After creating a provider account and a test listing, you can test how your marketplace works for customers.
We’re now exploring the two-sided nature of your marketplace. So far, we’ve created a test provider and added their listing. Now, we’ll create a customer account to test searching listings and transacting with providers.
Sign up as a customer
Customers need an account before they check out in your marketplace. Let’s create another test account: this time as a customer.
On your test marketplace, first, log out of the provider’s account after creating a listing. Click “Sign up” in the marketplace top bar, just like you did last time.
You will need to fill out the same signup information that you filled out as a provider, namely email and password. Since you can’t use the same email twice, you can either use a different email address or leverage the “+something” trick.
When you add “+something" before the @-sign into an email address, you can create an alias that’s connected to your own email address. For example, if your email address is your.name@example.com, you can create alias addresses by using your.name+something@example.com. You can replace "something" with any combination of letters and numbers.
For example, you could create the provider account with your.name+provider@example.com and the customer account with your.name+customer@example.com. Any email sent to either of these accounts will arrive at your your.name@example.com inbox.
Adding “+something” to an email works with many services, not just Sharetribe or your marketplace. It works for any email using Google, Outlook, Hotmail, and perhaps others. It may not work with every email provider.
Confirm the signup. You can verify your email as the operator from Console or via the confirmation email sent to the signup email.
From now on, you can switch between the customer and provider through Console. In the Manage users tab, log in as the provider or customer to log in as either user. In your Test marketplace, you have full access to user profiles and actions through Console. In a Live marketplace with real users, you will limited access.
If you’d like to view both user accounts at the same time, you can create the customer account in a private browser window or on a different browser entirely. This way, you can stay logged into the provider account throughout the whole process and only switch between windows.
Next steps
With our customer user created, we are ready to test the customer experience. In the next tutorial step, we’ll start by searching for the test listing we created to see how search works in the marketplace. Then, we’ll initiate a transaction and work through checkout, fulfillment, and reviews from the customer and provider perspective.