Why Sharetribe Is a Good Starting Point for Marketplace Founders
Building a marketplace from scratch can be expensive, slow, and risky — especially when the idea is still at the validation stage.
That’s why many founders choose Sharetribe as a starting point. It allows you to launch a marketplace MVP faster, test the business model, attract first users, and understand what features actually matter before investing in custom development.
But Sharetribe is not a “set it and forget it” solution. To grow, a marketplace still needs a clear strategy: SEO, onboarding, trust signals, payment flow, user experience, and sometimes custom functionality.
The best approach is simple: launch lean, validate demand, then improve the product based on real marketplace behavior.
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There are hundreds of eCommerce marketplace solutions available in the market but only a few are exclusively for multi-vendor marketplaces.
There are hundreds of software solutions available in the market for building eCommerce websites and mobile apps. But not all of them are capable of developing a multi-vendor eCommerce platform.
Some eCommerce solutions like BigCommerce, WordPress, Magento, etc., use plugins to convert the online store into multi-vendor marketplaces.
Read this blog to learn about the top 5 standalone multi-vendor e-commerce marketplace solutions: https://medium.com/yokart-ecommerce-multi-vendor-marketplace/top-5-standalone-multivendor-ecommerce-marketplace-solutions-83110c01fdff
Having a payment gateway that could essentially do every payment-related task without any trouble to the administrator is a must to have. Payment handling is one of the most crucial requirements to run an eCommerce marketplace as it is the backbone over which the complete business drives.
For you as a beginner who doesn’t have enough funds to invest in the marketplace features and need to create an affordable shopping cart with high return on investment, you need to
Sellacious is one ideal platform that helps you create your own eCommerce platform within just 15 minutes.
Good news for the eShops and eCommerce startups, from the graph given by Statista, it could be easily seen that eCommerce sales was $2.3 trillion in 2017 and is expected to grow to $4.88 trillion in 2021. With the advent entry of the new marketplace members, the competition amongst the existing players has increased and this has led into the evolution of eCommerce industry.
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LumiArts Transformation By Roobykon – Open New Colors!
In an age where almost everything is mass-produced, many people are more concerned than ever with finding ways to develop and express a taste that is unique and individual to them. One of the purest forms of individual expression is art – and for those of us who are not talented artists ourselves, expression through art means enjoying the work of other people.
From mega-institutions like New York’s Guggenheim and London’s Tate Modern, to local independent galleries, people are going out in ever-bigger numbers to look at art. But while these places offer endless inspiration, what if you want to enjoy works of creativity in the comfort of your own home?
For many people, buying an original artwork can seem like a daunting process: auction houses and commercial galleries are extremely intimidating places, not least because of the exorbitant prices usually asked for the works on sale. Luckily, though, at this moment in steps LumiArts – a platform that combines in-depth knowledge of art with the straightforwardness and simplicity of e-commerce. Founded on the back of a successful gallery in London’s Belgravia district, it aims to make buying art much more accessible, without compromising quality.
A really important distinguishing feature of LumiArts is that the selection of paintings, sculpture, and limited edition prints that it offers is carefully and expertly curated. This is important for two reasons. First and foremost, it means that you, the customer, won’t be distracted or dispirited by trawling through substandard work. Secondarily, but still importantly for anyone investing money in an artwork, it means that the artists whose work is represented are people with strong and developing careers, whose work will hold or even increase its value as time goes on.
So, what did we do here at Roobykon to help bring you the LumiArts platform? Find out this info here: https://roobykon.com/blog/posts/66-lumiarts-transformation-by-roobykon-open-new-colors
How you can develop an online marketplace? When we’re talking about developing marketplace, there are many ways you can do it. It doesn’t matter which type of it you plan to create: B2B, C2C, e-commerce or even auction. In this article we want to tell you about options you can use for creating...
Sharetribe with PayPal Payments - the lost documentation
Sharetribe you are great, but...
Sharetribe is a SaaS solution with all of its code published as open source. When you want to run your own marketplace and Saas Sharetribe does not fit exactly to your requirements, then you can host it by yourself and modify to fit your needs.
Everyone wants to launch ASAP, time-to-market is essential. Another important topic is choosing the right technology enabling further development. Sharetribe is written in Ruby on Rails (with decent local dev communities), well tested, and relatively feature-rich. And in the end, the most important thing - you don’t have to start from scratch.
Payments Payments Payments!
Sharetribe’s documentation is quite good. Community is not large but enough to help you solve common problems. But there is one big problem - Payments.
PayPal payments are only available on marketplaces hosted at Sharetribe.com due to special permissions needed from PayPal. We hope to add support for PayPal payments to the open source version of Sharetribe in the future.
Read here
Snooping around you can find information that there are possibilities to set PayPal within your open source version of Sharetribe. In theory the open source version of Sharetribe has the same code as the Saas version. Yet there is no information regarding the integration with payment gateways.
There is no way to configure payments in sharetribe besides building your own e.g. using Stripe. Still, we highly valued the short time to market so we attempted to leverage what was there.
Everyone can run PayPal with sharetribe, but...
After carefully considering our options, we decided to try and configure our sharetribe instance with PayPal. And the “fun” began. This wasn’t easy, but could be achieved provided one important condition.
You will have to resign from taking commision from your sellers
Sharetribe uses reference transactions to take commissions from sellers. Description of such reference transaction can be found in the “legacy docs”. After closer inspection we learned that PayPal is resigning from this API and we didn’t manage to get a production access to this endpoint. Even if you will be able to run this feature in sandbox environment - I advise you to just skip this at all, as you will face difficulties enabling it in PayPal’s production environment. Eventually we to production skipping the settlement of commissions during payment process.
It has to be ok for you go without commission
When you are ok not taking commission during the payment process (e.g. can settle it in a separate process) then you can follow the steps below to configure PayPal with your development and next with your production environment.
These steps assume that you will use sharetribe as a platform for one marketplace, but in other cases you can easily modify SQLs according to your needs. This solution was tested with version 6.1.0. Steps are prepared to configure development version. Creating production is very similar.
Installing sharetribe and collecting needed data for configuration
Install Sharetribe following the sharetribe documentation
Run the application and create your first account - let’s call it admin account. We will use this account in our example as a admin and as a merchant (seller).
Create a PayPal account (or use your existing account). Go to paypal page and sign up.
Login to PayPal developer platform where you will find your test accounts
Next step is login to sandbox using the business account for which you have to set a password:
click profile row with business account
in tab profile click “Change password”
set the password and save
Login as a merchant in the sandbox environment to get Merchant account ID.
using your *-facilitator@* account login here
on setting look for merchant account ID
PayPal application ID for testing (development) purpose is defined globally: APP-80W284485P519543T - for your production you will need to get this from PayPal Customer service.
PayPal username, password and signature can be found in the PayPal developer platform
click on the business account (e.g. like *-facilitator@*) and then go to the API tab where you will find the credentials
Setting up PayPal configuration for platform
After collecting all data put them to config.yml
development:
 paypal_username: [*facilitator_api1.*]
 paypal_password: [password]
 paypal_signature: [signature]
 paypal_partner_id: [Merchant account ID]
 paypal_app_id: APP-80W284485P519543T # Global test id
 paypal_button_source: # Unique value given to you by your PayPal contact [optional]
Now it is time for some SQLs :). Connect to your Sharetribe database and run this, don't forget define variables.
# set PayPal gateway INSERT INTO payment_settings SET active = 1, community_id = 1, payment_gateway = 'paypal', payment_process = 'preauthorize', commission_from_seller = 0, minimum_price_cents = 400, minimum_transaction_fee_cents = 0, confirmation_after_days = 14, created_at = NOW(), updated_at = NOW(); # define variables SET @username=(SELECT username FROM people LIMIT 1); SET @owner_email=(SELECT e.address from people p left join emails e on (e.person_id=p.id) where p.username=@username); SET @merchant_account_id="[merchant_account_id]"; SET @paypal_username="[paypal_username]"; SET @paypal_app_id="APP-80W284485P519543T"; UPDATE people set is_admin=1 where username=@username; INSERT INTO paypal_accounts (person_id, community_id, email, payer_id, created_at, updated_at, active) VALUES (null, 1, @owner_email, @merchant_account_id, NOW(), NOW(), 1); SET @paypal_account_id=(SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID()); INSERT INTO billing_agreements (paypal_account_id, billing_agreement_id, created_at, updated_at, paypal_username_to, request_token) VALUES (@paypal_account_id, 'fake-agreement', NOW(), NOW(), @paypal_username, @paypal_app_id); INSERT INTO order_permissions (paypal_account_id, created_at, updated_at, request_token, paypal_username_to, scope, verification_code, onboarding_id, permissions_granted) VALUES (@paypal_account_id, NOW(), NOW(), 'fake-token', @paypal_username, null, null, null, 1); INSERT INTO transaction_processes (community_id, process, author_is_seller, created_at, updated_at) VALUES (1, 'preauthorize', 1, NOW(), NOW()); SET @transaction_process_id=(SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID()); UPDATE listing_shapes SET transaction_process_id=@transaction_process_id where name='selling'; #if you have listings added before you should modify transaction_process_id in listing entries too
Creating merchant payment configuration
Add new business account. This will be a merchant (seller) PayPal account
Connect PayPal merchant account with Sharetribe merchant account. Login with your Sharetribe admin account and go to Settings->Payments then click “Connect”
Don’t grant the permission to charge. This second step will require access to Reference Transaction API - and it’s unable to get it.
Make your first (sandbox) payment
Login to sharetribe with your admin account (or other configured and connected to the PayPal account).
Add a new listing and logout.
Create a buyer account.
Remember to set the password for buyer account in PayPal developer platform
Logged in as a buyer - click buy on listing - and then process it through PayPal payment.
Login as a merchant (in our case - mechant is an admin account) and confirm the transaction. Go to the inbox (envelope icon) select transaction and accept the payment.
Login to the sandbox with your PayPal buyer account to see the transactions - just to be sure everything was done correctly.
Production ready
Going to production is relatively easy when you know how this works from the  development perspective. The main difference is that you are working with live accounts and you will need exchange few emails with PayPal.
At first you need to create the business account (the target one you will use to make business). Then you have to ask PayPal to enable to the API access for it. Then you will have almost all of the needed configuration parameters.
The last missing piece of information is the PayPal application id. To get such ID you have to fill the big form here: https://www.paypal-apps.com.
All the collected data has to be put into your production configuration file and followed with the execution of the same SQLs (same as for the development) on your production database. And voila! You have sharetribe with PayPal payments.
Conclusion
You should consider going with PayPal only in case when time to market is very important for you. More important than direct handling of the commision from sellers. A good alternative is Stripe or if you are US business then you can go with braintree. We have not found any traces of integrating Sharetribe with these, but perhaps one of the next projects will leverage those. Is it your project?
