A market stall has no window to put a sign in, no counter to leave cards on, and no room for anything that takes up space. What it does have is a customer standing right in front of you for about ninety seconds.
A laminated QR code the size of a postcard does a surprising amount of what a shop website would, for the price of one print.
The high-value ones
Payment. If you accept PromptPay or a bank transfer, a printed code beats reading out an account number over market noise, and it removes the transcription errors that cost you the sale. Generate this from your banking app rather than here — payment codes have to come from the bank.
Your line or social account. The single most useful code for a stall. Somebody who buys once and can reach you again is worth several times somebody who cannot. A website code pointing at your LINE, Facebook page or Instagram profile turns a one-off market sale into a customer.
Where you will be next. Markets rotate. A code pointing at a page listing your upcoming dates is the closest thing a stall has to a shop front — and it works even when you are not there, because the customer keeps the bag.
The rest, by stall type
| Stall | Useful code | Points at |
|---|---|---|
| Food | Ingredients and allergens | A simple page or note |
| Food | Reheating or storage instructions | Especially for anything frozen or fresh |
| Handmade goods | How it was made, who made it | A page with photos |
| Clothing | Size chart, care instructions | A page, not a PDF |
| Plants | Care instructions per plant | One page per common plant |
| Any | Wholesale or custom order enquiries | A form or LINE |
| Any | Product catalogue | For things you did not bring today |
That last one matters more than people expect. You can only carry so much stock to a market. A catalogue code lets a customer see the thirty designs that stayed at home.
Physical practicalities
A market stall is outdoors, in the sun, in the rain, and packed into a box every night. Plan for it:
- Laminate everything. A paper code lasts one wet morning.
- Matte, not glossy. Direct sun on a glossy card makes it unscannable — the most common cause of a code failing at an outdoor market.
- Bigger than you think. Across a table with produce on it, you are scanning from a metre away. That means 10 cm, not 4. See the print size guide.
- Print two. One on the front of the stall, one small on the table. They cost almost nothing and one will always end up in the wrong place.
- Put it on the bag. A sticker or stamp on the packaging is the code that goes home with them, which is where the repeat purchase happens.
Say what it does
Scan me gets nothing. Scan for next month's market dates gets scanned. So does Care instructions for this plant and See our other 30 designs.
Write the line above the code, in letters big enough to read from where the customer stands, and keep it to four or five words.
Do not make it the only route
Print the LINE ID or phone number as text next to the code as well. A share of your customers will have older phones, hands full of shopping, or no data — and a stall is not the place to make someone struggle. The text costs one line and catches everyone the code misses.
Test it under the actual sun
This is the one that catches people out. Test the printed code outdoors, in direct sunlight, at the distance a customer will stand — not on your kitchen table the night before.
Glare on a laminated card in full sun is a genuinely different problem to anything you can reproduce indoors, and it is why matte laminate is worth asking for specifically. Full routine in the pre-print checklist.
Make your stall code — free, no account, and it never expires.