tl;dr
Support for Braintree’s marketplace edition will be removed from Sharetribe’s open source codebase in the coming weeks. The main reason is that it’s seeing very low use, and it’s slowing down our development efforts.
Longer version
A big problem with our current Braintree marketplace integration is that it’s still only available only for merchants in US, and our open source users using need to have a legal business in US. There’s no reason to think it’ll ever become available anywhere else, as this situation hasn’t changed over years. It seems that the marketplace function isn’t a core business area for Braintree, and the integration doesn’t really see that much active development.
Also, feedback from Sharetribe open source users (including those in US) is that Braintree integration is not adequate them, and most people seem to have opted for anyway implementing another payment gateways (like Stripe), for various reasons.
Due to low popularity, the integration hasn’t been available at sharetribe.com in a while. This means it hasn’t really been updated: it doesn’t support some of our features (like shipping and pricing units), and it uses an old version of the Braintree API. The way the integration has been built also differs a lot from the way we’re planning to build payment gateway integrations in the future. Because of all these reasons, it has become a burden. We’ve decided to remove it from Sharetribe code to be able to move faster.
In the short term, this means that Sharetribe’s open source version will not have a payment gateway that would work out of the box (though it can be argued that our Braintree integration wasn’t really working like that either). We’ve noticed that many people who use Sharetribe’s open source code want to use payments in a very specific way, so we encourage everyone to build their own integration to their favorite gateway.
In the longer term, we hope to introduce an easier way to add new payment gateways both to sharetribe.com and to our open source version. We don’t have an exact timeline for these changes yet, so we’re not able to share more specifics at this point, but we know this is a huge priority to all Sharetribe users and something that’s definitely high on our roadmap.