A loyalty card suits a market stall well, as long as it is set for market rhythm: a short card of four to six stamps, because regulars can only visit when the market is on; a reward from your own table; and a way of joining that copes with weak phone signal in a park or a shed. For a stall, though, the most useful part is not the stamp. It is having a list of regulars you are allowed to tell where you will be next, which matters far more to a business that moves than to a shop with a fixed address.
Count the visits the calendar allows
A shop on a strip is open six or seven days a week. A stall is open when the market is, and that caps how often anyone can come back. Before choosing a target, count what the calendar allows.
A weekly farmers market gives a regular at most 52 chances a year, and most regulars manage two or three Saturdays a month, so about 30 visits. A fortnightly or monthly market gives 12 to 26. A pop-up shop that trades for three weeks before Christmas might see its keenest customers three or four times in total.
Then set the card so an ordinary regular fills it in a few months at most. That usually means six stamps at a weekly market, four at a monthly one, and three for a short pop-up. Ten stamps at a monthly market is the best part of a year, and nobody remembers a card that long. The entry on visit frequency shows the arithmetic.
Make the rule one stamp per visit with a purchase, or per visit over a modest spend. At a busy trestle table there is no time to count jars.
Make joining work in a field
Markets are held in parks, showgrounds, car parks and old sheds, and phone signal in those places can be poor at exactly the moment the crowd is thickest. Joining needs the customer's phone to open a page and receive a text code, and your own phone needs data to record the stamp.
Test it before you rely on it. Stand at your pitch at the busiest hour of a market day, open your join link, and see how long it takes. If it crawls, print the QR on small take-away cards as well as the table sign, with a line that says customers can join at home and collect their stamp next time. On Counter Club, joining asks for an Australian mobile and a code sent by text, so a customer with no signal at all cannot finish at the stall; how customers join walks through each step.
Keep a fallback for your own side. If your phone loses signal mid-morning, write each member's first name and the last three digits of their mobile on a notepad, press the stamps that evening once you are back in range, and then tear the page up. Do not keep a running list of numbers on paper.
Mount the QR where people can scan it standing up: on a weighted A-frame, clipped to the front of the table, or hanging from the gazebo frame at chest height. A code lying flat among the produce gets covered, splashed or blown away, and the QR code entry covers how big to print it.
Choose a reward from your own table
The reward should be the thing your regulars come for, and it should be cheap for you to give. A preserves stall gives a jar of choice. A coffee cart gives a coffee. A seedling stall gives a punnet. A baker gives a loaf. Each of those is worth several times its cost to the person receiving it.
Bring enough of it. Running out of reward stock at 11 o'clock, when two cards fill in the last hour, means two disappointed regulars and an awkward promise for next week.
Tell the club where you will be
This is where a stall gets the most from a list. Markets move pitches, add twilight nights, get cancelled for storms and heatwaves. A regular who drives across town to an empty showground is a regular you may not see again. A regular who is told on Thursday that the stall will be at the Sunday night market by the river, with the first chilli jam of summer, has a reason to come.
Send one message before the markets you most want your regulars at, plus any cancellation. Not every week. Messages to the club need a paid plan; the Free plan runs the card for 50 members but sends nothing, and the pricing page sets out which plan sends email and which sends texts.
For a pop-up shop, the list is nearly the whole point. When people join during a three-week pop-up, tell them plainly that you will let them know where the next one is. That is the reason they joined, and it makes the message they receive months later welcome rather than a surprise.
A worked example: Gherkin and Gale
Gherkin and Gale is a fictional pickles and preserves stall. It trades at a farmers market every Saturday and at a twilight market by the river one Sunday a month. Jars sell for $12 and cost $3.20 each to make, including produce, jar, lid and label. A typical regular buys two jars every second week.
The card is six stamps, one per visit over $20, with a jar of choice as the reward. The fortnightly regular fills it in twelve weeks, having spent $144. The reward costs the stall $3.20, about 2.2 percent of that spend, and is worth $12 to the customer.
By the end of summer the club has 150 members, 70 of whom gave an email address and confirmed it. Before each twilight market the owners send those 70 one short note:
This Sunday we are at the twilight market by the river from 4 till 9, with the first chilli jam of the summer. Come and find us near the food trucks.
On the first twilight night after the email, 16 members mention it at the stall and buy two jars each. That is 32 jars, and at $8.80 margin a jar, $281.60 of gross profit from one evening, from people who might never have known the stall was there that night.
When storms cancel a Saturday in autumn, the same list gets a two-line note before 7 that morning. Nobody makes a wasted trip, and three people reply in person the following week to say thanks.
Mistakes to avoid
A long card at an infrequent market. Ten stamps once a month is ten months.
A small QR flat on the table. Print it big, mount it upright, and laminate it against rain and spilt coffee.
Counting on the market's wifi. Assume none, and test the mobile signal yourself.
Stamping on someone's word for last week, every week. Catch-up stamps are for the day your signal dropped and you wrote it down, not a standing arrangement.
Messages that name the market but not when or where. Day, hours and how to find you, every time.
Borrowing numbers. A fellow stallholder's customer list, or the phone numbers on your wholesale invoices, are not people who joined your club.
What to do this week
- Count how many market days an ordinary regular can make in a season, and set your target from that.
- Print the QR at least 10 centimetres wide, laminate it, and mount it at chest height.
- Test the signal at your pitch at the busiest hour, and print take-away join cards if it is slow.
- Pack a notepad for days the signal drops.
- Decide whether telling the club where you will be is worth a paid plan, and draft your first message.