How we do Sharetribe Projects
Who We Are
CoFounders
- Matthew Ryan - Director and co-founder of JourneyHorizon - Based in Australia. I have been doing software development for over 20 years. You can find out more about me here https://au.linkedin.com/in/mattyv01 feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
- Tri Nguyen - Co-Founder of JourneyHorizon, Based in Ho Chi Minh City. Is our super smart Chief Operating Officer that is a wizard when it comes to making things integrate. A true master of the internet of things and micro-services. All around nice guy!
- Tam Vu – Chief Technology Officer, boy genius. Can talk the leg of an iron pot. Responsible for all things R&D at Journeyhorizon and looking after our core Sharetribe Code IP.
Our Team
Our team is based in Ho Chi Minh city and DaNang, Vietnam. Vietnam is a wonderful country and is the new Asian Tiger. An economy that is open for business and growing with an average GPD of 6 - 7% per annum. They have invested heavily in education, in much the same way that South Korea did in the 1990's and now starting to reap the rewards of that investment. With over 3,000 IT graduates a year we have access to some of the brightest minds on earth.
Our team are experts in Front-end and Back-end technologies including iOS, Android, React.js, node.js, Amazon Cloud Services and Google Cloud Services.
HOW YOU GOT HERE and WHAT’s NEXT
So you got here most likely because…
- You searched the internet for an online marketplace platform
- Found Sharetribe and determined it was the best platform to build your online marketplace
- You spoke to the Sharetribe team to confirm your idea fits with the platform.
- You Sign-up at sharetribe.com
- You configured your marketplace using the admin console
- You setup your DNS to point to your marketplace
- You pushed the big read button and your marketplace went live.
- You sat back had a well earned cup of tea..and then wrote down a list of 20 new enhancements you need to do to your marketplace.
- You read the Sharetribe docs and found out that you need to move to self-hosted and engage a Sharetribe Expert to help you extend your new marketplace and add the features you need.
- You came here to our website and read all about us and what projects we are have done
- You decided that we are super cool and great at what we do
- You book a meeting
- We have a brief meeting to discuss your project at a high level and see if we can work together
- Sign a service agreement
- We setup your hosting environment on AWS, Trello for running the project and discord for communications.
- We setup your testing environment
- We then create your backlog items in Trello, you fill in the missing details, we estimate each card fixed price, you approve and we deliver
- We then invoice every 2 weeks based on accepted backlog items.
- You determine when your new features are ready to go to production
- We continue working with you supporting and enhancing the site based on your direction
OR
- Someone like Fiona Burns introduced us; OR
- An existing customer referred you. OR
- The good people at Sharetribe referred you to us.
Fees and Charges
Everyone usually wants some kind of estimate on how much their marketplace will cost. We have estimated over 150 projects now and we have delivered more than 100 marketplaces from start to finish. We believe in giving you and honest appraisal of what it costs. Based on our experience to date we can safely say your marketplace will start at $4000 USD and go as high as the complexity of your requirements and fit with Sharetribe.
- $4,000 USD we do all the configuration in Sharetribe console for you. As above this does not include any customisations to your marketplace. . If you have done 50% of the configuration we will reduce the fee by 50%.
The fee does not include any customisation of the transaction process or Sharetribe marketplace template that would require self-hosting. It also does not include any graphic design, artwork or UI work, you are responsible for sourcing artwork, providing copy and providing branding assets
- $6,000 - $12,000 USD if you are going to be doing minor customisations to booking panel, checkout, transaction workflows and transaction email notifications.
- $12,000 USD + if you are going to want to do things not supported by Sharetribe natively, things like security deposits, recurring transactions, shopping cart, multiple bookings in a single booking panel, two or more different transaction types (i.e. Rent and Buy), integration with third-party APIs for Tax, Delivery, GPS tracking, Video integration and Messaging integration.
Rough Estimates for different customisations
- Then for visitors to the site, the price displayed will be in the currency based on their locale settings, but they can change the currency in the footer or somewhere else you choose, that will change the way that prices are displayed across the entire site.
- During check-out the price charged is based on the price and currency in the extended data of the listing. If this is different to your marketplace account, stripe will convert that payment to your marketplace currency, when you payout to the Stripe Connect account Stripe will again deal with changes to the correct currency based on the Users Connect Account setting.
Journeyhorizion Plugins for Sharetribe
For product marketplaces
All marketplaces
- Embedded videos links, should support youtube, tiktok, vimeo, vk, drive, azure and dropbox.
- Editors for provider to customise the data or they can use HTML or Markdown depends on the users need
- Need to be able to render the markdown as HTML.
- Prevent XSS attack and SQL injection
- UI to render the rich text.
- It also needs to make sure the keywords search work properly: Not recognising markdown and HTML tag as a keywords
- It can be extended to other text fields
Currently the plugin only supports single item purchases and does not work with the shopping cart plugin (will be supported soon).
Updating transaction emails with tracking information is additional work required for this plugin.
The ability for administrators to define the variant variables and variant enums (values). For example define Size Variable (L, XL, XXL) and a Colour Variable (Black, White).
Search results will enable searching by variant variable and return products where there is a stock quantity with a variant greater than 0.
Shopping Cart Not supported (coming soon)
Shipping not supported (coming soon)
Only works for fields configured in Console.
Works for all transaction processes.
Requires an Event Services Subscription.
For any marketplace
Requires An Event Services Subscription.
- In Sharetribe create listing page, users export listing’s availability. The system generates an iCal link which users import it to other calendars.
- Once the iCal link is successfully imported into external calendars, successful bookings (i.e. the booking is marked “accepted”) of that Sharetribe’s listing will show up in the calendars as an “event”
- If the booking is cancelled, the event will be removed from the calendar
- One listing’s ical link can be imported to multiple external calendars
- Users view the listing’s availability under the calendar’s default timezone
- Sync interval depends on the calendar application (some applications sync immediately, some may take up to 24 hours to update)
- To import an external calendar, users export the iCal link of the external calendar and import the link into Sharetribe’s listing via the listing’s edit listing page
- Once the iCal link is successfully imported into the listing, the system fetches the events from the calendar and creates corresponding unavailable slots in the listing’s availability.
- For repeated events, Sharetribe system doesn’t create unavailable slots in the listing’s availability. However, the UI still show it as if the system generates unavailable slots.
- The users view the calender’s events under listing’s timezone
- Users can import multiple ext calendars into one listing
- Users can name the imported calendars
- Users can remove calendars when need
- The system sync calendars' events every 15 mins
- Apple calendar
- Outlook calendar
- Google calendar
- Any calendar applications that support iCal link
Messaging does not make use of Sharetribe transaction infrastructure.Inbox displays real-time messages separately to transactions and enquires. Backend allows admin to view and moderate messages between users.
Enhancements to this plugin that are planned included:
- AI based monitoring of marketplace disintermediation
- AI based monitoring of hate speech
- AI based sentiment analysis
Requires an Event Services Subscription
- Tax is automatically calculated based on buyer and seller locations and product codes
- Tax is added to the checkout
- Tax is lodged in the Avalara Tax portal
Different subscription levels can be created and managed against the user.
Functionality and features of the marketplace can then be controlled based on the users subscription type.
Event Services fees & charges
Event services is required for some of our plugins to work. Event services is our cheaper more powerful and configurable version of Zapier. If more than one plugin requires Event Services, you only need a single event services subscription.
Development Backlog Item Fees
We don't charge per hour. We give you a fixed fee for each backlog item. Backlog items are small pieces of functionality that make up your site. You then prioritise your backlog based on the business value of that backlog item. Estimated backlog items include design, development, code review, manual tests and bug fix, but don’t include project management, business analysis, automated testing or regression testing.
Design Backlog Item Fees
Sometimes when you create a backlog card for a feature you are time poor and it ends up being a single line of text for what could be a very complex set of business rules and interactions with existing features. When this happens we will create a design card to cover the cost of the design work associated with this complex feature. We are always happy for you to avoid this design cost by providing the necessary details in the backlog card to allow the team to estimate the development work.
Estimation Fee
Estimating backlog cards involves lots of communication and sometime lots of clarification to ensure that both parties are fully agreeing on what needs to be delivered. To cover the cost of estimating cards we charge 10% of the Backlog cards cost once the estimate is complete.
Project Management Fee
All projects need project management, face-to-face meetings over google hangouts, and lots of communication back and forth. To cover the cost of managing the project we add a project management fee of 10% of completed back-log items. This way you are not paying based on hours, or some flat project management fee, the fee is tied directly to the value of the work delivered to you.
Infrastructure Management Fees
Our team has significant experience in hosting Sharetribe and custom features on Amazon Web Services.
To simplify management of your hosting we offer Account Management as a Service. Under this model we manage your AWS account, you add your billing information to the AWS console and then for each custom feature our team will give you an indication of any estimate change in your infrastructure fees.
We don’t charge for setup or configuration of these resources just a monthly management fee of 18% of your AWS infrastructure bill. We will add this fee during the normal invoicing cycle.
Your management fee includes monitoring using our infrastructure monitoring tools that gives us early insight into any problems occurring in your deployed web app or mobile app.
Ongoing Running Costs
You will have a number of ongoing costs, they will vary for each marketplace so you should do your own research and budget, but you should include:
- Sharetribe fees and transaction fees
- Journeyhorizon fees for plugin subscriptions
- Journeyhorizon Infrastructure Management Fees - 18% of AWS monthly costs
- Stripe fees
- AWS hosting fees – starting from $25 USD a month
- Intercom.io fees - you will need to support your users so you will need something. We really like intercom.io, but there are other options.
- Extended Warranty - this is optional but guarantees that we are always there to investigate and fix bugs
- Ongoing enhancements to your website - software is never finished, you will have ongoing changes to your site.
I really need a quote to get funding approval, can you provide me one?
Yes we can provide you a quote for your project if you really need one. However, to do this properly and for the quote to be anywhere near accurate you will need to provide a detailed requirements document, UX wireframe designs for areas of the Sharetribe Web Template that are different and the transaction flow design. We are more than happy to help you through this design process, but it takes time. Time that we can't spend on paying customers. In our experience so far we spend anywhere between 5 and 20 hours working with you to produce an estimate. This is because we know alot about Sharetribe and you know alot about your business and we need to bring those two things together to form a solid estimate.
We charge a fixed fee of $1200 USD for providing a formal quote you can use for budget approvals from your incubator, venture capital investors or investment office within your company. This fee must be paid 50% up front and 50% on completion of the quotation.
We don't have wireframes or a high resolution design, can you do this for us?
If you don't have a graphic designer around to do your high resolution designs for Desktop and Mobile don't stress. You can save yourself a lot of money if you spend a little time learning Figma (it is a free design tool) and taking the Sketch templates provided by the Sharetribe team to produce your high resolution clickable prototype. Don't stress if you are struggling with the design elements, just get the flows right and your business rules.
We have designers on staff and can do the design work with you, you should budget at least $3000USD to produce wireframes and user interface specs for key pages such as the home page, search results and view listing pages. Total design fees are driven by the number of pages in your marketplace design.
Finally we also recommend working with Fiona Burns out of the UK www.fionaburns.co she is awesome and has worked with us hand in glove on a number of projects.
We already have a Sharetribe marketplace, our last developer was rubbish, can you help us?
Absolutely, our process is the same. However, we do charge $300 USD to look at the code base and provide you with some basic advice about the condition your project is in. This will give you and us an idea of what we are getting into.
End 2 End Testing Fees
Our estimates don't include automated unit test, regression testing or full end-to-end (E2E) functional testing. You are responsible for E2E testing in the test environment and giving approval to release the test version of your code into production. We do have E2E testing staff and we can build test plans, test scripts and conduct E2E testing each release if you wish. Again we charge E2E testing as a fixed fee and it would be based on each release to production. Most clients do the E2E testing themselves during the development phase, then once in production may ask us to do E2E testing depending on how busy they get and their attitude to risk.
Mobile App Template for Sharetribe Marketplaces
We offer a Sharetribe template for mobile apps. This app template is equivalent to the Sharetribe web template and will allow you to launch a no-code iOS and Android native mobile app version of your marketplace. Our mobile template is built using Google Flutter and Dart programming language. Our mobile template includes the Delete Account feature required by iOS store to publish your app and comply with their publishing guidelines.
If you'd like to explore how it works, we have a demo app called Sharetribe Horizon. Simply download and install it on your phone to experience its seamless connection to our demo marketplace.
- Android: Download on Google Play
- iOS: Download on the App Store
Some example screen shots
Features in the mobile app
- Calendar (Booking)
- Purchase (Product)
- Free Messaging
- Enquiry Only
- Product Default
- Request Booking Default
- Custom Transaction Process
No Code Mobile App Fees
There is a one time setup fee of $199 USD to build and deploy your mobile app (if you are no-code hosted by sharetribe).
Monthly Subscription fee of $249 USD (no commitment) OR $199 USD p.mth (paid annually)
Deployment of the Mobile app will require you to upgrade to the Sharetribe Extend plan as the mobile app makes use of the integration API.
Custom Mobile App Fees
$199 USD Setup Fee + Customisation Fees + Hosting Fees + $349 p.mth USD subscription fee
The Mobile code can be extended and customised just like your Sharetribe Web Template. These fees are separate to your Sharetribe Web customisations. Depending on what version of Sharetribe Web Template you are on and what customisations you have made will determine the cost and feasibility of this.
If customisations are planned well, the server code should be reused between both web and mobile.
After 36 continuous months, we will provide you with a royalty free commercial license for the mobile app code base. This means no ongoing subscription fees for your customised mobile app.
How do I pay you?
Invoicing
We invoice every 2 weeks based on backlog cards that have been tested and accepted or have been in test for 2 weeks. Your invoice will have the following line items.
- Estimation Fees for backlog cards that have completed estimates.
- Backlog Card fees.
- Project Management Fees for backlog cards that have been delivered.
Payment
Great question!
We accept the following forms of payment:
- All forms of cryptocurrency – transfers of BUSD via Binance are free and the exchange rates are excellent. We particularly like bitcoin.
- Stripe/Airwallex – convenient for credit cards payments however there is a payment fee for you and us.
- WISE – create a free account, load some funds and transfer to our WISE account fee free.
- Local Bank Accounts - We have bank accounts in the USA (USD), EUROPE (EURO), Canada (CAD), Singapore (SNG) and England (GBP) that will accept funds transfer in those currencies. We use transferwise to then move our currency around back to Australia.
- WIRE/SWIFT - International Bank Transfer to our nominated account in Australia (USD or AUD). A very expensive option with poor bank FX rates (not recommended).
All invoices must be paid within 14 days.
If you cannot pay in that timeframe please let us know and we can make payment arrangements.
Getting Started
Step 1. Setting up development operations.
- We create a discord server OR Slack for all of us to talk
- We create a Trello project to manage backlog and the agile development process. See our “How we use Trello” for more information.
- Give us Admin access to your ST Go marketplace if you are migrating from ST Go to Sharetribe.
- Create a dropbox or Google Drive to share files.
Step 2. Move your marketplace to partner-hosted
- We create your AWS environments.
- We will deploy the ST Web Template to AWS and connect to you Admin Console.
- We update your Environment Variables file
- We get you to update your DNS so that your test.yourmarketplace.com goes to your test instance
- We get you to update your DNS so that your www.yourmarketplace.com goes to your production instance
- ta da...you have successfully moved from Sharetribe hosted marketplace to Hosted by Journeyhorizon
Step 3. Your Design
- Define your user journeys
- Sketch out your site-map
- Define your user interface for Web and Mobile formats. You can use Figma for this, it is free and creates clickable prototypes. Get the Sketch files from ST, import into Figma and go nuts... https://www.sharetribe.com/docs/design-toolkit/design-files/.
- Please be aware that there are minor variances between the design files and the Sharetribe Web Template, the Sharetribe team do their best to keep them in-sync but sometimes there will be small variances, where there are differences, the Sharetribe Web Template wins.
- Create a Google Document to hold your requirements
- a. Define the fields for User Profiles
- b. Define the fields for Listing Profiles
- c. Define the fields to be included on a Transaction if needed
- Identify gaps between the base template and what you want to achieve
- Create your imagery, colours and fonts
- Acquire any licenses to your images and fonts
- Define what country(s) you want to operate in
- Define what currency you want displayed
- Define what language you want the marketplace in
- Define what you want to sell?
- a. Rentals by night (nightly availability)
- b. Rentals by day (daily availability)
- c. Purchase products (purchase transaction)
- d. Hourly availability (hourly availability)
- Define any additional fees and charges you want to apply during the checkout?
- Define your buyer and seller commission structures? These are the commission the buyer pays to you or the seller pays to you from the transaction.
- Design your transaction processes, see this document https://www.sharetribe.com/docs/background/transaction-process/ . We recommend using Draw.io to produce your transaction process. We can provide you with a Draw.io base template if you like.
Step 4. Create your backlog
- Create your backlog in Trello this is your wish list of all the features you want
- Lets have our first sprint planning meeting
- Move backlog items to in development
Step 5. Usual Week
- Sprint planning monday (includes any bugs from last test and new features)
- Monday - Friday Lunchtime - Work on assigned items
- Thursday - Internal team QA
- Thursday PM - release to test environment
- Sat / Sun - you test the release, raise any bugs in Trello move cards as appropriate
- Monday AM - sprint planning and clearance for release to production of test
- Monday PM - release last weeks features to production
- Monday PM - you test that production is working fine.
- Rinse and repeat
Step 6. Support and ongoing enhancements
- Part 1 - monitoring. You select monitoring software, something like site24x7 or similar, and we configure that for you, this software then monitors the performance and availability of your site and will notify us of any issues or outages. For $300 a month we are then available to respond to these notifications and get you site back online.
- Part two - Extended Warranty - is how we deal with these issues and production bugs after the warranty period is finished. There are two options. Option 1. you pay based on the time it takes us to investigate and resolve the issue. Option2. You pay an annual support fee equal to 20% of your project value and we then investigate and resolve all issues as part of this fee…i.e. your support fees are capped.
- Part three - ongoing enhancement…continue as we do now, fixed price per card, and we fix bugs related to cards found in the test environment. Any bugs found in production fall under Part Two. We introduce a new label call “PRODUCTION BUG” so that we can all manage the difference between them.
Other Useful Stuff
Demo Sites
- https://stdemo.jhorizon.io/ – this is a live working demo site with our plugins installed
- https://st-demo-time.jhorizon.io/ – this is a live working site for hourly bookings (old yogatime)
- https://st-demo-product.jhorizon.io/ – this is a live working site for purchases (old sneakertime)
Test Data
You will need some test data for stripe, the following links provide the details for test accounts and test credit cards
- Bank Accounts https://stripe.com/docs/connect/testing
- Credit Cards - https://stripe.com/docs/testing
Sharetribe Documentation
- Sharetribe Documents - https://www.sharetribe.com/docs/
- Sharetribe Roadmap - https://www.sharetribe.com/flex/roadmap
- Sharetribe API - https://www.sharetribe.com/api-reference/
- Sketch Files - https://www.sharetribe.com/docs/design-toolkit/design-files/
Not Supported Yet
- Check roadmap for latest features in the works.
- Creating Listings through the Sharetribe Admin Console
- Transferring listing to another user
- Editing photos of a listing in admin console