect with a Sharetribe Expert or learn more about how to hire a developer.