💡 Vendor Demand Signals & Growth Dashboard

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Summary

Give vendors a lightweight analytics dashboard showing anonymized demand signals: follower growth trends, profile views over time, and which of their products are most searched for by nearby customers. This closes the feedback loop that drives vendor engagement — vendors can see the app is working for them, which motivates continued check-ins and profile maintenance.

Market Signal

Marketspread offers basic vendor reports but not demand-side analytics. Seen Markets has no vendor analytics at all. Instagram and Etsy both show creators/sellers their audience analytics, and these have proven to be powerful retention drivers in two-sided marketplaces. The "creator economy" pattern of showing demand signals to suppliers is well-established (Shopify, Etsy, YouTube Studio, Instagram Insights) but entirely absent from the farmers market space. Vendors currently operate in a data vacuum — they check in and hope customers come, with no visibility into whether the app is driving traffic their way.

User Signal

The PRD targets "10+ new followers per participating vendor" at 90 days and "Vendors post at least one same-day status update per market day" as a secondary success signal. Without visibility into these metrics, vendors have no way to know if the app is delivering value — and no motivation to continue investing time in check-ins and profile maintenance. Idea #389 (Manager Market Health Analytics) addresses the manager perspective on market-level trends; this addresses the vendor perspective on their individual demand — same need for data-driven feedback, different role and different data.

Technical Opportunity

The follow relationship data (FR25) already tracks followers per vendor. Profile view events can be captured via the existing audit subsystem (internal/audit/). Search query patterns can be aggregated from the GraphQL resolver layer without exposing individual customer data. The vendor profile screen (vendor Status tab) is the natural home for this data. Apollo Client's normalized cache makes it efficient to display trend data alongside existing vendor status. The Go backend's structured logging (slog) can feed into a lightweight analytics pipeline.

Assessment

Dimension	Score	Rationale
Feasibility	med	Core data (followers, check-ins) already exists. Profile view tracking and search aggregation need new instrumentation. A lightweight trends API is straightforward but needs careful privacy design.
Impact	high	Vendor retention is the critical supply-side constraint. Showing vendors that the app works for them is the single highest-leverage intervention for supply-side engagement. Without this feedback loop, vendor churn is invisible until it's too late.
Urgency	med	Most valuable once the platform has enough customer activity to generate meaningful signals. Design the data capture now; build the dashboard when vendor count reaches ~20+.

Adversarial Review

Strongest objection: At pilot scale (40 vendors, 250 customers), demand signals will be sparse and potentially demoralizing. Showing a vendor "3 people viewed your profile this week" doesn't motivate — it discourages.

Rebuttal: Show growth trends and positive framings rather than absolute numbers. "↑ 40% more profile views than last week" works at any scale. "You gained 2 new followers this week" is encouraging even when small. Shopify and Etsy pioneered this approach for small sellers — the key insight is that ANY positive trend motivates continued engagement. And the alternative (vendors seeing zero feedback from the app) is far more demoralizing than small-but-growing numbers.

Suggested Next Step

Define the minimum set of demand signals to surface (follower count + trend, profile views + trend, top-searched products). Create a wireframe for the vendor Status tab showing these metrics. Implement profile view event capture in the audit subsystem as a prerequisite data source.

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Generated by the weekly feature ideation workflow on 2026-08-07.