To sell products, offer services, post inquiries, or add any form of listing requires a user account. User accounts are created in your marketplace. Both the demand side (what we call customers) and the supply side (what we call providers) need to create user accounts eventually. In this tutorial, we’ll focus on creating a provider account and posting a listing to test how the experience works and what we may want to change.

Prefer video? Watch a video version of this tutorial on testing your Sharetribe marketplace.

User accounts are created on your marketplace website. You can access your marketplace from Console by pressing “View marketplace” in the Console top bar.

Now in your Test marketplace, navigate to your marketplace signup page on your marketplace website by pressing “Sign up” in the marketplace top bar.

On the signup page, enter the requested details:

You can use any name or email you like. You can use the same email you used to create your marketplace account on the Sharetribe website, since the user account you are creating here is separate from the account you use to login to Console.

You will likely need to login to this test account again while you build and run your marketplace, so remember to save your credentials.

Check “I accept the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy” (we will learn about editing those later) and click “Sign up”.

Once you create a user account, you need to confirm your email address. You will receive an email with a link to confirm your email address. Pressing the link in the email confirms your email.

Back in Console, where you have admin rights, you can verify emails for users as well. This function allows you to enable a smooth user experience if they are having trouble finding the verification email. Here is how to do it:

Whichever way you confirmed the email, the user account is now verified to start testing the marketplace.

With a user account, we can create our first listing! The next tutorial walks through how to create a listing.