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OWNER NAME: Juho Makkonen and Antti Virolainen
RATING: 8/10
Selling your own products and services online has become easy considering there are different tools and platforms that you can now use as a marketplace. Sharetribe is one of the places that you may want to explore when looking for an opportunity of building your own marketplace where you and/or other sellers market their own businesses online. This Sharetribe review will give you an overview about the platform’s features and to help you grasp the idea whether using it is a good investment to make.
Sharetribe offers a tool that can help you create your own marketplace. The platform was initially developed for the purpose of helping students sell old textbooks, finding a tutor and for getting help in moving out. It was designed by Juho Makkonen and Antti Virolainen. After five years in operation, the platform was a success and its developers further improved its features that become a marketplace platform that is now widely used for business.
The platform consists of a built-in payment system and can support a wide range of marketplaces with helpful tools for online marketing. The user can create their own marketplace with tools that can help them customize their site for filtering content, categorizing products and services and generating marketing strategies to market a business. One can use the features for custom branding, marketing and selling. The platform works on mobile devices as well.
In order to have access to the software you need to pay a subscription fee at $79, $119, $159 and $239 which is billed to you every 6 months. Each subscription level has a varying number of users allowed to use the marketplace under your account. You can also opt for an add-on feature of customized landing page for your site at $99 per month. Once your marketplace is up and running it can be browsed by anyone without the need of creating a user account. You can offer your marketplace for other sellers and they need to create their own user account.
The platform is develop as a Software as a Service (SaaS) which means that you can create your own marketplace quick and easy without the need of a developer. However, whatever features available to the platform are the only ones at your disposal. There is no chance to introduce more changes and added features other than those created by Sharetribe because the platform is not extendible.
The free version provides very limited support in developing your marketplace upon its launching. This means that while you have free options on customizing your site and endless possibilities of using the Sharetribe features and functionality initially, you will likely spend more investment in terms of developing your marketplace.
The Marketplace Academy
Aside from using the platform as a tool for building your own marketplace, Sharetribe also comes with a Marketplace Academy that helps you learn what you need to know about building and running your own marketplace. Your subscription not only comes with an access to the marketplace platform tools and software but also access to learning tools as well.
The Pros
The Sharetribe provides basically everything that one needs in order to start building his own marketplace. Its built-in payment system supports about 25 or more currencies in more than 190 countries. This makes all financial and business transactions to your own marketplace easy and hassle free across the globe. The platform is also designed for startup business which is advantageous when you have no experience about where and how to start marketing your own products and services.
There is also a free trial version that you can use. The platform is also regularly being updated for security measures and upgrades in functionality and analytics. It also supports open source integration from strong communities that can be helpful when starting out your own marketplace.
The Cons
Considering that the Sharetribe supports open source and different types of marketplace, you are likely confronted with too many features that you might not need for your business. This can be strikingly overwhelming and can distract you from how you want to build your marketplace and you might end up less focus on your goals and purpose. The main feature of the platform is actually to provide buyers a tools where they can filter, search and compare products until they find what they want. If you do not want this kind of features to your marketplace and you prefer using an algorithm that will choose the suitable provider according to the options and preferences entered by the buyer then you will have a hard time accomplishing this by using the platform.
Conclusion
Sharetribe offers a good tool that every marketer can use when they aim to build their own marketplace. It can easily be shared with other users and with features and functionalities that are very helpful in creating your own awesome marketplace website.
Check Out Sharetribe and Build Your Marketplace Website Here
