New in Sharetribe 🎉 Custom sorting for search results

Sorting search results can be just as important to a great search experience as search filters. Until now, Sharetribe included a fixed set of sorting options on the search page. You couldn’t remove options you didn’t need or add your own.

But that’s no longer the case. You can now choose which default sorting options you want. You can also add new ones—and even create completely custom listing orders for your search page with numeric metadata fields.

Default sorting options

Choose which default sorting options your search page has. In listing search settings, you’ll find a new section, Sorting options, where you can turn on or off the defaults:

• Newest
• Oldest
• Lowest price
• Highest price
• Relevance (when using keyword search)

If you disable all options, search results will be presented newest first, with no sorting dropdown shown to customers. If you enable just one option, that becomes the default. Unless of course you’ve also added custom sorting—more on that next!

Ways to use custom sorting

You can add sorting options using numeric metadata fields. Metadata is a new no-code feature that enables all sorts of use cases from featured listing collections and verified user proof. Metadata fields can only be filled by the marketplace operator in Console. Learn more about metadata in our last newsletter.

Add new sorting options like review average or popularity

Say you want to let customers sort by review score, popularity, or some other relevant metric. You can create custom sorting options like "Popular" or "Best rated" that customers can then use them to sort search results.

How to create a custom sorting option

Fully curate your sorting order

With custom sorting, you can control the order of listings on your search page. This can be a great idea for curated marketplaces where the ranking of results might be just as important as the listings themselves. For an early stage service marketplace in particular, it might be important to display the most reliable or best-performing providers first.

Follow the steps in the help center to set up custom ranking or check out the video clip from a recent Sharetribe Community event.

How to curate the default sorting order

Monetize top positions in search

High search placement is often a crucial factor in being noticed by potential customers. With custom sorting, you can monetize this visibility and offer higher positions in sorting to providers who pay a fee (instead of just showing newest listings first.

How to monetize high search placement

Take full control of the search page

These were just some examples of how you can use numeric metadata fields. How would you sort listings on your marketplace? With the new sorting capabilities, you can create a fully customized search experience for your marketplace. Choose the relevant default options or add custom sorting options and orders with numeric metadata fields. 

Ready to try it? Head to listing search and listing field settings to configure your sorting options.