Creating and managing a TradeCircle

How to create a circle, attach listings, review requests, manage members, and archive circles you no longer need.

Last updated 2026-04-30

This article walks through the full seller flow: create, attach listings, review requests, manage members, archive. All of it lives in your dashboard at /dashboard/trade-circles.

Creating a circle

Open Trade Circles from the dashboard sidebar.
Click Create. You land on the new-circle form.
Fill in:

- Name — short, customer-facing. Buyers see this everywhere your circle appears. "Early access", "Refurbished line", "Komatsu dealer pool" — keep it descriptive. - Description (optional) — one or two sentences that buyers see on the seller-profile tile and inside the circle. "New arrivals visible to followers 14 days before public launch" is a good shape. - Avatar (optional) — a square image. Helps the circle stand out on the seller-profile tile. - Access mode — Followers or By request. See Access modes for the trade-offs.

Click Create. You're taken to the circle's detail page, where you'll spend the rest of your time.

The circle is now live but empty. Listings don't get attached automatically — you do that during listing creation (or via the listing-edit page when it lands).

Attaching a listing

There's no separate "attach this existing listing to circle X" action in Phase 1. Listings are attached at the moment you create them:

Go to Dashboard → Listings → Create new listing.
Fill in the listing as usual — title, photos, parameters, price, location.
In the Visibility section near the bottom of the form, switch from Public to TradeCircle. A list of your active circles appears.
Tick one or more circles to attach the listing to.
Submit the form. The listing is created, attached to the circles you selected, and its visibility is set to TradeCircle.

A TradeCircle listing must be attached to at least one active circle. The form won't let you set visibility to TradeCircle without picking one.

The detail page

Every circle has a detail page at /dashboard/trade-circles/{publicId} with four tabs:

Listings — the listings currently attached to the circle. Read-only here in Phase 1; attach happens on the listing-create flow.
Members — the buyers currently in the circle. Visible only on By-request circles (Followers-mode circles get their members from your follower graph and have nothing to manage here).
Requests — the queue of buyers who've applied to join. Visible only on By-request circles.
Settings — name, description, avatar, archive / restore.

Reviewing access requests (By-request only)

When a buyer requests access:

The request lands in the Requests tab with status Pending.
You see the requester's identity using the layered display name we use everywhere — their seller-profile brand if they have one, otherwise their company name, otherwise their full name. With a small badge ("Verified seller" / "Company" / "Individual") so you know which kind of buyer is asking.
You see the message they sent, if any.

Two actions:

Approve opens a modal where you set how long the grant lasts:

- Permanent — most common; the buyer can see the circle until you revoke them. - A specific duration (e.g. 30 days, 6 months, 1 year) — useful for time-bound campaigns. After the expiry the grant lapses and the buyer falls out of the circle. They can request again.

Deny opens a modal where you can optionally write a reason. The buyer sees the denial and the reason in their /dashboard/circle-access page. They're free to re-apply.

Both actions update the request row immediately and the buyer is notified.

Managing members (By-request only)

The Members tab lists everyone with an active grant on the circle, newest first.

For each member you see:

Their layered identity (the same display we use on the requests queue).
The grant date.
The expiry date, or Permanent if it doesn't expire.

You can revoke a grant. A revoke removes the buyer from the circle immediately. If they had a still-pending follow-up request that hadn't been answered yet, that's a separate row — revoke only touches the active grant. The buyer is notified.

Revoking is silent on the buyer's side in the sense that no public chip says "you were revoked" — they simply stop seeing the circle's listings, the same way they would on grant expiry.

Editing the circle

The Settings tab lets you change:

Name — buyers see the new name on their next page load. Existing approved members aren't disrupted.
Description — same.
Avatar — replace, or remove (set to none).
Mode is not editable in Phase 1. If you need to switch a circle from Followers to By-request or vice versa, archive the existing one and create a new one with the right mode. Listings will need to be recreated and attached to the new circle, since the old circle no longer accepts listings.

Archiving a circle

When you don't need a circle anymore — the campaign ended, the dealer relationship ended, the contract expired — archive it from Settings.

Archiving:

Removes the circle from your active list and from the seller-profile TradeCircles tab.
Hides the circle's attached listings from non-owner viewers (even existing members no longer see them through the circle path — though the listings themselves still exist in your inventory, set to TradeCircle visibility, and won't appear in public search either).
Preserves all data — members, requests, audit log — so you can restore it later if needed.
Keeps the circle visible in your own dashboard under the Archived filter.

To restore: open the archived circle in your dashboard and click Restore in Settings. The circle goes back to active immediately, with members and grants intact.

Where buyers find your circles

Your seller-profile page has a TradeCircles tab with a tile per active circle and a count of how many you have. Each tile shows the mode, the description, the member count, the listing count, and the right action button for the viewing buyer. (See the Access modes article for the full button matrix.)
Your circle's authorized listings page at /seller/{your-slug}/circle/{circle-publicId} is what an authorized buyer sees when they click View listings. It looks like a focused version of your Listings tab — same card design, same search-friendly layout — but only the listings attached to that circle.

If you ever want to send a buyer directly to a specific circle, link to that page.