Pop-Ups, Trucks and Markets: Be Findable Where You Actually Are

Every listing system in hospitality assumes a front door. Food trucks, market stalls, residencies and pop-ups do not have one, and the usual workaround — listing the address of a lock-up in an industrial estate — is worse than useless, because it sends people to a place you have never served food.

Who it is for

Food trucks and vans. Market and farmers' market stalls. Pop-up residencies in other people's rooms. Coffee carts. Anybody whose answer to "where are you?" is a schedule rather than an address.

Appearances, not an address

You list where you will be and when — a market on Saturday morning, a festival next weekend, a monthly pitch outside a brewery.

Your map pin comes from those appearances. Somebody looking for lunch near them finds you while you are actually there, rather than at a unit you rent for storage. When the appearance ends, you stop appearing there, because you are not there.

Appearances also surface in the events feed, which is the other half of how people find this kind of trading: not "what is near me" but "what is on".

What stays when you move

The listing, the menu, the photographs and the ratings belong to the business rather than to a pitch.

That sounds obvious and it is the thing that usually breaks. A trader who builds up forty ratings at a market and then moves to a different one should not start from zero, and a customer who liked you in Cork should be able to find out that you are in Galway next weekend. The pitch changes; the business does not.

Taking money without a shop

Two things matter at a market, and both are about not having infrastructure.

Card payments through a phone. Mosey Pay takes an in-store card payment at 1.5% without a terminal. At a market that is not merely cheaper than a card machine — it is one fewer device to charge, one fewer thing to lose, and one fewer piece of hardware that fails when the signal is poor.

Order ahead, at 1.5%. For a festival or a busy market this is the one that changes your day. A queue has a maximum length beyond which people walk away; order-ahead serves the people who would have walked. You are no longer limited by how many people will stand in front of you at once.

Loyalty is worth more to a trader than to a restaurant

This is counter-intuitive and worth stating.

A neighbourhood restaurant's regulars live nearby, and a stamp card in a wallet works fine. A trader's regulars are scattered across pitches, markets and events — they are loyal to you, not to a location, and there is no door for them to walk past.

Something that follows the customer rather than the pitch is therefore doing more work. It is free on every tier, and a visit is recorded whenever somebody pays through Mosey, so there is nothing to stamp while you are trying to serve.

Changing the schedule

Markets get cancelled. Weather happens. A pitch falls through.

Change the appearance. This is the one piece of upkeep the format genuinely needs, because a listing that says you are somewhere you are not is worse than having no listing at all — it sends somebody to an empty pitch and they do not try again.

The reverse is the opportunity: an appearance added on a Thursday for a Saturday you have just picked up is visible to everybody nearby by the time it matters.

The listing is the part most traders skip

A food truck with no menu on its listing is the most common version of this, and it is the most expensive.

Somebody deciding where to get lunch at a market is standing between four stalls. What settles it is knowing what you sell and what it costs, and a listing that says "street food" answers neither. Photograph the board once and the scan will read it, prices included.

The other one worth doing is photographs of the food rather than of the van. The van is what they will see when they arrive; the food is what makes them walk over.

What it costs

• Listing, menu, photographs, ratings — free
• Loyalty — free on every tier
• Mosey Pay — 1.5% on an in-store card payment
• Order ahead — 1.5%
• Tips — 0%, paid to you in full

No monthly fee, no charge for being listed, nothing if you do not trade.

A worked example

A coffee van doing three markets a week and the odd festival.

Being listed costs nothing and puts it on the map at each market for the hours it is there. Card payments through a phone at 1.5% replace a terminal rental. On a busy Saturday, order-ahead at 1.5% serves perhaps twenty people who would otherwise have looked at the queue and gone elsewhere — at €4 a coffee, that is €80 of trade that did not exist, for €1.20 of commission.

The loyalty programme costs nothing and is the only thing in the van that remembers a customer from one market to the next.

What it connects to

• Claim your place on Mosey — the first step, free
• Take payments in store with Mosey Pay — 1.5%, no terminal
• Order ahead — serving past the length of the queue
• Run a loyalty programme — the customer who follows you
• What Mosey costs — every rate on one page