Sharetribe

🎙️ New Year, new podcasts! Two-Sided is coming with a new season, to uncover what makes marketplaces successful. This time Sjoerd sits down with the top marketplace investors to find out what they look for in startups, the challenges they see, and the trends to watch. If you're building, launching, running or funding a marketplace, you can't miss this!

New in Sharetribe 🚀 Calendar bookings with multiple seats We’re kicking off the new year with huge news for rental and service marketplaces: Sharetribe now supports calendar bookings with seats, no coding required! You can let providers add multiple seats to each time-slot—or have one seat per time-slot by default. (Sharetribe supports three different time-slot types without coding: day, night, or hour.) Seats are a game-changer for many service and rental marketplaces. Such as ones that offer: • Classes: Whether they’re for sports, languages, or crafts, classes listed on your marketplace can now accommodate multiple participants. • Tours and other experiences: A marketplace offering tours, services, or experiences can offer them for multiple people at once. • B2C rentals: Businesses that have multiple of the same equipment or tools available can  manage their rental stock with seats. • Desks in a co-working space: Providers can determine the number of desks or rooms available in the office. So if you’re building a marketplace with bookings where each time-slot can have space for more than one person, this feature is for you. Check out the newsletter (link in the comments) to learn more.

Sometimes, small improvements can be just as impactful as big feature updates. While we’ve released a lot of important new functionality to Sharetribe these past few months, we’re closing the year with a compilation of lots of small-but-impactful features and updates. Such as: • A new YouTube video field  • End-user experience improvements  • Two new Zapier automation templates • Updates to Sharetribe’s developer platform. Many of these updates were inspired by your feedback. Thank you! To learn more about specific improvements, check out our latest newsletter (link in the comments). In the comments, you can also find links to a list of everything we’ve added this year, and a sneak peek into what’s coming in 2025. And finally: Sharetribe’s support will be here to help you every day throughout the holidays. Happy holidays and see you next year!

👏👏👏 Thrilled to see our customer Ana Rachel Estrougo and her marketplace The Octopus Club featured in The Times as one of the 12 best pre-loved websites. Congrats Ana and team! 🙌

How to choose the right marketplace payment provider? Choosing a payment partner is one of the most important decisions you make for your marketplace’s tech stack. The payment provider you choose will impact things like: 🤝 your marketplace UX 🛠️ the speed and ease of building and maintaining your payment feature 📈 your revenue strategy 🌏 your scalability 💸 your cost structure. 📌 Here’s a checklist of the (minimum) things to check before locking down your choice: ✅ Support for the marketplace-specific payment flow. ✅ Ability to split payments and delay payouts. ✅ Handles the Know Your Customer process for your providers. ✅ Availability in the country where you operate. ✅ Ability to process the currencies used on your marketplace. ✅ Ability to process payouts to your providers' country/countries. ✅ You’re eligible to get access to a live environment. ✅ You know the process of how to get access to the live environment. ✅ You’re familiar with all the fees involved. ✅ You’ve tested that customer support is responsive and helpful. 📌 In the comments, you’ll find a link to a comparison table with six top payment provider companies + links to a complete overview article on each: Stripe Connect, PayPal for Marketplaces, Adyen for Platforms, Mangopay, Ryft, and Trustap. 👋 Considering a marketplace payment provider that’s not featured in this series? Tag them below so our Head of Content Mira can get in touch!

New in Sharetribe 🎉 Powerful updates to email notifications Sharetribe comes with a set of built-in emails that notify users about key events in your marketplace. However, some of these notifications might not be relevant to your platform. Or maybe you want to send some emails from another tool. That’s why Sharetribe’s latest release gives you more control over your marketplace’s built-in email notifications than ever. You can: • Add three new emails: user approved, listing approved, and permissions changed • Disable and enable built-in emails • Choose your email color Learn more about the updates (link in the comments) and build your ideal email notification setup with Sharetribe!

Marketplace payments are about as complicated as online payments get. If you’re using Sharetribe and its built-in Stripe integration to power your marketplace, this isn’t something you need to worry about. You already have a powerful, customizable, localized, and compliant marketplace payment system on your platform. BUT if you are: - Looking for another marketplace payment provider to integrate with your Sharetribe-powered marketplace - Still considering your marketplace tech stack Our latest article series is for you. Some highlights of what you’ll find: 💳 How the marketplace payment flow works 💡Key feature requirements for your marketplace payment provider 📌 Comparison table with top marketplace payment providers 📚 Detailed overviews of top marketplace payment providers: Stripe Connect, PayPal for Marketplaces, Mangopay, Adyen for Platforms, Ryft, Trustap Links to all articles are in the comments. ✏️Also! Are you considering a marketplace payment provider that’s not featured in this article series? Tag them in the comments! Our Head of Content Mira would love to write about more payment options for marketplaces. 👋Special thanks to Dom Mackenzie from Ryft and Steve Grice from Trustap for contributing to the series.

New in Sharetribe 🎉 Choose any currency when not using online payments Sharetribe uses Stripe for online payments, which means that, without coding, monetary transactions are currently limited to countries and currencies supported by Stripe. But what if you’re building a marketplace in a country (and currency) that isn’t supported by Stripe (and don’t want to invest in custom development yet)? One option is to launch your marketplace without online payments. Instead, you can connect buyers and sellers through your platform and let them handle payment off platform. With the latest Sharetribe release, you can now use any currency around the world when building a marketplace without online payments. You have many ways to monetize your marketplace. Recent Sharetribe releases let you build monetization flows like subscriptions, listings fees, or lead fees without coding. They’re great ways to monetize your platform before investing in custom development. Find a link for more details in the comments!

Another week, another panel about ownership. The good folks at The Ownership Economy are organizing a Summit next week, and I'll be there to talk about steward-ownership together with Christian Kroll from Ecosia. Here's how they summarize their mission on their website: "The Ownership Economy is a new economic model that seeks to empower individuals by giving them greater control over their assets and data. At its core, The Ownership Economy recognizes that in today's digital age, data is a valuable commodity that is often controlled by large corporations. The ownership economy seeks to change this by giving individuals the power to own and control their data, as well as other assets such as property and intellectual property." There are a a few tickets left still (exactly 28 at the time of this writing), so if this is your cup of tea, there's still time to grab yours! Friends in NYC: it would be awesome to catch up, but it will need to happens some other time, as I won't be able to make it in person: my schedule didn't allow me to fly over, so I'll be attending this one remotely.

Nice to see our CEO Juho Makkonen's and Cristóbal G.'s classic, The Lean Marketplace, on Shaun G. Slabber's reading list. ✨ Have you read it? What did you think?