💡 Reserve-at-Market Intent Signaling

[github-actions[bot]]

Summary

Customers can tap "Reserve" on a vendor's product before market day, signaling purchase intent without payment. Vendors see reservation counts ("5 people reserved your eggs") as demand signals before they load their truck. This is coordination, not commerce — it bridges the gap between "I plan to go" and "I plan to buy" without crossing into the explicitly deferred e-commerce checkout.

Market Signal

Pre-ordering/reserve is the #1 emerging vendor tool trend for 2026: Homegrown, Local Market Pickup, and Soko all offer pre-ordering with payment. But these are commerce tools. The 2026 food ecosystem analysis shows "order-ahead behavior" as a dominant consumer trend, with customers increasingly wanting to browse and commit from their phones before visiting. Markets' reserve-without-payment model is unique — it captures intent without the friction and liability of payment processing.

User Signal

The PRD's customer persona Rachel plans her Saturday morning around app confirmations. Currently she can confirm vendor presence (FR14) but not product availability for a specific visit. The vendor persona Brad wants "measurable new followers and inbound customer visibility" — reservation counts are a direct, actionable signal of demand. No existing ideas cover purchase-intent signaling.

Technical Opportunity

The vendor product catalog (FR12) and customer follow relationships (FR25-26) provide the data model foundation. Reservations are a simple join table (customer_id, vendor_product_id, market_day_id, created_at). The domain event bus can notify vendors of new reservations via the existing FCM path (internal/notify/). The reservation expires automatically after market day (aligned with auto-checkout, FR20c). No payment infrastructure needed.

Assessment

Dimension	Score	Rationale
Feasibility	med	New data model (reservations table) and UX surfaces, but no payment complexity
Impact	high	Directly drives vendor demand visibility and customer commitment; unique in the market
Urgency	med	Pre-ordering is trending but Markets should establish core coordination first

Adversarial Review

Strongest objection: Reservation no-shows could erode vendor trust. If 10 people reserve eggs but only 3 show up, vendors stop paying attention to reservations.

Rebuttal: Without payment, the reservation is a soft signal — vendors should not set aside physical inventory for it. Frame it as "interest signal" not "guaranteed sale." Over time, show vendors their reservation-to-purchase conversion rate so they can calibrate. Even a 30% conversion on reservations gives vendors more demand visibility than they have today (zero). The no-payment design means the failure mode is "less useful than hoped," not "actively harmful."

Suggested Next Step

Define a "Reserve Intent" story in Epic 6 (Customer Discovery) that adds a reserve button to vendor product views. Design the vendor-side reservation summary as a companion story in Epic 4. Validate with vendor interviews whether demand signaling is valued.