How it works, in detail

You send us the market and we build it. There is no organiser account to create and no settings screen to fill in — that is a deliberate choice while the marketplace is small, because a market that is set up wrong is worse for you than one that takes a day longer.

What we need: the market's name, its address, whether it runs on a repeating schedule, on specific event dates or permanently, how many stalls you have, what you charge for one, and whether entry is free or ticketed. You see the listing before it goes live.

A vendor applies from inside the app. They send a stall name, a description of what they will be selling and the product categories they trade in, and they can add the dates they would prefer and the stall size they want.

You see all of it alongside their existing storefront, so you are not judging a trader on a sentence — you can look at what they actually sell, at what prices. You accept or decline, and a decline can carry a note explaining why.

Two things are refused before they reach you. A vendor who already has a live application to your market cannot send a second one, and once your stall count is full the market stops accepting applications instead of collecting money for a space that does not exist.

You set the stall fee, per market. A vendor sees it before they apply, so nobody applies without knowing what they are paying.

The fee is charged by card when they apply, not on the day. The amount charged is always read from your market's current fee, and the payment is checked against that figure when it settles — a payment that does not match is held and flagged rather than quietly accepted.

Paying does not approve the application. A paid application still arrives for you to accept or decline, and a payment that fails marks the application as such.

The fee is yours. Noques takes 10% of it for running the listing, the application queue and the gate. That share is settled by hand at the moment — nothing in the system splits it automatically, so it is reconciled with you rather than deducted at the moment of payment.

You can charge for entry or leave it free. Either way a visitor gets a ticket with a QR code that lives on their phone.

How long a ticket is valid for is worked out from your schedule rather than typed in. A market with event dates issues a ticket for the current or next event window; a recurring or permanent market issues a day pass for the day it was taken. If an event market has no upcoming dates, it will not sell a ticket at all rather than sell one for nothing.

A paid ticket only becomes valid once the payment has actually settled, and the amount is checked. One ticket per person per market.

What does not exist yet: ticket tiers, early-bird pricing, season passes, paying at the gate, and customer-facing ticket refunds. If your market needs any of those, say so when you enquire — it is better to know now than to plan around something that is not there.

Somebody applies through the app to work your gate, and Noques approves them. Once approved they can scan tickets on their own phone — with the camera, or by typing a code in when a screen is too cracked or too bright to scan.

The gate is strict on purpose. A ticket that has already been scanned is refused, a ticket scanned outside its validity window is refused, and two scans of the same ticket at the same moment cannot both succeed. A ticket whose payment never settled will not scan.

What you pay a gatekeeper is between you and them. A compensation arrangement can be recorded against the market and shown, but Noques does not pay it and does not take a cut of it.

The name, the description, the stall fee and whether the market is open for applications can be changed quickly — send it to us and it is usually same-day. The schedule, the location, the entry fee and the gate settings need an admin, so allow a working day.

On reporting, the honest answer is that there is not much yet. Every ticket, every scan and every stall fee is recorded, but there is no screen that shows you your own market's numbers, no attendance count and no revenue report. We send you what you need by arrangement. It is the next thing being built for organisers, and until it exists you should not plan on self-serve reporting.