Vendor Types

Vendor types are the categories you sort your vendors into — Farmer, Prepared Food, Artisan, Nonprofit, Food Truck. They’re a small piece of setup that a lot of other things hang off, so it’s worth doing early and doing once.

Configure them under Market → Edit → Vendor Types.

Why do vendor types matter?

Three reasons, and only the first is cosmetic:

1. They organize your market. Vendors pick a type when they apply, so your applications and rosters arrive pre-sorted.
2. They drive pricing. You can charge a different rate per type — nonprofits at $0, food trucks at a premium. See Pricing Rules.
3. They target compliance rules. You can require a health permit only from prepared-food vendors, and a certificate of insurance from everyone. See Vendor Compliance Rules.

Set your types up before you configure pricing or compliance, because both of those reference types by name.

How do I create a vendor type?

Each type has three fields:

• Name — what vendors see when they choose. Use their language, not yours: “Baked goods,” not “Category 3.”
• Parent type (optional) — nest this type under a broader one.
• Sort order — controls the order types appear in. Put your most common types at the top; most vendors will pick from the first three.

How do nested vendor types work?

Types can be nested one under another, which lets you keep a clean top-level list while still capturing detail. For instance:

• Produce
  • Vegetables
  • Fruit
  • Flowers
• Prepared Food
  • Baked goods
  • Hot food
  • Packaged / shelf-stable

The value of nesting shows up in pricing and compliance: you can set a rule against the parent to catch everything beneath it, and override a child where it differs. A health permit requirement on Prepared Food is the kind of thing you want applying to every child type automatically.

Don’t over-nest. Two levels is almost always enough, and every extra layer is another decision you’re asking a vendor to make correctly on a signup form.

Can vendors edit their own type?

No. Vendors select from the types you’ve defined; they can’t create or rename them. That’s deliberate — if vendors could invent categories, your pricing and compliance targeting would drift out from under you.

If a vendor picks the wrong type, an admin can correct it from the vendor’s record.

Where do vendor types show up?

• Vendor application and booking forms — the vendor picks their type.
• Pricing rules — as the target of a vendor type price override.
• Compliance rules — as the target of a document or payment requirement.
• Reports — the vendor sales report includes a Sales by vendor type breakdown, so your categories become the shape of your revenue analysis. Vendors without a type are grouped as Unassigned. See Reporting & KPIs.

That last one is a good reason to keep your list tidy: whatever categories you define are the categories you’ll be reading your numbers in for the rest of the season.

Common gotchas

• Renaming a type doesn’t break anything, but vendors who already applied will see the new name. Rename freely; restructure carefully.
• Types are per market. If you run several markets with the same categories, you’ll set them up on each one.
• Deleting a type that pricing or compliance rules point at will orphan those rules. Check your Pricing Rules and Vendor Compliance tabs before removing a type mid-season.
• Unassigned vendors show up in reports as “Unassigned.” If that bucket is large, it usually means a type was added after vendors had already applied.

Next steps

• Pricing Rules — charge different rates per type
• Vendor Compliance Rules — require different paperwork per type
• Markets — the rest of the market configuration tabs