We’re rolling out new trainings (with Vern!) — and we’ve moved them!
They’re now in your Documents tab — scroll down to learn about setting up a market, setting up accounting, and more. Every week we’re adding more!
New market setup, new accounting setup, new accounting features (to be discussed soon!) — managemymarket has a great bone structure, and we’re beefing up the muscles on the inside.
What would you like to see?
We thrive on customer feedback — and we want to make managemymarket work better for everyone.
Check managemymarket.com on Monday. Because after all, the inside does matter, but the outside counts too, and we worked with a fantastic designer who is part of a Portland design company called Finn Media. We are really excited about our face lift, so come back and see it!
There are a few things different about market set up this time around. If you’ve already set up your market for this year, we made the changes for you. Go in and check them out!
On the other hand, if you’re waiting to set up your market, thank you for waiting, and now you can go in and get crazy. If you’d like us to copy over anything from last year, like your legal agreement, let us know. Otherwise, it’s probably better to start from scratch.
- We’ve eliminated the vendor type by stall size “fee grid” that was so confining for managers. Instead it’s very free form and much more applicable for markets that charge mostly by the season rather than mostly by the day. It’s called “payment options” rather than payment plans.
- We added a section at the end called “statements” for vendors to check off to make sure they have read. It’s a bit more straightforward than yes/no, if you just want to make your vendors pause and say, yes, I have read the “no plastic bag” policy or something.
- You can now edit font styles in your legal agreements and messages to vendors!
- You can also change the order of your list items — so if you want vendors to answer questions in a certain way, you can just drag the questions around. Same goes for payment options.
It’s a new year, so it’s time for a new look for managemymarket. That’s not all, though — look out for new features such as new market set up, enhanced accounting features, and more! Whether you’re a manager or a vendor, now’s a great time to visit managemymarket.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 58 trips to carry that many people.
Does your website have a link to your Complete Vendor List? You know, the one that lists your approved vendors in alphabetical order, and updates automatically with the information they provide to you?
You should talk to me if you don’t yet have one. They are great — and they will free up some of your maintenance hours on your website, since the alternative is a bit more archaic — you’d have to go in and manually update your vendors as you approve them, add their company description, and change the order every time you approve a vendor in the middle of the alphabet!
But what if your customers need to contact one of your vendors after your last market day? If it’s past your last market day, then your vendor list is blank. There are two ways to fix this. One is to add a day to each of your market — maybe the last day in January — in market set up. The other is to talk to me and get the code for the off-season. This will have to be updated next year, though, so keep that in mind!
Today, it’s November. Your regular season has ended. You might be organizing a holiday market, but for the most part, you’re done. You look around your office space — at home or at work — and you see all the paper. 2011 was a big year — look at all that documentation! Paper applications, licenses, and attendance rosters — 2011 could fill an entire file cabinet.
You’ve been hearing about managemymarket for a few years now. Some of the markets you admire use it. And now you have just a tiny bit of down time, before registration opens again for 2012. But you’re not ready to make a commitment. After all, your market just ended!
What you’d really like is to get in, and play with managemymarket – really see what’s behind the login.
Now you can! Since managemymarket charges for approved vendors only, and you’re not going to even contemplate approving vendors for at least a couple months, you’re in luck!
Sign up, and see what all the fuss is about. Signing up now will lock in 2011 prices ($13/approved vendor/market/year — going up to $15/approved vendor/market/year as of January 1, 2012) and there’s no obligation, so if you (or your board) decides against it, we’ll just take you out of the database. Plain and simple.
What are you waiting for?
Do you have an age limit for your market?
Here’s the story.
Do you link to your organization’s product search on your website?
Did you even know that was an option?
Now it’s easier for you to find. Go to your Organization tab, and scroll down. The last link on the bottom is the link to your product search page. You can put this on your website — and that’s fairly easy to do. It’s called “wrapping it in an iFrame” (see example below, although you’ll want to have your orgID, not mine).
But wait! There’s more! Search for something that any of your approved vendors (in any of your markets) sells, and you won’t just see their next market date, you’ll see all following market dates.
Like this:
This update is for the vendor’s side of things:
After a vendor creates a profile, they can then apply to markets in their area. Now, searching for markets is fast and easy! Due to a rather technical (aka nerdy) fix, vendors can search for markets 50, 100, 500 miles from them lickety split! And the system is much more forgiving with spaces or dashes — it even will search for markets near an intersection or a town!
See below:
Due to popular demand, managemymarket just got easier for vendors to use!
When a vendor applies to your market, they choose dates. This is the only time they are able to make updates, which can be problematic for some managers, since as a manager, you have to go into the vendor’s account and edit every date.
We found a way to streamline that process! See the screenshot below:
Now, from the same screen, you can edit the number of stalls they request, edit the dates they’ve been approved for, and make comments all without clicking the “edit” link!
Changing # of stalls requested from 0 to 1 automatically approves that stall, and changing it from a number to zero automatically disapproves that vendor’s date.
Now that the summer is winding down, market managers get to take a deep breath, relax, and regroup for next season.
Does this describe you? Or is it more like this:
-plan fundraiser
-work on a one-day festival
-get busy talking to your vendors about whether they’ll be back
-plan vendor potluck
You’re probably in the latter category, and won’t get to take a breath until about November.
But keep managemymarket in mind — we’re here to help you save time, money, and the environment!
When the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service was collecting data for the 2011 snapshot of farmers markets, they made themselves clear: their intent was to make the data open source. It’s only been a few months, and here’s what some people have been doing with this data.
We’ve heard from many of you that you’d like to add managemymarket to next year’s budget, and we’d like to offer a way to help.
managemymarket in 2012 is more robust than ever before (with many new features, and more to come!), and because of that, the price will increase to $15 per vendor, per market, per year.
But if you sign up now, you can lock in the 2011 rate ($13 per vendor, per market, per year) for the next two years.
And, if you’d like to save even more, we can offer a flat rate based on the number of vendors you anticipate — saving an additional 20% at least!
Reply to this email, call 503-878-8466, or fill out our contact form – we look forward to working with you!
An old funeral home in Kansas City has been turned into a farmers market. Read more here.
Are what make me happy to work with farmers markets!
Read the feel-good story here.
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A couple weeks ago, we sent out an email describing a bit about our web design. Since then, we’ve heard back from many of you — seems as though you might be interested in creating or updating your website! We can help. We’ll set up a website using a template for $349. Then, we’ll teach you how to update your website’s pages using the template so you’re not tied to us for maintenance. To see a real-life example, check out Woodland Park Farmers Market’s new site. You don’t have to be a customer of managemymarket to get a simple website, but if you are, there are some really cool add-ons for your site, such as the Interactive Market Map, a Complete Vendor List, and a type-ahead product search function that come with this design. |
First in a series. What do you think?
We realized that we have been adding a lot of tools for markets and their websites, and we thought that you might want to see how to incorporate everything into your website.
So, we created a sample market website. Check it out!
