Vendor Markets

This guide walks through using TinyLVT to allocate booths for a market, fair, or similar vendor event. It layers auctions on top of familiar posted-price booth sales, so each vendor engages with as much or as little of the mechanism as they like.

Overview

The starting point looks like any vendor event: the organizer offers booths of a few types (standard, electric, double, food stall) at posted prices, and vendors buy guaranteed access. TinyLVT adds two auctions on top:

A booth auction allocates whatever booths remain after posted-price sales. When the event is oversubscribed, demand sets the price of the remaining booths rather than a waitlist or a first-come scramble.
A placement auction decides which vendor gets which specific location. Every vendor holds a claim to some number of booths of each type — bought at the posted price, won in the booth auction, or both — and bids for the locations they prefer, limited to what they hold.

Both auctions are optional from a vendor’s perspective. A vendor who buys a booth at the posted price and never touches an auction still has their booth; the organizer assigns them a location from whatever the placement auction leaves unclaimed. Vendors who want another booth, or who care where they end up, take part in whichever auction serves them — and pay only what competition actually requires.

All locations are placed in one simultaneous auction so vendors can react to prices and to where competitors are landing across booth types — for example, giving up a contested corner for a cheaper mid-row spot.

For Organizers

Creating the Community

Go to tinylvt.com and create an account
Create a community with the Backed Credits currency mode in your currency, and connect Stripe so vendors can bid backed by card holds — see Card Payments

Categories and Sites

Define one category per booth type (e.g., “Standard booth”, “Electric booth”) from any site’s Spaces page — categories are shared across the community
Create the placement site: the floor plan. Add one space per location, named by its number on the map (e.g., “Space 12”), each assigned its booth type’s category
Create the booth site: one space per booth still unsold when posted-price sales close, named with letters to avoid confusion with locations (e.g., “Standard booth A”), all in the booth type’s category. Add a description noting that the specific location is decided in the placement auction

Leave all spaces at 1 eligibility point: each booth or location then counts as one item.

The Two Auctions

Create both auctions early, named after the event (e.g., “October Fair — Booths” and “October Fair — Placement”), so vendors have time to enter values and enable proxy bidding. Create the placement auction as capped, and schedule it after the booth auction concludes.

Caps are each vendor’s booth claims, and you build them in two steps:

Record posted-price sales by hand. On the placement auction’s page, set each vendor’s cap for a booth type to the number they bought. Do this as sales happen; a vendor with no cap cannot bid for locations.
Carry over the booth auction’s results. After the booth auction concludes, apply its results to the placement auction’s caps in one step. Carry-over is additive: a vendor who bought one booth and won a second ends up with a cap of 2.

After the Placement Auction

Locations that received no bids stay unallocated. Assign them to the vendors who sat out the placement auction, and the floor plan is complete.

For Vendors

Guaranteed Access

Buy a booth from the organizer at the posted price, as at any event. The organizer records your claim in TinyLVT. If you do nothing else, you’ll be assigned a location after the placement auction — no bidding required.

Bidding for Additional Booths

If you want a booth beyond what’s available at the posted price, join the booth auction:

Booths of a type are identical, so set one value for the whole category — the most you’d pay for one booth of that type
Enable proxy bidding with max items set to the number of booths you’d take in total
The proxy bids on the cheapest booth of the type for you, switching as prices rise

Prices start at zero and rise only as far as competition from other late-deciding vendors pushes them. The remaining booths can go for less than the posted price when late demand is thin, or for more when the posted-price slots sold out early and demand outstrips what’s left. Buying early locks in the posted price; deciding late means taking the market price, whichever way it lands.

Choosing Your Location

In the placement auction, your caps appear as bidding capacity per booth type: how many locations of each type you can pursue at once. Enter values for the locations you prefer — a corner spot near the entrance might be worth a premium over a mid-row one — and let the proxy chase the best deal, or bid by hand to react to where other vendors land.

If a location matters little to you, there’s no need to participate; you’ll be assigned one of the leftover locations for each booth you hold.

Example

A fair has 30 standard booths and 10 electric booths. Posted prices are $80 and $120; vendors buy 24 standard and 6 electric booths directly. The remaining 6 standard and 4 electric booths go to the booth auction, where thinner demand from late-deciding vendors takes standard booths to $65 — below the posted price, since bidding starts at zero and rises only as far as competition pushes it.

Every vendor’s claims become caps in the placement auction over all 40 locations. Half the vendors skip it entirely and are assigned leftover spots. The rest bid for the locations they care about: entrance-adjacent spots clear at $30-40 over their booth price, most others at $0.

The organizer never had to rank vendors, run a waitlist, or referee location requests — and vendors who wanted the simple posted-price experience got exactly that.

Learn more about Auctions and Card Payments.