Robust management tools are a backbone to any successful marketplace business. They help you both run your marketplace on a day to day basis, but also help you track performance on a wider scale. Are people joining at regular rates, are listings getting created, are transactions happening? Is there something hampering your growth?
With Sharetribe, you get the management tools out of the box. You both set up and manage your marketplace in Console.
You can use Console to discover insights and take action based on them. In this guide, we’ll use practical examples to demonstrate how to identify growth issues and optimize your marketplace funnel.
Here are the example questions we’ll be diving into:
Are users joining your marketplace? What's the ratio of supply (providers) to demand (customers)?
Are new listings getting created? If not, why?
What kind of listings are being created?
Are customers discovering these listings?
Are there listings without any transactions?
Are transactions getting started but never completed? What's preventing completion?
Are people leaving reviews?
Follow the step-by-step instructions to get answers to similar questions in your marketplace data or apply what you learn to your specific needs.
In this guide, you'll discover how to:
Use Console's filtering tools to spot potential hangups in your funnel
Identify user acquisition problems and listing creation bottlenecks
Analyze transaction completion rates and identify drop-off points
Monitor review activity and its impact on marketplace growth
Think about next steps based on your data insights
The filtering and analysis techniques covered in this guide work best when you have some user, listing, and transaction history to work with, but you can start applying these methods already in your test environment to learn how Console filtering works.
Let’s get started!
Are users joining your marketplace?
Navigate to user management in the Manage section of Console. There, you’ll find all your user data.
Let’s start by filtering users by when they were created.
Click the Filter button in the top right corner.
Choose the Created at filter.
Select your desired date range. It can mean the past week, month, three months, or year, multiple years—or anything in between.
Click Apply. Console returns all users that match the condition.
Change the date range to compare the number of new users over time.
Tip! You can also filter by a start or end date. If you only add a date to the first field, the search will return all users who were created on or after that date. And if you only add a date to the second field, the search results will include users who were created on or before that date.
What’s your buyer-to-seller ratio?
If you’re using user types to have separate supply and demand groups on your marketplace, you can use the user type filter to track buyer-to-seller ratio. You can combine this with a specific timeframe or apply the filters to your entire user base.
Check the number of providers:
Choose the userType filter.
Select your provider user type.
Click Apply. Console returns all users who chose the provider user type at signup.
Check the number of customers:
Click open the filter selection again.
Switch the provider user type to the customer user type.
Click Apply. Console returns all customers.
You can compare the number of accounts in both groups to calculate your buyer-to-seller ratio.
The buyer-to-seller ratio depends heavily on the nature of your marketplace, the industry, and specific customer needs. It describes how many customers a single provider can serve. For example, on a typical real estate marketplace, the ratio is 1. A single house can typically be sold to a single buyer, and then it’s off the market. On a marketplace for digital downloads, the ratio could be in the ballpark of 10,000:1. Most marketplaces fall into the middle.
Learn more about the buyer-to-seller ratio in Marketplace Academy.
How to get more users on board?
The best ways to reach more users depends on which group of users (supply or demand) you’re looking to attract.
It’s also always a good idea to go through your own signup process to make sure it works smoothly and isn’t too cumbersome. For example, are you using a lot of mandatory user fields? That might cause some people to abandon the form midwat.
And if you can’t find a clear reason, it’s always a good idea to reach out to existing users and ask for their feedback. They might have insight on what worked and didn’t work when they signed up.
Marketplace Academy has some great articles on onboarding supply and finding customers after launching.
Tip! If you have some traffic analytics set up in Google Analytics, Plausible, or another service, check how your marketplace is getting discovered. Another option is to look into if your marketplace is getting discovered in AI tools. And if you’re doing social media marketing, check your analytics on the platforms.
Are listings getting created?
Let’s move on to listings. Go to listing management in Console.
Let’s start with checking how many listings are getting created over time.
Click the Filter button in the top right corner.
Choose the Created at filter.
Select your desired date range (such as past week, month, three months, or year, multiple years).
Click Apply. Console returns all listings that match the condition.
Change the date range to compare the number of new listings over time.
Then, we can get into more granular research.
Are listings getting published or staying in draft state?
Listings in Sharetribe can have the states:
Draft
Published
Closed
Pending approval (if you have listing approval enabled on your marketplace)
Published listings are listings customers can buy or book, so your goal likely is to have as many of your listings in this state.
If you notice many listings in draft state, you can confirm it by filtering your listing data further as follows:
Choose the State filter.
Select Draft in the dropdown.
Click Apply. Console returns listings in draft state.
If there’s a significant number of drafts, it shows providers are starting but not completing their listings.
If the listings are new, it’s possible providers are still working on the content. However, there might be other things at play. Possible next steps you could take;:
Review the quality of individual listings. If listings look ready but remain unpublished, the issue likely lies elsewhere in the process rather than incomplete content.
Consider what steps providers must complete before publishing and identify potential drop-off points. Go through the listing creation process on your test marketplace yourself. Do you notice any blockers or friction in the process?
Reach out to the providers who have draft listings. Ask what's preventing them from completing their listing, whether they're encountering technical issues, and if they need help with any part of the process.
Check your listing type settings. Do you have the default field Payout details required before publishing enabled? If yes, providers who haven't connected their payout details can’t publish listings or receive payments (and you can check who has or hasn’t with user filters). You can consider changing your settings or assisting your providers to connect payout details. Please note that if you do change your settings and don’t require payout details upfront, customers still can’t buy or book the listing before the provider adds the payout information.
What kind of listings are getting created?
You can also analyze what kind of listings are getting created. Especially if transactions aren't happening at the expected rate, customers may not be finding what they're looking for. Let’s look at two potential reasons: category and price.
Are there listings in all categories?
If your marketplace uses categories, check that listings are distributed across all available categories. Finding empty or sparse categories is a poor search experience for customers and can make your marketplace appear emptier than it is.
To check how many listings each category has:
Choose the filter categoryLevel1. (This is your main category. You can also choose either sub level category, if you have them in use.)
Select a category from the dropdown.
Click Apply and check how many listings there are.
Repeat for the other categories.
If you notice a category isn’t listed in the dropdown at all, it means are no listings in that category. It might be a good idea to remove it from your category settings for now. You can easily add it back later using Sharetribe's no-code tools if providers request it or when you have sufficient supply to populate it.
Are listings too expensive?
Another potential barrier to transactions is pricing. As a marketplace founder, you likely have an idea about the average price for your products or services that customers are willing to buy.
To analyze whether providers are pricing themselves out of transactions or if your commission structure is forcing them to set prices too high, you can use the following filters.
Choose the filter Price.
Enter your ideal highest price (that you would not prefer providers not to go over) to the first field. Leave the second field blank. The filters will use the first field value as a minimum filter.
Click Apply. Console shows how many listings are priced at your highest estimated price point and above.
If there are a lot of listings priced very high, there are a couple of things you can do:
As always, reach out to your providers and ask them about their pricing strategy. Does their pricing align in their experience with similar products, services, or rentals? How much do they expect to profit? You can also encourage them to start with lower pricing: often, people can raise their pricing when they have good reviews from previous customers.
Reduce or change your commission rates. A very high provider commission can force providers to increase prices beyond what customers are willing to pay. Consider lowering your rate or dividing the commission payments between customers and providers. You can do this in Sharetribe, completely no-code.
Learn more about choosing the ideal commission rate in Marketplace Academy.
Are there listings without any transactions?
One of the key value propositions of most marketplaces is that it has multiple providers and multiple customers. Customers can find a lot of supply on one platform and providers get access to a larger customer base than they would otherwise.
So it’s important that transactions are happening and that those transactions are divided across multiple listings and providers. If all bookings concentrate on a couple of listings only, the marketplace isn’t really working for everyone: it’s only working for a few providers.
To check the transaction distribution, you can filter your listings as follows.
Choose the filter Number of transactions.
Enter 1 into the first field.
Click Apply. Console returns listings that have at least one transaction. Note the number.
Open the filter selection again.
Update the number of transactions: delete 1 from the first field and enter 0 to the second field.
Click Apply. Console returns listings that have no transactions. Note the number again.
If the latter number is much higher than the first, you might have some work ahead of you. Still, it’s understandable if new listings don’t have transactions yet, so you can filter them out.
Click Add a condition.
Choose the filter Created at.
Enter a date one week or month past to the second field.
Click Apply. Console returns listings that were created on that date or before.
If you learn that a large number of older listings have no transactions, the situation can be risky for a couple reasons:
Most providers are not getting value out of your marketplace—and might leave.
If one of your high-value providers decides to leave your platform, your revenue will take a big hit. If transactions are divided across a wider selection of listings, losing one provider is not the end of the world.
It's time for qualitative research. Compare the unsuccessful listings with ones that do receive transactions. Are there clear quality issues in photos, descriptions, or overall presentation? Is there limited availability that makes booking difficult, or if the pricing is significantly higher than comparable listings.
Equally important is understanding what providers with many bookings are doing right. Analyze your top-performing listings to identify best practices you can share with other providers. This might reveal insights about optimal pricing strategies, availability management, listing presentation, or customer communication approaches.
Use these insights to help all providers improve their performance. Create help content, implement features that promote best practices, or directly advise struggling providers on how to optimize their listings. Feature listings on your landing page to give them a visibility boost.
Are transactions happening?
Finally, let’s look at some ways you can filter transactions. Go to transaction management in Console.
And we’ll start with how many transactions are getting started over time.
Click the Filter button in the top right corner.
Choose the Created at filter.
Select your desired date range (such as past week, month, three months, or year, multiple years).
Click Apply. Console returns all transactions that match the condition.
Change the date range to compare the number of transactions over time.
If the numbers look promising—transactions are coming in regularly and people seem to be finding what they're looking for—it’s a good start. However, a new transaction card in Console doesn’t always mean it will progress to a payment or a completed purchase. So it’s good to take a closer look at the quality of transactions and whether you’re actually making revenue from them.
Are transactions getting started but never completed?
Sometimes transactions get started but don’t complete. For example, a customer might request to book a service or rental (if you’re using the booking transaction process), but the provider never accepts the booking, and it expires.
Here’s how you can check the state of transactions:
Choose the filter State.
Select the value Expired in the dropdown. Expired means that a payment was initiated, but did not move forward and lapsed. The customer did not pay anything.
Click Apply. Console shows transactions where payment expired.
If you see many expired transactions, there might be an issue in your transaction flow. Why are providers not reacting to bookings? Some things to look into:
Are providers receiving booking notifications? You can check if providers have verified their email in user management. Use the filter Has verified email and choose Yes/No.
Are your marketplace emails getting through email provider’s spam filters? Check if your domain reputation is solid with major email providers or whether messages are ending up in spam folders.
Go through a test transaction on your test marketplace. Is there something off about the transaction process?
Are users leaving reviews?
Reviews are a huge part of any marketplace’s value proposition. New customers often make purchase decisions based on previous customers' experiences. So it’s important that people are leaving them.
Check if reviews are happening as follows:
Choose the Has a review filter.
Select Yes.
Add the condition Has payout (this way, you’re filtering our expired or on-going transactions).
Select Yes. Console returns all transactions that have progressed to the review stage that have a review.
Compare this to the number of transactions that don’t have a review. Is the ratio concerning?
If yes, there are some actions you could take.
Sharetribe sends automated review prompts when a transaction concludes, but in case people don’t seem to be reacting to them, you could
Tweak the email text copy to be more compelling.
Beef up your notification roster with additional Zapier reminders.
Educate your users about the importance of reviews.
Learn more about building trust in your marketplace in Marketplace Academy.
Conclusion
Console's filtering tools give you the data you need to understand your marketplace performance, but the real value comes from acting on what you discover. Whether you've identified user acquisition challenges, listing creation bottlenecks, or transaction completion issues, dig deeper and take targeted action.
You can use these filtering techniques or different ones that fit your marketplace best to regularly track your data. This can help you catch new issues before they become major problems. And remember: talking to your users is always a great way to learn. Combine quantitative insights from data with feedback from your users to understand the "why" behind the numbers.
Continue learning
These articles go into more detail about the different data filters available in Console:
You can also download a CSV of your user, listing, or transaction data and export it to your own system.
To learn more about strategies to build, launch, and grow your marketplace, check out Sharetribe's Marketplace Academy. We also have a 10-step video guide that takes you through your entire marketplace journey.