How to start a market in Australia

Decide what your market is

Everything downstream — venue, insurance, which stallholders apply — follows from a one-sentence answer: what kind of market, how often, and for whom. A weekly farmers market lives or dies on produce growers within driving distance; a monthly makers market needs a catchment of hobbyist and small-business creatives; a night market is a food and entertainment event that happens to have stalls.

Frequency matters more than founders expect. Weekly builds a shopping habit but demands a stallholder pool deep enough that a wet week doesn't empty the site. Monthly is far easier to staff and promote, and is where most new markets should start.

Find a venue and get the approvals

Councils are the gatekeepers for most market sites in Australia — parks, car parks, school grounds and showgrounds all typically need a permit, a licence or a hire agreement, and requirements differ between councils, not just between states. Talk to your council's events or property team early: approval can take weeks to months, and they'll tell you exactly what they need to see.

• A site plan showing stall positions, vehicle access and emergency egress
• Your public liability insurance (councils commonly ask organisers for $10–20 million cover — confirm the figure with yours)
• How food stalls will be handled — councils register food businesses and will want to know who's selling food
• Toilets, waste, noise and parking arrangements

Private venues (church grounds, breweries, shopping centre car parks) can be faster to secure and often come with power, toilets and parking already solved — in exchange for rent or a revenue share.

Insurance, before anything is public

You need public liability insurance as the organiser before you announce a date — venues and councils will ask for the certificate of currency, not a promise. Most organisers also require each stallholder to carry their own public liability policy; our insurance guide covers how that's usually set up and what to actually check on a certificate.

Recruit your first stallholders

Your first twenty stallholders are recruited by hand — at other markets, through local maker and grower groups, and by asking every good stall you meet who else you should talk to. Nobody applies to a market with no stallholders, so founders typically soft-commit a core group before opening applications publicly.

Decide your stall pricing before those conversations: a simple flat price per stall type (say, a standard site, a food site, a powered site) is easier to sell and to administer than bespoke deals, and you can always negotiate for the anchor stalls you really want.

Set up the machinery

However you run it — spreadsheets or software — you'll need a way to take applications, collect insurance documents, approve stallholders, take stall payments and tell everyone where to set up. This is the part StallsApp exists for: your market gets a public page with its dates and an application form, approvals and payments happen in one place, and market-day changes reach every stallholder without a phone tree. Most organisers are set up in an afternoon.

Your first market day

Plan the first day for half the size you hope for: fewer, fuller stalls beat a sparse site. Confirm every stallholder in the final week, send site maps and bump-in times two days out, and put your own phone number on everything. The second market is easier — by then, the stallholders who had a good day are your recruiters.