Membership to a marketplace can be paywalled and monetized. If you restrict typical marketplace capabilities to only certain users, you can charge a fee for access to these capabilities. Such value can be monetized by a membership fee: in exchange for recurring fee, a user gains access privileges non-members do not have.
You can set up a membership fee without coding on your Sharetribe marketplace. It requires configuring your Access control permissions, setting up a subscription payment system, and integrating your marketplace and the payment system together.
This guide walks you through how to charge a membership fee without coding on Sharetribe.
1. Create a payment page to pay the membership fee
First, you will need to set up a system for users to pay you the recurring membership fee. There are many subscription payment systems you could use, but we recommend using Stripe's suite of payment tools for your subscription payment. Sharetribe's Help center guides use 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. We recommend using Stripe’s tools called Checkout and Billing as your subscription payment system, but there are other solutions for such payments on the market.
2. Enable user approval
You need to enable the user approval feature in Console > General > Access Control.
Doing this means that users who sign-up must first be approved before they have full access to the marketplace. Users who are pending approval cannot create listings or initiate a transaction. Learn how to enable user approval.
You can also make your marketplace private to hide listings and other user profiles from users pending approval. Learn how to make your marketplace private.
3. Link your marketplace and payment system
Once you have set up the payment page and enabled user approval, you need to communicate to your users how they can be approved and granted access to the marketplace. You should provide guidance in a couple of places:
When enabling user approval, you can include a CTA button to direct users to the necessary steps or instructions for gaining approval. Learn how to add a call to action. In the CTA link, you should add the User_ID and Email Address dynamic parameters:
?client_reference_id={userId}&prefilled_email={userEmail}. This will be crucial later on, if you plan to automate the user approval process using Zapier. Learn how to use dynamic parameters.
You can also modify the default message shown when a user who is pending approval tries to access marketplace listings. You can do this through the Marketplace Texts feature. The specific text key you need to edit is:
"NoAccessPage.userPendingApproval.content": "You need approval from the {marketplaceName} team to get access to the marketplace.",
4. Approve the user
The final step is to approve users once they have paid the membership fee.
You can manually approve users who paid. After receiving and reviewing the payment in Stripe, you would go to Console and approve the user. Users can be reviewed and approved in Console > Manage > Users. Users gain access after they are approved in Console.
You can also automate user approval using Zapier. Through Zapier, your marketplace can be informed and updated when a membership fee payment occurs and approve the user automatically.
More information on monetizing your marketplace
A membership fee is only a single example of the capabilities and value you can monetize. You can find more ideas on how to monetize your marketplace in the following articles: