Knowing your users is an important part of running a marketplace business. Custom user fields let you collect specific information about your users during signup. They also help your users create richer user profiles.

Every user has a set of default fields, like email, name, and bio, some public and some private. Custom user fields are public fields that tell you—and fellow marketplace users—more about the people on your platform. In Biketribe, we’ll ask users for their biking interests to start building a community where people share relevant information about themselves.

Navigate to Users > User fields in Console. By default, you don’t have any user fields, so we’ll start by clicking “+ Add a new user field”.

We’ll create one user field for our bike rental marketplace: a checkbox group for favorite types of biking.

The field name is shown in the marketplace on the signup form and user profiles.

Type in Biking interests.

Field ID is a unique identifier, stored in the data of the user. While the field’s name can be changed, you should not change the field ID after users have been created. User data will retain the old ID. The field ID should not contain spaces or special characters.

The ID for this field will be biking-interets.

Type in biking-interests.

The user field type will be Select multiple, which is a checkbox field group. The user can choose anything from none to all fields.

Next, we determine some further settings for the user type:

We’ll add the field to the signup form but will not make it mandatory to reduce friction during signup. If someone doesn’t want to choose an interest, they can still sign up.

Finally, we’ll choose to hide unselected options from user profiles. This means that any unselected options will be hidden in public profile pages.

The combo of settings is this:

Enable Add this field to the sign-up form.

Disable Make this field mandatory.

Disable Show unselected options on the user profile page.

Next, we define the different options for the user field. Click “+ Add a new option”.

Just like fields, options have names.

Type Mountain biking.

The option value is comparable to the field ID: it's an identifier stored in the user data. No spaces or special characters are allowed.

Type mountain-biking.

Repeat the process for as many biking interests as you want to add. For our example platform, we’ll add: E-biking, City biking, BMX, Commuting, Tandem biking, and Long-distance biking.

Finally, you can choose to limit this user field to a specific user type. This is very useful when creating different onboarding and user experiences. In the case of our peer-to-peer bike rental platform, we don’t want to limit this field to only bike owners or customers, so we’ll leave this section empty. We want all users to share more about their biking interests.

Disable Limit this field to specific user types.

And save changes!

It's time to move on to listing settings!

Go to Step 3 to adjust your listing type.