Extending your Sharetribe marketplace with code enables you to build unique features and designs to grow your marketplace business. If you’re like most Sharetribe founders, you’re not a developer and need to hire a developer to add custom code to your marketplace. This article walks you through tips on how to hire a developer to use Sharetribe.
Hiring a developer is a process. You will need to find a suitable candidate, discuss your requirements with them, align on cost and time, and finalize your agreement.
This article breaks down the process into three key steps:
Prepare your requirements
Connect with developers
Evaluate and choose a developer
How to prepare requirements
Having clear requirements is key to a productive developer hiring process. To prepare accurate proposals, developers want to know:
What your marketplace is about
How you want it to work
A great way to think about your requirements to the developer is to think of them as end-user problems you want to solve on your marketplace. Answering the question “What should my buyers or sellers be able to do?” is a great way to start creating your requirements.
Sharetribe helps you a lot with this process, as it comes with many core marketplace features out of the box. You should get familiar with these features, then consider if you want or need to change them. A developer will use these out of the box features as the starting point for their build, so imagining your own requirements as changes to these core functionalities will align with their building process.
You may wonder if there is a feature or workflow you cannot achieve without custom code. The answer is that, due to Sharetribe’s technical architecture, you will rarely encounter technical limitations. The limitations you are more likely to hit are in the budget and time needed to build a feature. Writing custom code is costly and, if you are launching your marketplace for the first time, you likely want to prioritize efficiency. Thankfully, Sharetribe provides many pieces and tools to help you build custom features more affordably than if you built them from scratch.
How to connect with developers
The best place to find a developer is Sharetribe’s network of verified Sharetribe Experts. Sharetribe Experts are developers and designers who have been vetted by Sharetribe for their technical skill and professionalism.
Sharetribe Experts include individual developers, small teams, and larger agencies from all over the world. All of them have experience building Sharetribe marketplaces. They are the most experienced and trusted Sharetribe developers in the world.
You can connect with Experts in the Experts Marketplace. Submit your requirements via a requirement form to submit your needs to all Experts. You will receive proposals from different Experts to consider. Or, review and connect with specific Experts via the Directory.
You can find a suitable developer through other means as well—hiring a Sharetribe Expert is not mandatory to customize Sharetribe. Any developer with the appropriate technical skillset can build custom code for Sharetribe.
If you already have a developer in mind or have one in your team, you can direct them straight to Sharetribe’s developer documentation. An established working relationship is valuable and Sharetribe offers many resources for developers to get up to speed.
If you would like our advice at any stage in this process, you can book a call with our team or drop us a message via the chat widget in the corner. ↘️
How to choose a developer
Anyone with the required technical skillset can write code to customize a Sharetribe marketplace. In this section, we’ll focus on hiring a developer from Sharetribe’s Expert network, who are vetted and have the required skills to complete Sharetribe customization projects.
The required technical skillset depends on what is needs to be built. Simple color or style changes require only basic development skills, but familiarity with command line tooling is helpful. Many UI changes can be done with pure CSS knowledge.
For anything more extensive than basic look-and-feel changes, familiarity with JavaScript, React, and crafting UIs with components is needed. Working knowledge of frontend web development and JavaScript is a good starting point in learning the technologies.
On your end, you’ll want to focus on several key factors to help you decide on the best developer:
Scope: How much customization you want to do
Budget: How much you can invest in customization
Relationship: How communication works between you and the developer
Let’s take a look at these in turn.
Scope
How much you want to customize defines the scope or size of your project.
For developers, size of a project is generally understood in terms of development hours (how long will it take to do the work) and price (how much will those hours cost). Development hours indicate the effort it will take to complete a project.
Small: A contained customization task or additional feature, keeping the existing look and feel
Medium: Adding several features or achieving a general objective, keeping the existing look and feel
Large: A comprehensive customization project touching multiple parts of the marketplace. This can mean 150 or more development to complete the first version.
Generally, the more hours your project requires, the bigger team you will want to hire. As a general rule, large teams can deploy more development resources to complete your project and have organizational structure to manage the complexity of a larger projects. On the other hand, a smaller team can be more agile and complete smaller scopes quicker.
Of course, larger teams can still handle smaller projects and smaller teams or individual developers can handle large projects, but you will find more success if you align your scope to the size of the team.
Budget
Your budget also determines who you can and should hire. The cost of the custom code project equals the number of hours required multiplied by the hourly rate the developer charges.
A developer’s rate depends on several factors, the most important of which are:
Location: Generally, teams from regions where cost of living is lower cost less than teams from regions where cost of living is higher.
Team size: Generally, larger teams cost more than smaller teams because they provide more services. For example, larger agencies offer a broader suite of services like design, marketing, or strategy consulting.
Experience: Generally, more experienced teams cost more than less experienced teams.
Relationship
The third most important factor in determining who to work with is the relationship you establish. The developer will become a stakeholder in your success, helping you create new value in your marketplace business. When choosing a developer, consider their communication style, responsiveness, and ways of working: do they align with yours?
Since trust is an important component to this relationship, work with someone you know or strongly consider hiring a Sharetribe Expert. Experts are vetted by Sharetribe for their professionalism and technical expertise, so you can trust that they know Sharetribe and engaged in successful client relationships previously.
Next steps
Ready to hire a developer? Start your search in the Experts Marketplace.
Learn more about building code on Sharetribe as efficiently as possible as you prepare your requirements.