What vendors see when they apply
A walk through the vendor side of a Trestle application, from the public link to the approval email, with no accounts and no passwords anywhere.
Placeholder post. This is draft copy written to demonstrate the blog layout. Replace it before launch.
Most application software asks a vendor to create an account before it asks them anything useful. That is a strange thing to require of someone who may apply to your market once a year, and it is the first place organizers lose good applicants.
Trestle does not ask for one. A vendor opens your public application link, fills in the form, and submits. That is the whole flow.
No accounts, no passwords
Every vendor in Trestle is a record identified by their email address, not a login. When they need to come back to something, they get a magic link. The link is long-lived so it keeps working across a season, and you can revoke it at any time if an address changes hands.
For the vendor, that means one less password. For you, it means no support thread that begins with “I can’t get in.”
Applying is always free
A vendor is never asked for money to apply. The only payment in the system is the booth fee, and it only appears after you approve them. Keeping the two separated matters more than it sounds like it does: it removes the awkward conversation about refunding an application fee to someone you turned down.
What happens after submit
- The application lands in your queue with every answer and file attached.
- You jury it alongside the others, side by side, rather than in a spreadsheet.
- On approval, the vendor gets their onboarding checklist: documents, waivers, and the booth fee.
- Until every item on that checklist is done, the vendor shows as incomplete, so nothing quietly slips.
Why this shape
The pattern underneath all of it is that the vendor should only ever have one next thing to do, and it should always be reachable from a link in their inbox. Organizers already carry enough of the season. The application flow should not add to it.