Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Andreas.
You’re right, Go isn’t the perfect solution for all marketplace ideas but it’s available for free with the Community Edition and still is a good way for you not to start from scratch. Building only what’s missing will be way cheaper than re-inventing the wheel for the core features!
Here are comments/answers to the items on your list.
- All the code for PayPal is available. However the solution that was integrated requires some special approval with PayPal’s team. This requires quite a lot of legal documents, commitments, minimum company revenue so in practice, I think it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to get onboarded with that solution easily. But nothing prevents you from contacting PayPal and ask to get access to the solution integrated in Go. In the past few months, PayPal has started to build a new online payment solution for marketplaces. In my opinion this is still behind other services, but you could consider integrating it if PayPal is a key requirement for your marketplace idea. Finally, keep in mind that the Stripe integration is available for free, without any limits, in Go CE.
- Indeed, we haven’t open-sourced all the components for this. However a few people on this forum have shared their own solution so this is something you could consider. We are not working on this right now but we’ll share here if we make all the location search components open-source.
- The marketplace supports multiple languages. Only the Custom Landing Page doesn’t, by default. Everything else can be in multiple languages. Again, this is something you could customize yourself if this is key for your users. So far we’ve learned from the hundreds of marketplaces using that add-on that this is, in the vast majority of cases, not something requested a lot. Maybe having the Custom Landing Page in only one language is good enough to get started?
- Yes, this is available out of the box.
- Yes, users can contact each others anytime, from the Contact button on listing or profile pages. Admins can view the conversations from the Admin panel.
- We don’t offer a stock feature. However sellers can close listings anytime and they can also reject any transaction request from a buyer. So there is no risk that they’ll sell something that they actually don’t have.
- There is a basic shipping feature in Go that you can enable by editing your Order types.
- Thanks for the suggestion. This is not an idea I’ve seen before, I’ll keep track of how often this comes up!
- Indeed there isn’t such feature in Go.
If you’ve already learned from your users that key features are missing in Go, I’d suggest to look at Sharetribe Flex, our other product.
Initially, we had just Sharetribe Go. However, lots of people were asking, just like you, to get certain additional features and design improvements, for an additional monthly price. Initially we thought we could just build that all ourselves, but we soon realized it would not be possible. The problem was that everyone had a bit different idea of what features exactly would they need, and how exactly the design should work. We realized it was not possible to build a solution that would allow all that. Building a marketplace software solution that would allow any features or design changes without coding is simply not possible – at least we don’t think it is. There will always be something missing, no matter how much we build there.
This is when we decided to create Flex, to solve this very problem. We think it’s the fastest and cheapest way to build a marketplace that looks and works just the way you want, and has the exact feature set you have in mind.
You don’t need to have programming skills or search for programmers to use Flex. We have a network of expert Flex developers we’d be happy to connect you to. All you would need to do is to describe to them developers what changes you’d want to the example Flex template. The hosting is also not a problem: most of the heavy lifting is done by our servers, you’re only hosting a very simple template. Once the developers have finished building the changes you need, they can set up the hosting. The hosting of the template is very much “set and forget”, if you’re not doing anything very complex there, and just $25/month already takes you to a really big scale.
I hope you’ll consider it and get started at https://www.sharetribe.com/products/flex/! Our team will also be happy to have call with you (you can book one from your Flex Console, after you got started) to learn more about your idea and put you in touch with Flex partners.