sharetribe

Sharetribe's platform makes it easy to develop and deploy a robust marketplace quickly.

Comments: Sharetribe provides a hosted marketplace platform, including PayPal and Stripe payment gateways, that my company eXcesS Capacity leverages to rapidly develop, deploy and market a web property where businesses rent, sell and buy underutilized resources.

Pros:

Sharetribe's marketplace platform incorporates essential functionality such as workflow, listing customization, notifications, PayPal and Stripe payment gateways, ratings and reviews, and much more. Sharetribe's customer support is very knowledgeable and responsive to my questions and requests. The Sharetribe Marketplace Academy is informative about how marketplaces should be built, deployed and marketed.

Cons:

While there are gaps in functionality, the features provided with a product that has evolved since 2008 are rich. Sharetribe support is interested and responsive to its users enhancement suggestions.

Sharetribe is a great platform

Comments: Sharetribe is a really interesting platform and their customer service is out of this world! I would recommend it especially if you are planning on creating a services or rental marketplace. multi-vendor retail is a little tricky in some areas but they're adding features all the time and are receptive to requests (although requests are always subject to development demand and timelines, of course). Considering the quick set up, amazing customer support and tutorials available, I would highly recommend giving it a try to see if it will work for your unique marketplace.

Pros:

Sharetribe's customer service is amazing: quick (despite timezone differences), friendly and solution focused. The initial set up is guided via a checklist for different areas of your marketplace and is very easy to follow. The look is pretty clean and the filter features are built in and really powerful. There are a lot of tutorials and supporting documents available if you're trying to figure out something new and if you still have trouble, they're always happy to help. There are also a lot of case study examples of Sharetribe marketplaces out there so you can really see what's possible for what you're trying to do.

Cons:

I found that since my marketplace focuses on peer to peer sales (not rental or service based), I ran into some features that weren't available or possible to implement on Sharetribe. There is a lot of customization possible but there were a few things that I felt were important for the specific result I was looking for that made it difficult for me. Despite this, I have had a great experience with Sharetribe and they helped me launch my initial marketplace which has been essential in my business growth.

Save your time and money

Comments: Landing pages are so important for any website. Your options to have one with Sharetribe is to pay them a ridiculous fee to host one page, I agree with reviewer [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN], it really is a joke. Their landing page design looks cheap and clunky, customisation is extremely limited, you can’t even change the font from white to black (unless you are using a white background, in which case the font is black automatically) so you are forced to choose dark images otherwise you can’t see the font. The alternative they offer is for you to host and design your own landing page and they will host your platform on another domain. They clearly know little about how SEO works as that option is not viable. When you realise that the platform has so many limitations, they advise you to self-host the platform as the code is open source, that way you can customise it how you want. I only wish I had done this from day one, I would have saved myself a lot of time, money and hassle.

Pros:

Quite easy to set up if you have little technical knowledge.

Cons:

In the past 8 months, I have received misleading advice, I have been told a number of things are possible with Sharetribe Go using custom script, then after speaking with five separate developers, I now realise that this is in fact untrue. On numerous occasions, I have had to chase multiple times for a response, because apparently my emails randomly went into their spam folder. I have also received differing support from two support advisors, it feels as if they are not all on the same page and they are not really aware of the platform’s capabilities and limitations. The most shocking part is that they make many of their own assumptions. One which led them to schedule my subscriptions for cancellation without my consent and then not inform me, despite them saying “we always do the cancellation upon the customer request and never on our own.” When I realised what they had done and called them up on it, their response was “You would have gotten a notification on [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] to let you know about this scheduled cancellation in case you wanted to change something.” [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] would have been two days prior to them cancelling my subscription. What Sharetribe deem as acceptable behaviour is shocking, particularly when they do things that they claim they never would. The platform itself has the bare basics for features and lacks the ability to customise, and in my opinion is not worth the expensive hosting fees.

Sharetribe - HELPED DURING COVID-19 - Give them your business!

Comments: The thing that really stood out to our team of 20 remote volunteers was the customer service that Antti from sharetribe offered us. During COVID-19 it is a very difficult time for all businesses but the team at Sharetribe were enthusiastic to help and really took the time to understand our product. They even geared up for a national TV spot we were promised but that never happened.... upping their servers and giving us advice on some scaling challenges with our manual approval process.

Pros:

This is incredibly easy software to deploy for any kind of two sided marketplace. Especially useful for a team that includes non technical people. We used the GO & FLEX versions and found them simple, intuitive and that the support was really exceptional for when we were figuring out how to use it initially and for all our out of the box queries.

Cons:

We think the auto response on emails - when a listing is not approved. Would like to customise this, but it's a small thing and you can always find a work around (we did with Sharetribe's assistance).

Nocode tool for MVP marketplaces

Pros:

Very easy to use and deploy. Gréât for testing you idea.

Cons:

Limited customizationImpossible to change the UX or even automated emailsOf your users base grows, the pricing can become very high