Running a Community Marketplace: Ultimate Guide
This guide will give you more context and show you how to make your community marketplace a success. Launching a community marketplace with Rarible requires no code knowledge and doesn't cost any fees whatsoever.
This article is quite long, so we’ve split it up into a few parts. Click the links below to jump to the corresponding section immediately:
Let’s start with a simple question.
I. Why should you create a community marketplace in the first place?
When you launch your own NFT collection, most of your community usually trades on third-party marketplaces. Having a community marketplace offers several advantages for your project:
The fees from each trade go directly to your project's treasury, benefitting your project and the community (instead of simply going into a centralized company's pocket).
2. Aggregated liquidity + enforced royalties.
On a community marketplace, royalties are paid on each sale. Even if the listing was aggregated from a marketplace that would allow users to circumvent royalties, should they trade via that marketplace's UI instead of your new platform.
3. No copycat scams + better navigation.
Your community is safe from copycat scam collections—and has a much better time navigating your project's NFTs.
4. Web3 freedom.
Your project no longer has to rely on centralized marketplaces that technically can delist your collection at any time, causing massive damage.
Owning a community marketplace is a much more Web3-native experience.
5. On-brand shopping experience for your holders.
Your community feels at home and has an awesome, deeper experience trading NFTs on their new marketplace. Especially when it's designed with on-brand colors, font and other customizable elements.
If you want to dig a bit deeper and learn why we think community marketplaces are the future of NFT trading, check out the article below:
So, if you're a collection owner and don't have a platform yet, go create your own community marketplace now! It's free and will take just a few minutes.
Once you have claimed your own marketplace, let’s jump into basic settings. If you’ve already gone through the initial setup, feel free to skip the next section and navigate to more advanced settings Rarible community marketplaces offer.
II. Basic Settings
Let's cover the most important basic things you can play around with to maximize the impact of your marketplace.
Customize the look and feel of your marketplace 🎨
You can customize the colors, font, and layout on the backend of your marketplace. That way, your marketplace will feel like an integral part of your project's ecosystem - meaning your community will enjoy visiting it along your Discord and, ultimately, trading there.
If you need some inspiration, a few examples we love are:
You can also find a detailed step-by-step instruction on setting up your community marketplace on our Zendesk.
Set your transaction fees 🧮
On any Rarible commmunity marketplace, you can set a custom transaction fee.
This fee will be applied to every trade from listings on your marketplace and will go to a target wallet that you define.
Rarible itself charges no fees on community marketplaces.
Optimize your SEO ✍️
You can edit the title and description so that your marketplace pops up on the first page of Google search.
Play around with keywords, and make sure that the description has the name of your project in it.
Set up a custom domain 🌐
By default, your marketplace is hosted on our wlbl.xyz domain. To get more trust from your community and ensure they always find their way home, you can host it on any (sub-) domain you have.
See a detailed guide on changing your domain here.
III. Driving traffic to your marketplace
Having your own marketplace is nice. But it doesn’t help if nobody uses it! That’s why you’ll have to do some promotion. Don’t worry: We don’t expect you to be a marketing pro. But there are a few basic steps you can take in a short time to ensure your community uses their own marketplace instead of a third-party one.
Here are the basics of driving traffic to your marketplace:
Announce your marketplace in your community 📯
Post a link to your marketplace on Twitter, Discord and any other platforms where your project is represented. When you announce, make sure you also share the advantages we described above—your community will love to use their new marketplace if they know that fees go to project development (or, maybe, that there are no fees at all—depending on how you set up your marketplace).
Consider making a special announcement post where you include some visuals to match the look and feel of your marketplace.
Posting the announcement on social media will also help you reach out to new collectors who haven’t seen your marketplace yet.
And if you tag Rarible in your announcement tweet... who knows? Maybe you'll get a retweet from an account with 500k followers. Just saying.
Link to your marketplace on your website & socials 🕸️
Make sure you have a link to your marketplace on your project’s website.
Further, if your socials, Linktree, Discord or other services currently link to your collection on a third-party marketplace, we recommend switching that for your community marketplace, or at least making sure that option is visible enough. We also advise linking it in CTA buttons and menus.
While these steps only take a few minutes, they help your community learn about the benefits their new marketplace provides over centralized platforms. And, as a result, get more liquidity for your marketplace.
It's a win-win.
Let your team know 💬
If you have a team of moderators, community managers or others, let them know about the marketplace and ensure they know why it matters.
If your team works in Discord, you could instruct them to encourage linking to NFTs on the community marketplace instead of a third-party one.
Communication is key.
IV. Getting support from Rarible
We feature one community marketplace we love every week on our social media and our newsletter. Why shouldn’t it be you?
If you’ve created your own marketplace with Rarible, you can apply to be featured as community marketplace of the week for a chance to get a shoutout on Twitter and a newsletter feature.
If you’re working on a bigger project and need more customization, you can request to be one of our white-glove partners. These are highly customized marketplaces built by the Rarible team, so those projects are selected on a manual basis (see more on the difference between whiteglove marketplaces and ones made through the builder here). To apply for a white glove marketplace, click here.
Wrapping up: LFG!
We hope those few easy steps will help you get your marketplace up and running. If you ever need any help, feel free to get in touch with us on Discord.
We hope your community marketplace will help you drive more trading to the decentralized Web3 world.
Let’s get going and get trading!