Subscription/membership feature

Sharetribe doesn't offer a built-in way to charge a subscription fee, but there's a pretty good workaround many of our customers are using.

Updated over a week ago

On top of charging a commission, you may want to ask your members to pay to join or post listings in your marketplace. There isn't a built-in feature for this yet, but here are two pretty good workarounds.

How to charge sellers a fee to post a new listing

If you want to allow users to join and make purchases freely but charge the providers (users who add listings), you can do the following:

  • Go to your Admin panel, then to the Settings tab, and turn on the setting "Only users verified by admin can post new listings". After this, each user needs to be manually be approved by you before they can post a listing. You can learn more about this specific feature here.

  • Sign up for a subscription billing service. We recommend Chargebee – this is what many of our customers are using, and we're also using them ourselves for billing our customers. They're great! Chargebee has a free plan for new businesses, and it allows you to set up payment pages without coding to charge your users monthly or yearly fees. You can create several subscription plans from Chargebee and set up subscription pages for them. This only takes a few minutes.

  • You can direct users to your Chargebee subscriptions using a link or drop-in script. “Checkout using the drop-in script” (modal box) is automatically enabled for users signing up after Feb 06, 2018. 

Integrate Chargebee Checkout using the drop-in script

  • Copy the “Header script” from Chargebee and paste it into the “Custom head code” section of your marketplace. You can find this section in the Advanced / Custom script tab of your Admin panel. If you are already using other scripts (such as a Google Verification Tag), you may need to modify the Chargebee script. 

  • Go back to Chargebee and copy the code next to “Generate Checkout Button for plan <Plan Name>"

  • In your Admin panel, open the "Users" section and choose "User rights". Under "Posting rights", click on "Open in editor". Open the HTML editor (the rightmost button in your Mercury editor toolbar) for the "Posting rights information text" section. Paste the code where you want the link to appear. Press “Save and replace” and then “Save.” 

  • Here, you can also edit the message your providers see when they try to post a listing without your approval and explain that they need to subscribe before they can post.

  • Your Chargebee subscription is now integrated with your marketplace via a drop-in script.

Integrate Chargebee using Hosted Page URL

  • Copy the hosted page link from Chargebee for your plan.

  • In your Admin panel, open the "Users" section and choose "User rights". Under "Posting rights", click on "Open in editor". Paste the link into the ""Posting rights information text" section. 

  • Here, you can also edit the message your providers see when they try to post a listing without your approval and explain that they need to subscribe before they can post.

  • Your Chargebee subscription is now integrated via a hosted page URL.

What to do when a user subscribes?

Whenever someone subscribes through Chargebee, you'll get an email notification. You can then go to your Admin panel, then to the Users tab, and search your user list with the user's email who subscribed in Chargebee. When you find the user, you can give them rights to post listings by switching on the toggle for "Posting". The user doesn't get an automatic notification when you do this, so you might want to send them an email telling them they can now post listings.

How to charge all users a fee to join the marketplace

If you would like to charge a subscription fee from all your users to allow them to enter your marketplace, you can use the same workaround, but instead of controlling posting rights, you can make your marketplace invite-only and keep the rights to invite new people to yourself. This is how you do that: 

  • Go to your Admin panel, then to the Settings tab, check the box "Allow users to join only with an invite from another user" and uncheck the box "Allow all users to invite new users". You can learn more about this feature here.

  • Go to your Admin panel, then to the Instruction texts tab, and add a link to the Chargebee payment page to the "Signup info" area, with an explanation telling your users they need to subscribe to a plan before they can sign up.

  • Once you get an email about a new subscription from Chargebee, go to your Admin panel, then to the Invite new users tab, and use the form to send an invite code to the user who subscribed to a plan.

Do more with Chargebee

Chargebee has lots of useful tools that help you manage the subscriptions. For example, it allows free trials to tell your users the first month is free, and the billing will start only after that. It also makes it easy to manage cancellations, refunds, payment failures, plan changes, and things like that.

Did this answer your question?