What's new in Sharetribe Flex

🛠 Improvements:

- Preparations for rate limiting in Marketplace API and Integration API in dev and demo environment
- Maintenance
- Behind-the-scenes work for upcoming features

🛠 Improvements:
- Maintenance
- Behind-the-scenes work for upcoming features

🚀 New content and offer: free templates for your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Every marketplace business needs Terms of Service and Privacy Policy agreements. However, these legal documents can be fairly difficult to write, especially when you're just getting started.

To help you launch your marketplace faster, we've compiled two templates you can use as a baseline for the agreements between your online marketplace business and its users.

Access the templates and find instructions on how to use them in Flex, in this Flex Docs article.

🚀 New content: two articles on modifying booking times in FTW-hourly

We've added more content to help you get the most out of booking times in Flex and its template: Modify booking time intervals to set bookings to longer or shorter than one hour and Add buffer time to bookings so that providers have a non-booked interval between customers.

🛠 Improvements:
- New version to all Flex Templates for Web and the Sharetribe-scripts package. These include bug fixes to reported issues in the recent update of sharetribe-scripts.
- Plenty of maintenance and bug-fixing behind the scenes make backend development more manageable and more reliable.

🛠 Improvements:
- New version to all Flex Templates for Web. The sharetribe-scripts package was updated to a new major version 6.0.0, which adds support for the latest versions of several libraries.
- An update to the image carousel on listing pages. Images are now loaded faster and, on touch screens, you can change the image by swiping.

🛠 Improvements:

- Maintenance and bug fixes.

🚀 New feature: Edit your Microcopy in Console

Microcopy means the small pieces of text in your marketplace user interface, like button labels, error messages, and help texts. It’s now possible to edit all these in Console and see them appear in your marketplace right away, without a need to touch code.

Read the newsletter, check out a guide on how to use the editor, browse technical documentation about microcopy in Flex, or browse the technical documentation about Assets.

🚀 New feature: Create new listings with Integration API
Would you like to integrate your marketplace to Shopify or WooCommerce, or build any other integration that allows listings to be created automatically in your marketplace? This is now possible through the new endpoint in Integration API that allows listings to be created with it.
Read the newsletter, browse the API reference, or check out an example script.

🛠 Improvements:

- Support for Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Read the release announcement in Slack or the Pull Request.

🚀 New in Flex docs: Implement user deletion

As a complement to the recently released user deletion endpoint, we've published a cookbook that guides you in implementing the delete feature in your FTW template. The cookbook features a server-side endpoint to check whether the user has incomplete transactions, and only allows deletion to proceed when all transactions are complete.

Read the release announcement in Slack, or the newsletter, or browse the documentation.

🚀 New feature: API support for deleting users

It's now possible to delete users via the Marketplace API, and not only via Console anymore. Using that feature, customizations to your front-end can give marketplace users the ability to delete their own accounts. Read the release announcement in Slack, and browse the documentation.

Read the release announcement in Slack, or the newsletter, or browse the documentation.

🛠 Improvements:

- Enable/Disable Listing approval in Console. Reviewing all listings before they are visible has been a feature present in Flex for a long time, but required some technical work to be enabled. It's now possible to enable or disable it in just a couple of clicks, from Console. Read the release announcement in Slack, or the newsletter, or browse the documentation.

🛠 Improvements:

- Maintenance and bug fixes.

🚀 New feature: Query users by extended data

A new API feature that makes it easier to search and filter users based on extended data. Previously, it was not possible to search and filter this data through the API. For instance, to query all users with certain membership status, it was necessary to query all users and then do the filtering in an external backend, outside of Flex. With the updated /users/query endpoint to the Integration API, this can all happen within Flex.

Read the release announcement in Slack , the newsletter or browse the documentation.

🛠 Improvements:

- All Flex Templates for Web (ftw-daily, ftw-hourly, ftw-product) have seen a new release. It brings mainly bug fixes and some library updates. This update is available for all templates and you can find them from the Release page on each GitHub repository.

🚀 New feature: FTW-product, a template for product marketplaces

A new Flex Template for Web (FTW), FTW-product, is now available. It focuses on product marketplaces and uses the listing stock management feature. With this new template, it is now many times faster to start building a marketplace for selling products.

Read the release announcement in Slack , the newsletter or browse the documentation.

🚀 New feature: Support for listing stock management in the APIs

Flex now has support for listing stock management. With this new set of features, it is much easier to build a product selling marketplace on Flex.

Read the release announcement in Slack, or the newsletter, or browse the documentation.

🚀 New feature: Query listings by a set of IDs

It is now possible to query listings by a given set of IDs (up to 100) in both the Marketplace API and Integration API. This makes it easier to build features like a wish list of favorite listings for a user, or any other feature where recording and querying a set of listings might be useful.

Read the release announcement in Slack, or the newsletter, or browse the documentation.

🚀 New feature: Connect Flex to Zapier to automate tasks without coding or relying on developers.

Save time as an operator and offer new value to your users. Wouldn’t it be great if new users of your marketplace would automatically be added to a Mailchimp mailing list? Or, if providers could receive a text message whenever a booking is made for their listing? Or, if all new transactions automatically got added to a Google sheet?

You can now make this automation (and so much more!) a reality without having to code or rely on a developer. Sharetribe Flex now offers an integration to Zapier that lets you connect with over 3,000 web apps.

Get started with our Zapier cookbook or the newsletter.

🛠 Improvements:

- Events are a key Flex feature, every marketplace surely has a use for them and we've made it easier to unlock their potential. We've added a new page in Console where you can easily learn about Events and access the key resources about it (docs, flex-cli commands, ...).

🚀 New feature: Integrate any payment service provider
Sharetribe Flex offers a built-in payment system powered by Stripe Connect, but Stripe has its limitations. You can now integrate your Flex-powered marketplace with any third-party payment service provider.

This guide offers an overview of the steps required to complete such integration and the things you should consider before and during the integration process. You can also read the newsletter.

🛠 Improvements:

- The Flex APIs now use the latest data for time zones when handling time-based availability plans. This fixes an issue where in some cases where a time zone had its information changed recently, Flex API would return incorrect time slots or be unable to create a booking for otherwise available time. This update is already in place for all Flex APIs and does not require any changes in your Flex applications.

🚀 New feature: New payment methods

You can now use new global payment methods (Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Microsoft Pay) as well as new local payment methods (Alipay (China), Bancontact (Belgium), EPS (Austria), Giropay (Germany), iDEAL (Netherlands), Przelewy24 (Poland)).

Read the newsletter or browse the documentation.

🚀 New feature: Transaction events
After the powerful concept of events was introduced to Flex, we are releasing an update that extends the concept to transaction events. You can now build automation related to bookings, reviews, and transactions. Read more about events in Flex or read the newsletter.

🛠 Improvements:

Minor updates to FTW templates: FTW-daily v8.1.0, FTW-hourly v10.1.0.

🛠 Improvements:

- Code splitting. It makes it possible to start organizing your codebase so that most of it is split away from the main chunk. In practice, code splitting reduces the code that needs to be downloaded and parsed during the initial page load. This improves performance and therefore affects Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It also gives new possibilities to create alternative page versions (for different processes and UX purposes) since those are not adding extra performance drop for every page load.

🚀 New feature: Events

Send custom notifications. Sync data with your CRM or marketing automation tool. Approve listings automatically. Events let you do this and a lot more.

Read the newsletter.

🚀 New feature: Outgoing email settings

Change your outgoing email address in Console or use your own SendGrid account to get more statistics on email notifications.

Read the newsletter.

🚀 New feature: OpenID Connect login

Integrate any social login or third-party authentication to your marketplace. Flex now supports single sign-on via OpenID connect. Read the newsletter.

Read the newsletter.

🚀 New feature: Google and Facebook login

Reduce friction in signup. Let your users sign up and log in to your marketplace with their Facebook or Google accounts. This is supported for Google login both to Marketplace API and Flex Templates for Web.

Read the newsletter.

🛠 Improvements:

- Support of vanilla CSS and live CSS Properties in FTW. This major release updates sharetribe-scripts dependency aka our Create React App (CRA) fork to the newest version: 4.0.0.

🚀 New feature: Manage admin users in Console

It's now possible to invite new users to your Flex account and remove them directly from Console.

Read the newsletter.

🛠 Improvements:

- Gzip compression enabled. This will improve the site performance by reducing the response sizes significantly. No need to update Flex Templates for Web, or SDK, the change is effective immediately.

🚀 New feature: Proposed bookings and the ability to update bookings

Earlier, you needed to cancel a booking and initiate a new one to reschedule. Now it's possible to edit the details of the booking via a new action in the transaction process instead. In addition, you can now create "proposed" bookings that don't yet block availability, to allow multiple people to request to book the same dates at the same time, so the provider can choose which of those to accept.

Read the newsletter.

🚀 New feature: Custom image variants

You can now define image variants freely, instead of relying on the earlier fixed set of aspect ratios. You can crop the images to the exact dimensions and aspect ratios you want.

Read the newsletter.

🚀 New feature: Flexible pricing and commission engine

This feature introduces new flexible pricing and commission engine, which offers a secure way for you to have any pricing and commission structure in your marketplace.

Read the newsletter.

🚀 New feature: Filter and sort users, listings, and transactions in Console

This feature allows you to filter users, listings, and transactions to more efficiently find what you're looking for.

Read the newsletter.

🚀 New feature: Operator transitions via Integration API

It's now possible to transition transactions via Integration API. This means you can easily keep the status of multiple transactions in sync, or more easily integrate third-party solutions like delivery to your transaction process.

Read the newsletter.

🛠 Improvements:

- Streamlined way to add and edit search filters. This improvement streamlines the process of changing FTW filters and makes it a lot faster to edit the filters and add new ones. Read the newsletter.

🛠 Improvements:

- Improved search experience in Console. The Console keyword search makes it easy to find users by their name or email and listings by their title and description from Console. Read the newsletter.

🚀 New feature: More management options in Console

Lots of new management and moderation capabilities: delete users, listings, and reviews, directly from Console, edit reviews, edit the email address of a user, and manually verify the email address.

Read the newsletter.

🛠 Improvements:

- New Flex documentation site. This new version adds a search, a sidebar for more straightforward navigation, and a new tutorial for those just getting started. See https://www.sharetribe.com/docs/.

🚀 New feature: Sort search results

We're introducing the ability to sort listings by creation date, price, and public and metadata, which allows a variety of different sorting options.

Read the newsletter.

🚀 New feature: Filter search by time-based availability

It's now possible to filter the search by time-based availability. You can return either the listings that are available for the entire provided time range, those that have at least some availability within the provided range, and those that have at least a slot of specified slot available for a specified range.

Read the newsletter.

🚀 New feature: "Log in as a user"

As an admin, you can now log in as a user of a marketplace, and edit their profile and listing information on their behalf.

Read the newsletter.

🛠 Improvements:

- Integration API v2. The second major release of Integration API allows you to edit users and listings programmatically. This allows integrations to solutions third-party identity verification, subscription billing systems for paid memberships, and more. Read the newsletter.

🚀 Flex has seen many new features and improvements added over time!

We did not list them all here, but you can look at the FTW and API reference changelogs.