Tutorial introduction

Learn how to build your marketplace with Sharetribe.

Juho Makkonen avatar
Written by Juho Makkonen
Updated over a week ago

Welcome to the Sharetribe no-code tutorial! In this tutorial, you'll learn how to complete the setup of your marketplace and launch it to the world, without coding.

We will be setting up a rental marketplace in this tutorial. However, we'll also give guidance on what to do if you're building a marketplace for selling products or services instead.

We will create the marketplace using Sharetribe's no-code marketplace builder (there's a separate developer tutorial available if you want to learn how to customize your marketplace with code). Our step-by-step instructions will navigate you through the process of configuring your marketplace in Console. All work will be carried out in your marketplace's Test environment. The end result will be a marketplace you could launch to real users.

What are we building?

We're going to build a peer-to-peer marketplace for renting bikes. We're going to call it "Biketribe." While we're guiding you with specific steps to build Biketribe, feel free to mix things up a bit to create your unique marketplace concept instead. Just remember that if you switch things around, you'll need to keep track of those changes when following other steps in this tutorial.

At the end of the tutorial, you will have a fully functional bike-themed rental marketplace in your Test environment. At the end, we'll explain the necessary steps to launch your marketplace live on your own domain, start inviting real users to it, and processing real transactions.

We won't go through all Sharetribe's no-code features in this tutorial, as there are lots of them. Instead, we'll focus on the minimum setup required to get to a state where you have a working marketplace that is ready to be launched.

How does building a marketplace without coding work?

Building your marketplace without coding happens through the menus in the "Build" section of the sidebar navigation in Console. This is where all the no-code customization takes place.

Under "Advanced", you'll find things like "Transaction process visualizer", "Applications", "Social logins & SSO", and so on. These are needed only when customizing your marketplace with code. For now, you can ignore them and focus on things in the other menus.

Setup wizard

When you start building your Sharetribe marketplace at www.sharetribe.com, you are first asked a series of questions, and a marketplace website is then generated for you based on your answers, with certain default configurations. It's possible for you to change all these configurations later.

We assume that when you're reading this tutorial, you've already gone through the setup process, and tested how your marketplace works.

If you're building a marketplace where products or services are bought and sold, it likely won't make sense for you to change your configuration back to a rental marketplace, as instructed in the tutorial. We recommend you keep the configuration the setup wizard gave you and follow the tutorial by making adjustments that are applicable to your marketplace concept.

For this tutorial, we have initiated our marketplace with the setup wizard by making the following choices:

  • Country: Finland

  • Language: English

  • Currency: EUR

  • Main activity: Renting products, vehicles, or properties

  • How do customers typically book: By day

  • Do customers want to search by location? Yes

Thanks to these choices, our marketplace has been set up for local rentals already at the beginning of the tutorial.

The steps in the process

Below are the steps that we will follow in this tutorial. We recommend following the tutorial in this order, but feel free to jump directly to the step of your choice.

Let's get started!

It's time to start building! Go to Step 1: Adjust listing type.

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