MARKETS & POP-UPS
When the Stall Comes Down, the Card Stays Up
You are there for a weekend, then gone. The card is what keeps the customer afterwards — and tells them where you will be next.
You sell in a place you do not keep
Markets, fairs, festivals, a unit in a shopping centre for six weeks. The crowd is somebody else’s, the dates are fixed months ahead, and when it ends you take the table home.
How Many People Meet You and Vanish?
Every market ends the same way: you pack up, and a crowd of people who liked your things walk off with no way to find you again.
Your own arithmetic, not a promise: buyers per event times events per year. Not all of them will install a card — but right now none of them can.
What the Card Does Between Events
A season on the circuit, stop by stop. Pick a market to see what happens before it, at the stall, and after you pack up.
Example numbers from a small ceramics stall, not a forecast. The pattern is the point: every event adds to a list you can reach before the next one.
Four Things That Make or Break the Day
A stall is not a shop. Everything happens in the ninety seconds someone stands in front of you.
Nobody signs anybody up by typing their details in while six people wait with cash in their hands. The sign-up has to happen on the customer’s phone, not yours.
Do this: a big printed QR code on the stall, and let people install while you wrap. For people who already have the card, kiosk mode scans them through without you touching anything.
Where the codes go →The scanner is a web app that runs in a phone browser — no App Store, no install, but it does need a connection, and so does installing a card.
Do this: test the signal at your pitch before the doors open, and carry a hotspot if it is thin. Print the QR code on card, never show it on a phone screen: a printed code works in sunlight, at any angle, while you are handing someone their change.
Selling on the move →A stamp card at a stall you see twice a year is a slow promise. A coupon with a deadline is a fast one.
Do this: set the coupon to run for a fixed number of days after it is issued, long enough to cover your next event. Decide it carefully — that setting cannot be changed once the card is live.
How coupon cards work →This is the whole reason to run a card at a market. The people who met you in June have no idea you are at the docks in July.
Do this: schedule a push for the evening before each event with the place, the dates and the hours. Tick the schedule box, pick the date and time, and send it to everyone or to one segment.
How push notifications work →Seven Things in the Crate
Tick them off while you pack. Six of them fit in an envelope.
Three Numbers After Every Event
Read them on the Monday, while the market is still fresh — they decide which pitches you book again.
One link per event turns a stall fee into a number you can compare. Two hundred installs at a small fair beats forty at a famous one.
The number that says whether the card is doing its job. A stranger who finds you again is worth more than any stall fee you will pay.
Markets are seasonal, so read it against the same month last year rather than against last month.
What Do You Want It to Do?
Once people are on the card, each page below shows the settings that move one number.
What Stallholders Ask Us
Pack the Card With the Gazebo
One printed code, one phone, and a list that comes home with you. Try it for 14 days — no card needed.