Run festival vendors from application to paid booth

Food, art and craft vendors are a large part of what people remember about a festival, and a large part of what the festival office spends its spring on. Every vendor is a small business with its own questions: How big is the booth? Is there power? When can I load in? Did you get my payment?

This guide covers a vendor process that scales from a dozen tents to a full vendor village, and how FestivalSpark handles each step. In FestivalSpark, vendors are exhibitors on the festival's event.

Decide what you're selling before you open applications

Write your booth packages first. A package is a product: a 10×10 craft booth, a 10×20 food booth, a food truck pitch. Give each one a price, a plain description of what's included and, where space is finite, a limit on how many can be sold. Remember that the limit counts booths, not people: if you have room for eight food trucks, the truck pitch has a limit of eight.

Then list the extras vendors can add to a booth, such as electricity, an extra table or a second parking pass. Selling power as a separate add-on is fairer than folding it into every booth price, because a jeweler and a wood-fired pizza oven don't draw the same load.

Some questions to settle before you publish, because vendors will ask them:

• What does the booth include? Ground space only, or a tent, table and chairs?
• What power is available, and what does each circuit support? Food vendors need specifics.
• Load-in and load-out times, and where vendor vehicles go after unloading.
• What you won't allow. Many festivals limit how many vendors sell the same thing, so the craft row doesn't become six candle stalls.

Take applications from the festival's page

When the festival takes vendor applications, its event page on your website shows a link to apply. The application asks for the vendor's business name and description, a contact name, email and phone, the booth package they want, any add-ons, and a note for your team. Nobody has to create an account to apply.

A pending application holds its booth from the moment it's submitted, and declining it releases the booth again. If a package is already full, a new application for it is turned away rather than quietly oversold, so the eighth food truck doesn't become a ninth by accident. Review promptly: a pile of undecided applications can make a package look full when it isn't.

Review with the whole row in mind

Applications arrive as pending in the event's exhibitor list. Review them against the festival you're building, not one at a time in isolation:

• Balance the food row. Three taco trucks and no vegetarian option is a planning problem you can see in the list before it's a complaint on social media.
• Curate the craft row. A juried feel usually comes from saying no to near-duplicates, not from saying yes to everyone who applied first.
• Check the practical fit. A vendor who needs a 50-amp circuit can only go where that circuit is.

Approve or decline each application. When you approve one, record where the booth goes: "Food Row B, pitch 4" or "Craft Tent, table 12" is far more useful on the morning of load-in than "somewhere near the second stage". Place vendors against the event's map, so food lands near seating and water, craft sits where people linger, and nothing blocks an emergency lane. The site map guide covers laying out the grounds.

Invoice and get paid

Each approved vendor is invoiced for their booth and add-ons. Vendors can pay online by card, and the money settles directly into your organization's own Stripe account, with no platform markup from FestivalSpark. Plenty of long-time vendors still pay by check; record those payments against the same invoice so the balance is right either way.

Set a payment deadline and hold to it. A booth that isn't paid by the deadline is a booth you may need to offer to the waitlist, and saying that up front makes the conversation easier later.

Give vendors a portal

Approved vendors get a portal where they can keep their profile current, see the festivals they're exhibiting at, and pay their invoices. That moves routine updates like "our new truck has a different name" out of your inbox and into the vendor's hands, and it gives them one place to check what they still owe.

Keep them coming back

Each vendor's business record, with its contacts, stays in your workspace after the festival. When you open applications next year, you already know who sold out by Saturday afternoon and whose power draw tripped the breaker. Your returning vendors are the easiest applications you'll review.

A short thank-you after the festival helps too. Send it through an email campaign to your vendor contacts with the dates for next year, and prepare it with the FestivalSpark Assistant if you like; your team reviews every draft before it goes out.

The week before gates open

Walk the list once more:

1. Every approved vendor has a booth location.
2. Every booth invoice is paid, or you know why it isn't.
3. Every vendor who needs power is on a pitch that has it.
4. Load-in times have gone out to everyone.

If all four are true, the vendor village is ready.

For how vendors fit into the rest of the festival plan, read how to plan a multi-stage festival.