Listivo

The field model decides everything else

A classified-ads site usually breaks at the same point: the second category. A car listing wants mileage, fuel type and transmission; a flat wants rooms, floor and furnished state. Themes that ship a fixed set of listing fields force you into workarounds as soon as your marketplace serves more than one sector.

Listivo's answer, as the vendor describes it, is a field builder with eleven types: taxonomy, text, rich text, number, price, salary, location, embed, gallery, attachments and link. The important part is the sentence that follows the list — all custom fields are searchable and filterable. That is what makes the field choice a structural decision rather than a cosmetic one. A field you add for a submission form becomes a filter in search without a second integration step.

Parent-child fields and conditional visibility

Eleven field types would be unwieldy if every field appeared on every submission form. The vendor's description handles this with field connections: link fields as parent and child, or reveal and hide options based on what the user selected. Fields are also structured across multiple levels, with AJAX loading as users move through them.

Picture the effect on a real form. A seller picks "Vehicles", then "Cars", and only the car fields appear — engine size, mileage, body type — while the property fields stay out of the way. The same connections drive the filter panel, so a visitor narrowing by category sees the relevant filters rather than the full inventory. This is the feature that decides how long your submission form gets and how quickly a buyer can narrow a result set, so it is worth checking how deep the vendor's demo takes the nesting before you commit to a category tree.

Reload-free search built on the same fields

The search engine is described as delivering results without page reloads, filtering by category, location, price range and any custom field. Sorting covers relevance, date, price high to low and low to high, and listing cards come in more than one layout.

Two additions sit around that core. Keyword search suggests terms drawn from ad titles and matches inside ad descriptions, so a buyer who does not know your category names can still find listings. And the vendor ships ten hero search widget variants, which are the entry points that place the search form where your homepage design wants it. If your marketplace depends on search-driven traffic rather than browse-driven traffic, the hero variants and the filter panel are the two pieces to test together, not separately.

Location search with a provider choice

Location is both a field type and a search dimension. The vendor offers two map providers and frames the trade-off plainly: Google Maps brings autocomplete, custom map styling and country restrictions, while OpenStreetMap is presented as reducing API costs while keeping the map search functionality. Radius search and an interactive map on listing detail pages are listed for the location layer.

The choice is a running-cost decision as much as a design one. A global marketplace with heavy map traffic may prefer the OpenStreetMap route; a local site where address autocomplete is part of the submission experience may want Google. The vendor does not describe how switching providers affects existing listings, so treat that as something to confirm rather than assume.

How the money side is actually priced

Payment packages are the core of the monetisation model, and the vendor lists the variables you can charge against: ad duration, featured periods, bump-ups that push an ad back to the top of results, and category-specific tiers. Free packages, coupons and promotional discounts sit alongside them as acquisition tools.

Two payment rails are named. WooCommerce gateways handle one-off transactions — credit cards, PayPal and bank transfers appear in the vendor's list — and Stripe subscriptions produce recurring revenue with automatic monthly renewals. Google AdSense is a separate revenue line for traffic rather than listings.

The design question is whether your category tree can carry different prices without confusing sellers. Category-specific packages make that possible; whether it stays legible depends on how your packages are named and grouped, which is a decision the theme will not make for you.

Accounts, moderation and contact channels

A paid listing platform needs to distinguish who is posting. The vendor separates private seller and business account types, which lets you apply different features and pricing to each. Registration can run through Google and Facebook social login, with email confirmation and Twilio SMS phone verification, and reCAPTCHA protects the form.

Submission happens on the front end with photo and attachment uploads, including limits on count and file size, location search and field validation. Moderation is optional but, when enabled, generates email and SMS notifications for approval and decline, and users who edit an ad may need reapproval. Messaging is built in, and ads can also carry WhatsApp, Viber and SMS contact buttons.

That combination shapes staffing. If you moderate rather than auto-approve, the notification templates and the reapproval rule determine how much admin time each listing costs, and the template customisation the vendor mentions is where you make those messages sound like your site.

Landing pages, widgets and the editing surface

The SEO layer is the part that suits a directory better than a blog. The vendor says Listivo generates micro-landing pages for specific categories, locations and filter combinations automatically, with pretty URLs, custom titles, meta descriptions and canonical URLs, and claims Yoast SEO compatibility. For a marketplace whose value is long-tail search — "used vans in a named city", "flats to rent with a balcony" — those generated pages are the growth mechanism, and they depend on the field structure described earlier.

Editing happens in Elementor. The vendor lists over 200 widgets built for directory and listing sites and says ad templates and user profile templates are editable there, alongside pages. Elementor Pro is listed as supported for extra functionality, and the free version is separately named in the compatibility list.

What the declared attributes settle, and what they don't

The marketplace attributes recorded on 4 November 2026 list Elementor, Elementor Pro, Contact Form 7, Jetpack and Facebook under compatible-with, mark Gutenberg Optimized as Yes, and name PHP, CSS and JS files as the package contents. The declared WordPress range runs from 5.0.x through 7.0.x. Those are vendor and marketplace declarations, not records of a tested install on your stack, and the range does not tell you how a specific page builder combination behaves. The vendor's own compatibility paragraph also names Yoast SEO and WP All Import, which you will not find in the attribute list — a reminder that neither list is complete on its own.

What is left for you to verify is narrower than it looks: how deep the field nesting goes in practice, whether your category tree survives import cleanly, and whether the search behaviour holds up at your expected listing volume. Those are the questions the demo and documentation are for, and they matter more than any single widget count.

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