Market managers don’t talk about this often enough: responding to vendor emails quietly eats your entire workday. For most of us this jobs is s part-time position, therefore the time windows to get things done is very limited.

Let’s look at a real example
A medium-sized weekly farmers market with 50-65 stalls receives approx. 150 vendor applications. Now for this example let’s say that 50 of these vendors email the market manager with the same set of questions:

• How do I apply?
• What are the fees?
• What are the dates?
• What are the rules?
• Who do I talk to?

You probably posted all the answers, either in the top section of the application form, on your website or somewhere in your market policies but nowhere where it ca be seen in one easy place that reaches the wide audience of vendors you need. That’s why you end of spending about 10 minutes per vendor answering the same details over and over.

Fun times
The fifty 10-minute conversations take up 8.3hrs. At an hourly wage of $25.50 that’s $211 just to answer emails. That’s the invisible expense that drains the market budget. And if we’re being honest, it’s simply not a fun task. Don’t get me wrong, I love taking to vendors and vendor acquisition is an important part of running a successful market, but if we can reduce the effort, free up time to focus on things like marketing, sponsorship and emergency preparedness, that’s when we build a sustainable organization.

The solution? Put your information where vendors can self‑serve it.
Creating a Market Scout listing takes about 20 minutes, it’s less complicated than listing a suite on AirBnB. Once it’s up, you send every vendor inquiry the same link, training them to self-serve might take a little while but they will eventually get it. Your inbox will still need some attention but only for things that can’t be solved elsewhere. And you’ll reclaom hours of your time every single week.

And because your listing lives on the marketplace for the year (for recurring markets), new vendors will discover your market without emailing you first, meaning more applications with zero effort. Now you might be in the position where you don’t want more vendor applications, and I hear you on that, the key is to set yourself up to find the right vendors. The ones that fill the gaps, compliment the product mix and match with your target shoppers. The more detailed you can be on who you’re looking for, the fewer applications you’ll have to filter through.

As a bonus, add in the scam protection. It saves vendors real money, reduces the anxiety and portraits your market in a professional way that shows that you protect your vendors as good as possible.

But why paying for it
As market managers we might not be used to talk in “business language” or price out how much it costs to acquire a vendor (customer acquisition cost). I haven’t heard of many markets that calculate the labour and marketing dollars it took to find a vendor, then estimate how many markets/season the vendor would return just to get the lifetime value of a customer. Well that might just be because we don’t look at vendors as our customers or we don’t directly pay for marketing activities to find vendors (means forgetting to budget the labour it takes to manually promote it). Where I’m going with this is: posting your market listing on My Market Scout is not free, paying for the time it takes to manually sign-up vendors isn’t free either. When you approve a vendor, it will generate income for your market, not just for that one time but hopefully for years to come. The return on your investment in a market listing is long term and will exceed the cost.

Based on my own experience it is very hard to make money off hosting markets, the margins are slim, the workload is high. A small communication shift, posting on Market Scout and empowering vendors to self-serve can save you hours every week and help your market grow smarter, not harder.

Lettuce talk soon,

Isabel

P.S. behind My Market Scout is no big tech company, no investors, just myself. I’m working everyday on building a tool that supports and serves many markets and vendors.