Somebody drives eleven minutes on her lunch break to a car park where the van is every Wednesday. It is not there. There is no post about it, the website has a schedule from the spring, and she eats a sandwich from a garage.
She will not check again for a month, and she was one of the best customers the trader had.
The checklist
Publish these and the regulars keep coming.
1. A current schedule in one place
On your own site, this week and next, with dates rather than days. Social media scrolls away and listings go stale, and regulars need somewhere authoritative.
2. The exact location
Not a town. The car park, the street, the estate, with something that works in a mapping app. Traders publish a place name and customers drive to the wrong end of it.
3. The trading hours per pitch
Because they differ by site, and somebody arriving at two to find you packed up at one thirty does not come back.
4. The weekly rotation
If you keep one, published as a pattern. A regular who knows it is Wednesday at the business park stops checking and starts planning.
5. Changes announced early
The moment you know, in every place the schedule appears. A cancelled pitch announced at eleven saves a dozen wasted journeys.
6. What happens in bad weather
Whether you trade, whether the site changes and how people will be told. Customers assume you will be there and set off.
7. The private booking days
When you are unavailable for public trading, so regulars are not disappointed and so the days look busy rather than empty.
8. The seasonal pattern
Which sites run in summer, which stop, and when the pattern changes. Regulars lose you at the seasonal changeover and never find you again.
9. A way to be told
A message list, so people hear where you are without checking. It is the single most valuable asset a mobile trader can build.
10. Preorder or collection
Where offered, because a customer with twenty minutes will preorder and a queue loses them entirely.
11. What is on the menu that day
Because specials and sell outs change, and somebody driving over for one thing should know it is available.
12. The contact route
Somewhere a customer can ask, at any hour, and get an answer rather than waiting for somebody to check a message between orders.
13. Keep the site details straight
Because the pitch requirements and the customer information are different things, and both matter, as in power, pitch and site requirement questions.
13b. Say what happens when you sell out
A trader who finishes at one o'clock on a good day leaves an afternoon of arrivals disappointed. Posting the moment you sell out, in the same place the schedule lives, saves journeys and frequently reads as success rather than failure to the people who see it.
14. Answer where are you at any hour
It is the question, it is constant, and answering it automatically from a published schedule is exactly the volume described in where is the truck today and other questions traders answer, the same location precision as breakdown location questions that slow a response and the cost thinking in hidden costs of AI chatbot pricing.
Getting started
Publish a current dated schedule with exact locations and hours, announce changes immediately and answer location questions at any hour. SpideyChat for food businesses answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about answers on the features page.