💡 Vendor Market Application Pipeline & Capacity Visibility

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Summary

Give vendors visibility into which markets have open vendor slots, application deadlines, waitlist positions, and required documentation — turning the opaque, market-by-market application process into a transparent discovery experience. Help managers see application volume and vendor-mix gaps to make better roster decisions.

Market Signal

In 2026, major farmers markets (Boise, Athens, Mass Farmers Markets) are closing applications early due to capacity — leaving qualified vendors unable to find markets with openings. The Chesapeake Ag Innovation Center published guidance on "how to get accepted" that reveals the pain: vendors apply blindly to multiple markets hoping one accepts. Seen Markets and Marketspread offer application management for individual markets but not cross-market discovery for vendors seeking openings. No existing platform solves the vendor-side market discovery problem at scale.

User Signal

Discussion #480 (Manager Vendor Recruitment & Outreach Pipeline) addresses the manager side of this problem — managers wanting to attract good vendors. This proposal addresses the complementary vendor side: Brad (vendor persona) needs to find markets where he can sell, not just manage the ones he's already in. The PRD's FR13 (vendor requests to join markets) and FR10a (manager invites vendors) establish the join-request workflow but don't address the upstream discovery problem of how vendors find markets with capacity and compatible product needs.

Technical Opportunity

The architecture already includes market profiles (FR8), vendor rosters (FR10), and join-request workflows (FR13). Adding capacity and accepting_applications fields to market profiles and surfacing them in vendor-side search (FR13a: "Vendor can browse and search available markets") extends existing data models without new infrastructure. Category-specific openings ("seeking: baked goods, prepared foods") leverage the existing product category taxonomy. The vendor Markets tab in the existing tab structure is the natural home for this discovery experience.

Assessment

Dimension	Score	Rationale
Feasibility	high	Extends existing market profile schema and vendor search; no new infrastructure
Impact	med	Solves a real pain point for multi-market vendors and growing markets; strengthens supply-side network effects
Urgency	med	Most relevant during application season (winter/spring) but useful year-round for rolling-admission markets

Adversarial Review

Strongest objection: Managers may not want to publicly advertise open slots — it could attract low-quality applicants or undermine their curated vendor-mix strategy. Showing waitlist positions could discourage vendors from applying.

Rebuttal: Make capacity visibility opt-in per manager. Managers who are actively recruiting (a common pain point per Discussion #480) can toggle "accepting applications" with optional category-specific openings. This pairs naturally with the recruitment pipeline. Waitlist position visibility is optional — managers control what applicants see. The default experience is still the current apply-and-wait model; this adds an optional transparency layer that benefits both sides of the marketplace.

Suggested Next Step

Extend the market profile schema with capacity, accepting_applications, and category_openings fields. Design the vendor-facing "Find Markets" discovery screen with filters for application status, product category needs, and distance.