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The single biggest obstacle to running self hosted Sharetribe

dollar-1362244_640So, you checked out Can I customize Sharetribe? and determined you need a backend programmer? And that you’re going to self host, whether on Heroku or elsewhere? That’s great!

Let me let you in on the single biggest obstacle to running Sharetribe self hosted. (It’s not the biggest obstacle to building a successful marketplace–that is building the community and getting liquidity–but it is a big one.)

There’s no great option for taking payments on self hosted Sharetribe.

Braintree has limitations and can only support companies in the USA (I believe).

Paypal isn’t supported with the open source version.

No other payment processors are supported ‘out of the box’.

So, if you are charging nothing for your marketplace, or if you monetize your site in some other way such as a listing fee or using the marketplace as a captive market, you’re fine with the self hosted version.

Otherwise you are going to have to pay a developer to integrate with a payment processor. Here is what to think about when you are evaluating payment processors:

  • Do they support the currency I need to support? (Sharetribe only supports one currency per marketplace at this time).
  • Do they handle splitting payments?  That is, if someone pays $100, and the marketplace commission is 10%, $10 goes to the marketplace and $90 to the seller.  How is that handled–many payment processors don’t support splitting payments in the manner.
    • If you aren’t splitting payments, how are you going to get your money and make sure the seller gets theirs?
  • If I need payment escrow, do they support that?
  • Are there legal ramifications (taxes, fees, etc) that my marketplace has to handle with regards to taking money?

It’s worth looking at these:

And if you are interested in having Stripe connect in your system, I’m working on such an integration.  Please sign up for the list to be notified when it is ready to go.

5 thoughts on “The single biggest obstacle to running self hosted Sharetribe

  1. Dan says:

    test comment

  2. moore says:

    I don’t quite understand your question.

  3. Callum says:

    Hi Dan. Your articles on Sharetribe are very interesting. I’ve recently signed up for Sharetribe Go Pro and to be honest the support aren’t very technical minded. Would you mind me asking for your advice? On Sharetribe Go all external links that are added into the main menu open in new windows. Ideally I’m looking to have them open in the same window. Sharetribe support stated that it might be possible to change this with <script> but I have tried all possibilities that I can think of. Do you have any ideas? Thanks for your time.

  4. moore says:

    Hiya, I never used Sharetribe Go, so can’t speak to that, sorry.

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