Providers on your marketplace may want more visibility for their listings. By offering featured listing placements, where certain listings appear more prominently and first in search results, you can charge providers a fee in exchange for this visibility boost.
You can charge a featured listing fee to your marketplace providers without coding. It requires creating a way for providers to discover and pay for the opportunity, setting up a payment system to collect the fee and manually assigning a priority order to providers' listings in Console.
This guide walks you through how to charge a featured listing fee on your Sharetribe marketplace.
1. Create a page to advertise the featured listing opportunity
Your providers should be made aware of the opportunity to pay a fee to boost the visibility of their listing. The most effective way to do this is by creating a dedicated content page on your marketplace that explains this offering, how providers can get featured and how much they’ll pay.
Your content page should cover what a featured listing is, what the fee is, and include a clear call to action directing providers to your payment page. You can create this page using the Pages feature.
2. Set up a payment page
You will need a third-party payment system to collect the featured listing fee. This can be either a recurring fee (i.e. monthly subscription) or a one-time fee.
We recommend using Stripe, but any payment solution that allows you to charge a one-time or recurring fee will work.
When setting up your payment page, make sure to collect the provider's email address so you can identify which provider's listings to feature once you receive their payment.
3. Set up the featured listing order field and sorting
To control the order in which listings appear in search results, you need to create a metadata listing field and configure the sorting settings in Console. You should also disable all other sorting options to ensure listings are always displayed in your defined order.
Note that assigning a priority order to a listing must be done manually for each listing in Console and cannot be automated.
More information on monetizing your marketplace
A featured listing fee is only a single example of the capabilities and value you can monetize. You can find more ideas on how to monetize your marketplace in the following articles: