If you're looking for alternative ways to monetize your marketplace beyond charging a commission, you might consider asking your users to pay a subscription or membership fee or even a fee each time they post a listing.
While Sharetribe doesn't have an automated feature to charge users for publishing listings, you can still create an effective workflow with some manual setups and third-party services without coding.
To implement a subscription or membership fee in your marketplace, follow these three key steps:
Decide whether you want to charge the fee only to providers or to all users on your marketplace. If it’s the former, follow step 1a. If it’s the latter, follow step 1b.
Sign up for a payment service that supports charging recurring fees.
Create a content page that guides your providers on how to obtain listing permissions and pay the subscription fee.
Let's walk through each of these steps in detail below.
1a. Enable listing posting permission
You can enable the manual listing publishing permission by going to the Build section of your Console General → Access Control.
This feature lets you control which providers can post listings on your marketplace. Once activated, you can view and manage users with listing publishing permissions in the Manage Users section of your Console. Users who have been granted permission will have a checkmark (✔) on their user tab, while those without permission will be marked with an X.
OR
1b. Enable approve users who want to join
You can enable the Approve users who want to join feature by going to the Build section of your Console, General → Access control.
When this feature is enabled, you will see users who signed up and are pending approval to join your marketplace in the Manage Users section of your Console. Users pending approval won't be able to post listings or initiate transactions on the marketplace.
2. Sign up for a subscription payment service
Sharetribe's built-in payment gateway uses Stripe Connect, which is specifically designed for collecting commission fees and splitting transaction payments between the marketplace and providers. However, if you want to charge recurring monthly, semiannual or annual fees, you'll need to use a separate payment service that supports this functionality.
Many payment solutions offer this capability, such as Chargebee, Moonclerk, and Stripe Checkout. For this guide, we'll use Stripe Checkout as it offers a straightforward setup for creating a simple payment page without the need for coding. Follow these steps:
Go to the Stripe Checkout website to create an account. Fill in your business profile to start using payments.
If you already have a Stripe account, you can set up Checkout in your existing account.
In your Stripe dashboard, go to Payments > Payment Links. Here's also a direct link to the page.
In the "Product" field, select + Add new product. Here, you'll create your subscription plan as a product, providing key details such as the name, description, cost, and payment frequency. Once you have filled in all the mandatory details, click on "Add product"
Once you have added a product, you'll be able to find and select it from the Product field.
Click on "Create link" in the top right corner of the page. Once the link is created, you can copy the URL of the payment page and share it with your users. This link will direct them to the payment page, where they can pay for the subscription fee.
3. Communicate how to obtain listing publishing permissions
Lastly, you’ll need to inform users that they must pay a subscription or membership fee to your marketplace in order to receive permission to publish listings (1a.) or be allowed access to the marketplace (1b.).
Depending on what approach you implemented, you should make the following modifications:
If you charge fees to allow providers to publish listings, edit the default message that appears when a user without listing posting permission attempts to publish a listing. You can do this through the Marketplace Texts feature. The specific text key you need to edit is:
"NoAccessPage.postListings.content": "You need to receive publishing rights from the {marketplaceName} team.",
If you charge fees to allow users access to the marketplace, edit the default message that appears when a user pending approval attempts to access listings on the marketplace. 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.",
You should update the default texts shown above to guide users to where they can find more information about paying the subscription or membership fee. You can create this content page using the Pages feature. Be sure to include a link on this page that directs users to the Stripe Checkout page created in Step 2, where they can pay the fee.
Optional: set up an email notification when there's a new payment
With the above setup, you'll need to manually monitor your Stripe dashboard whenever a new user pays the subscription fee so you can promptly grant them listing publishing rights. To streamline this process, you can set up automatic alerts using Zapier. By doing so, you can receive an email notification each time a new payment is made in Stripe Checkout, allowing you to take timely action.