How to start a market in South Africa

Starting a market is three problems in a trench coat: a site you are allowed to use, traders willing to pay for a spot on it, and enough people walking through to make those traders come back. Solve them in that order, because each one is the evidence you need for the next.

The permission part is the one that catches people, and it is genuinely local — South Africa has no single national answer, by design.

Two separate things, from two separate people, and you need both.

Permission to use the site comes from whoever owns or controls it — a school, a church, a business park, a landlord. Get it in writing, with the dates and the hours, before you take a cent from a trader.

Permission for trading to happen there comes from the municipality. Informal trading is governed by the Business Act 71 of 1991, which empowers each municipality to regulate trading in its own area through its own by-laws. Those by-laws set where trading may happen, what permits are needed and what they cost, and they differ town to town — which is why no guide, including this one, can tell you the answer for your street.

Go to your municipality's informal trading or business licensing office and describe exactly what you are planning. Cape Town's process is documented here and issues permits for up to three years, with fees adjusted each July; yours will have its own equivalent. Ask specifically whether the market holds one permission covering the site or whether each trader needs their own, because both models exist.

Food is what turns a market into a morning out, so most organisers want it. It also brings the one hard regulatory requirement in this whole guide.

Regulation R638 of 2018, under the Foodstuffs, Cosmetics and Disinfectants Act, requires a Certificate of Acceptability for premises where food is handled for sale. It is issued by the municipality's Environmental Health department after an inspection, must be displayed, and is not transferable between people or premises.

What that means for you as an organiser: ask your Environmental Health office how it applies to temporary stalls at your site, and make the answer part of what you tell traders when they apply. Do not leave each trader to guess — an inspector arriving at your market to find nobody compliant is your problem as much as theirs.

Background on R638: SME South Africa.

1. 1

   Decide what the market is for

   A craft market, a food night market and a farmers' market draw different traders and different crowds, and they want different sites and different days. Most markets that fail were never any one of these — they were a general market, which is nobody's specific plan for a Saturday.

2. 2

   Find the site before you find the traders

   Traders will ask where and when before they ask anything else, and you cannot recruit against a maybe. Look for parking, shade, somewhere for a queue to stand, power if you want hot food, and a landlord who will put the arrangement in writing.

3. 3

   Get permission — both kinds

   Permission from whoever owns the site, and permission from the municipality for trading to happen on it. These are separate, and the second one is the one people forget until a week before.

4. 4

   Set the stall fee

   High enough that traders take the commitment seriously and you cover the site, low enough that a first-time trader will risk it. Ask organisers of nearby markets what they charge; most will tell you.

5. 5

   Recruit traders, in person

   The first ten are the hard ones and they come from markets you already visit. Go, buy something, ask who runs it, and ask the trader what would make them try a new market. The answer is almost always 'foot traffic and a fair fee'.

6. 6

   Give people a reason to come

   A market with twelve stalls and nothing else is a slow morning. Coffee, somewhere to sit, and one thing people cannot get elsewhere is the difference between a crowd and a trickle.

7. 7

   Run the first one small

   A dozen traders you can actually look after beats forty you cannot. The traders who have a good first market tell the others, and that is the entire recruitment strategy for market number two.

Having read a good deal of what traders say about markets, the complaints are remarkably consistent and none of them is about the stall fee.

• Know before Thursday. Being told on the Friday night whether you have a space is the single most common grievance. Accept or decline promptly, even when the answer is no.
• Do not put two of us side by side. Three candle stalls at a twenty-stall market means three unhappy traders and no more candle sales.
• Tell us what to expect. Rough footfall, what sold well last time, whether there is power. Traders plan stock against this and resent guessing.
• Market the market. Traders bring their own followers, but they are paying you for the people they could not have brought themselves.

The market itself is the fun part. What wears organisers down is everything around it: a WhatsApp group of ninety people, applications in four different formats, chasing EFT proofs the night before, and no reliable count of who is actually coming.

Whatever you use to handle it — a spreadsheet, a form, a platform — decide it before market number one rather than after market number three, because the habits you start with are the ones you keep.

This is the part Noques was built for: listing a market gives you applications from traders who already have a storefront, the stall fee paid by card when they apply, and entry tickets that scan at the gate. We set it up for you, and the detail page is honest about what it does not do yet.