You can customize your Sharetribe marketplace with code to extend out of the box capabilities. There are multiple ways to build custom code. If you’re not a developer, you can vibecode to change how your marketplace looks, flows and behaves, and to add features it doesn't have out of the box.

The rest of this article explores in detail what features and use cases vibecoding is a great solution for, and where you should probably try a different approach.

This article is a companion article to “How to start AI-assisted coding on top of Sharetribe for non-developers”, and we recommend taking a look at that one if you’re interested in the practicalities. However, this article is a good starting point, so you know what you’re getting into - and indeed, whether vibecoding is the approach you want to take at all. When you make the decision to move forward with vibecoding, please make sure to also check out our article on how to succeed with vibecoding on Sharetribe.

In short, if it’s a setting, do it in Console. If it’s about how the marketplace looks and behaves, vibecoding is an option. For most people, if it’s about money, identity, or private data, hiring a professional developer is recommended.

The starting point is your own copy of the Sharetribe Web Template. It runs on your computer and is connected to your marketplace’s Dev environment. You can use the Sharetribe skills plugin for this: you install it in your AI tool, and answer the questions it asks, and go from there. Learn more on how to start vibecoding from this help center article.

This is where AI-assisted coding shines, and where most non-developers get most value. Purely visual changes are easy and fast to make and check yourself in your local environment, and if they go wrong, usually nothing breaks except the appearance.

Changing fonts, adjusting the typographic scale, using custom colors, and so on: all of this is possible when editing the Template. So is changing the listing cards, the listing page layout, profile page, search page, and checkout design, as well as the mobile view. You can also add SEO details that the Template doesn’t cover by default.

You can also change how your users act on the marketplace, not just the looks. For example, adding, removing, and reordering the steps in your listing creation wizard, adding steps to the signup flow, redesigning the search page and its filters, and adding fields or confirmation steps to the checkout. A favorite listings feature is also a good example of changing the user experience.

One thing to keep in mind is that these changes are a step up from visual work, as they touch more elements in the codebase than just the visual layer. For example, new steps in the listing wizard have to save the data somewhere, show it on the listing page, and also work when editing the listing. So depending on what you want to change, you may want to prepare for a more complex implementation. This is also where versioning (for example via Github) shines, since it can help you roll back to an earlier version of your marketplace, before any changes that potentially broke your marketplace.

Features which store, read, and act on data are again a step up from the previous ones, and where a professional developer can be valuable. They’re still possible to do, and can be very useful for your users.

For instance, shipping and delivery options at checkout, address handling and tracking numbers, discount codes, promotional pricing, custom fees etc. are possible to include. Custom filtering and sorting is also possible, if the Console settings are not enough.

Your Template talks to the Sharetribe back-end through APIs, and your custom features take use of these when needed. You can read more about our APIs from our technical documentation, though be warned that it can be a bit daunting for non-developers.

API access is already available in every plan, including Trial and Build, in the Dev and Test environments. Extend allows you to use it in a Live environment (along with other customizations).

Note that the presence of the API means you’re not limited to the Sharetribe Web Template. You can build new front end elements and even a front end from scratch, including a mobile app, by having them communicate via the API. However, before starting to vibecode a mobile app, we recommend reading this article about existing mobile app approaches.

Changing the transaction process involves two parts: by default, the transaction flow is configured when choosing a Listing Type in Console. Read more about Listing Types here.

The transaction process itself is different from choosing a listing type. The states transactions move through as well as the actions available at each point (e.g., refunds and cancellations) are defined in the transaction process, including the payment behavior. These are edited using the Sharetribe CLI, and can be considered high risk, like anything that touches the financial aspects of your marketplace. Note also that a broken transaction process can (and usually does) break important things from your marketplace for your users, so we warmly recommend hiring a developer to implement or at least review these changes.

Connecting your marketplace to third party software can be a more reliable use of vibecoding, since the software you’re connecting generally has documentation for the AI to follow, and a team that has made sure that the integration works once properly implemented. Further, in many cases, the code for the integration lives on the servers of the third party developer, making it safer to run.

Examples here include analytics, support chat, email marketing / CRM tools, video calling, accounting, and shipping software. However, before investing time into integrating these via code, it may be a good idea to check if Zapier can be used to implement them instead.

Not everything useful requires code changes. You can also:

These features are technically possible, and an AI tool can happily work with you to create them. The problem is that you won’t necessarily be able to tell if the implementation is correct, and being wrong here can cause more serious issues.

Sharetribe’s payments run through Stripe by default. Charging money, holding funds, payouts, and identity verification is done with Stripe’s help, as well as compliance management.

It is possible to integrate a third party payment gateway on your marketplace, but it’s not an easy project. This modification touches your checkout page, listing pages, and the transaction process. Like with many other customizations touching payments, we do not recommend vibe coding for this.

As opposed to a single vendor shopping cart where a user can buy multiple listings from the same user, a multi vendor shopping cart allows users to add listings from different vendors in their cart and do a single checkout. This is harder than it probably sounds, since it had to calculate listing prices and shipping fees for different providers, split the payment and commission properly, create more than one transaction (one for each provider) from the same checkout, and handle what happens when some items from some vendors are sold out.

In short, it’s a feature that touches data, payments, and the transaction process. For this reason, we advise against it, unless you involve a developer.

Anything that stores, displays, or acts on personal data requires caution. A mistake here can expose user data rather than just look wrong. The same goes for the signup/login process.

Identity verification is something that is commonly asked in this category, and it does not require coding. You can use Zapier to implement identity verification without adding additional risks to your marketplace.

For any of the above features (or other complex or sensitive features), hiring a developer is usually more efficient and above all, more safe. Sharetribe Experts have been vetted by Sharetribe for their technical expertise, and you can find them on the Experts Marketplace. Asking them for a quote does not require commitment.

You can also choose to not offload the whole project to a developer, but rather ask them to cover the features you’re not sure about. This can be a good middle ground between vibe coding and fully developer-led development.

While vibecoding is a useful marketplace, it does have its limits. Here are some of the main ones.

This is the main thing that can’t be done with vibecoding. Asking an AI tool to change these Console settings will not work. However, you should note that it’s possible to work around many of these by changing the template: the key thing is that if you choose to use the Console to drive these settings on your marketplace, it’s not possible to change them. But for example if you want to create custom pages from scratch (not with the Pages editor), you can of course do so.

The marketplace will always run on user types, listing types, reviews, and messages, and other Console-based data models. These are a fixed set of building blocks for your marketplace, and how most custom features store what they need. You can’t invent a new building block in the Console or restructure the existing ones.

In practice this is not a significant limitation, and part of what makes building on Sharetribe fast. The structure that constrains you in this regard is the same structure that is already built to handle payments, search, messaging, reviews, and so on.

The authentication system itself always runs on Sharetribe’s servers. Of course, you can customize parts of the login process, such as adding steps to the registration process and adding SSO, but the actual authentication takes place on Sharetribe’s systems. This is a fine but important distinction.

The Console is your admin tool and runs the same on every Sharetribe marketplace. It can’t be restyled, and features can’t be added to it. If you want new administrator experiences such as administrator analytics, those need to be created and hosted separately.

The template retrieves Console-based content through the Asset Delivery API. It’s possible to change the merge logic to combine local and hosted settings, but that’s more advanced customization and not recommended for vibecoding.

The idea with Sharetribe is to build on top of what you already have. Features that you can configure in the Console are features that are already built, so using them is faster than vibecoding them from scratch. Using custom code is mainly about modifying existing features and functionalities (and in some cases, adding new ones).

Keep your environments in sync. The dev environment is where you build your custom code. Make sure you have the same configurations in Dev and Live, since for example if a listing field is missing in Live and you used it in Dev, your marketplace may break.

Visual looks are usually easier to change than data processing or user experience. Changing visuals usually only involves one layer: changing the marketplace behavior involves more complex customizations.

Consider hiring a Sharetribe Expert. This is especially useful if you get stuck or are unsure whether you’re comfortable releasing a fully vibe coded marketplace live.

If you’ve gotten this far and want to try it, read this article on how to start AI-assisted coding, and how to succeed with vibecoding on Sharetribe.

Want to understand custom coding more broadly? Learn how customizing with code works, what features can be built with custom coding, and what you should know about custom coding as a no-code founder. These are useful articles also for vibecoders.

Need to hire a developer? Connect with a vetted Sharetribe Expert on the Experts Marketplace.

Vibecoding won't turn you into a professional developer, and it isn't meant to. What it does is put the look, feel and flow of your marketplace in your own hands, allowing for quick customizations. Start with something small and visual, test it properly, and build from there.