Opening a season of market days for pitch bookings

Why generate the season instead of creating each market day?

A market is twenty-six Saturdays, not twenty-six unrelated decisions, and keying them one at a time is where the mistakes live: a date missed in August, a pitch count copied wrong in June. The console will generate a recurring series from a cadence — every Saturday between two dates — or a grid of slots across dates and times if your market runs a morning and an afternoon session. Either way the market days and their pitch pools are created in a single transaction, so you never end up with a date that exists but has nothing bookable in it.

Each generated market day then carries its own live availability. That matters more than it sounds: a wet Saturday that fills to a third has no effect on the next one, and a vendor looking at your page sees the true count for the date they are choosing rather than a season-wide impression.

The generator has a bound on how far ahead it will build, which is deliberate — it stops a typo in an end date creating years of empty market days. Generate the season you have actually agreed the site for, and generate the next one when you have it.

How should I structure pitch types so the counts hold?

The rule that saves the most trouble: anything that changes the price or the physical limit should be its own pitch type, not a question on the form. bindro counts pitch types, and a count it holds cannot be oversold — inventory moves under a row lock inside the payment transaction, so two traders clicking at the same moment cannot both take the last one.

Power is the case where this bites. The form has a "power required" box, and it charges nothing on its own: it is a question that tells you what a trader needs. Selling power as a paid add-on is possible and is the right shape for a table or a gazebo, but it prices the extra without limiting it unless you give the add-on its own capacity. If you have six powered pitches and they cost more, publish "3m pitch" and "3m pitch with power" as two types at two prices with capacities of, say, fourteen and six. You get the right price and, more importantly, you cannot accidentally sell a seventh trader something you cannot plug in.

Pitch size works the same way, and there is a reporting dividend: pitch size and product category are both questions with no sensitivity attached, which means they are the axes the board report breaks your season down by. A tidy set of pitch types in April is a trader-mix table in October.

• One pitch type per price point and per physical constraint — size, power, vehicle.
• Set each type’s capacity to the number you can actually site, not the total.
• Keep the question list short: business name, category, size, power, insurance.
• Free market days are allowed and cost nothing in fees — useful for a first season.

What can a vendor actually book in one go?

One market day. This vertical does not resolve the multi-date basket, the season pass or subscriptions, so a trader taking a pitch every Saturday until October goes through the booking form each Saturday, and no card is stored to be charged automatically later. Tell your regulars this up front — it is the single most common surprise for a returning trader, and it is much better heard from you in March than discovered in the form in April.

There are two workable answers. The first is simply to accept the repetition; the booking form is short and a regular trader gets through it in a minute. The second, for a committed trader who wants the whole run settled, is to invoice their business for a block of dates against a purchase order and record the bookings from the console, which keeps one payment against a run of market days.

What you cannot do is put someone on a standing order inside bindro. Recurring billing is not switched on for this vertical, and the reason is worth knowing: the payout engine settles per delivered market day, so money not attached to a date is money it could take and never release. A limit that protects the trader is a better limit than one that does not.

What should I do before the first date goes live?

Book a pitch on your own market day, from a phone, paying properly, and then refund it. It takes five minutes and it is the only way to see what your traders see: the questions in your own words, the upload step, the confirmation email and the refund link inside it. That refund link is worth looking at deliberately, because it works in full up to the moment the market day starts and there is no notice period you can set against it.

Then decide about application review before you publish, not after. Turning it on changes what a booking is — an application rather than a sale — and it is much cleaner to open a season that way than to change the deal halfway through it.