Platform Administration

This page is for VendorStreet platform administrators — the people who operate the platform itself and support the organizations running on it. If you’re an operator running your own markets, venues, or experiences, you want Getting Started instead; nothing here applies to your account.

Platform admin tools sit under /admin and are visible only to users with platform administrator rights.

What can a platform administrator see?

The admin area gives a cross-organization view that ordinary accounts never get:

Area	What it covers
Overview (/admin)	Platform-wide dashboard, including a Needs attention panel
Markets (/admin/markets)	Every market across every organization
Market detail (/admin/markets/:id)	One market’s info, system status, platform pricing, audit trail, and admin controls
Organizations (/admin/organizations)	Every organization on the platform
Organization detail (/admin/organizations/:id)	One organization’s membership, platform pricing, owners, and admin actions
Vendors (/admin/vendors)	Vendors across organizations
Bookings (/admin/bookings)	Bookings across organizations
Invoices (/admin/invoices)	Invoices across organizations
Payments (/admin/payments)	Payment records and the platform ledger
Notifications (/admin/notifications)	Outbound notification activity
System (/admin/system)	Unverified accounts, the text-message (SMS) switch, platform settings, configuration keys, Stripe fee configuration

What controls are available on a market?

Opening a market in the admin area gives you several panels:

• Market info — the operator’s configuration, viewable without switching accounts.
• System status — the market’s operational and billing state.
• Platform pricing — the per-booking fee for this specific market, overriding the platform default. On a venue’s seat sales the amount is charged per ticket, and it applies only while the organization has no Platform pricing of its own (below), which takes precedence. This is how a negotiated rate is applied. See Payments & Payouts.
• Read-only view — inspect without risk of changing anything.
• Admin controls — status override (which also decides public listing), billing and onboarding overrides.
• Audit & activity — the change log for the market.

Overrides exist for support and launch assistance: unblocking an operator stuck behind an onboarding step, activating a market for a customer whose payment is being handled outside the normal flow, correcting a status set by mistake.

There is no public-visibility switch. A market’s public page lists its dates, vendors and stall map while it is Live, its organization is active and its membership is in good standing — the same state the operator controls. A venue sells seats while it is Live, its organization is active, its membership is active and its payouts can take a charge — the operator reaches all of that on their own, and no admin switch is needed or consulted. Overriding a status to Live does not get round a lapsed membership or missing payouts; to comp a membership, use the organization’s membership waiver.

Stopping a venue selling. Two ways, and they are not the same:

• Override the venue’s status to Paused. Every public seat path refuses it at once, including carts already holding seats — but it is not sticky: the operator can set the venue Live again themselves.
• Lock the organization (on the organization’s page). Every venue in it stops selling and its public seat pages answer as if they did not exist, and its experiences stop taking bookings. Only a platform administrator can unlock it, so this is the stop to use when the operator must not be able to undo it.

Neither cancels anything already sold. A buyer who reached Stripe’s payment page before the stop can still finish paying.

What controls are available on an organization?

Opening an organization shows its membership, owners and admin actions, plus a Platform pricing card. That card is what VendorStreet charges the organization for appointments, experiences and venue seats; on a venue’s seat sales it takes precedence over the market’s own Platform pricing.

• Plan — per booking, flat subscription, or free. Free can only be chosen for an organization that arrived through a plugin (the option is disabled otherwise).
• Per-booking fee, paid by the operator — blank follows the platform default, which is shown beside it. 0 means the operator pays nothing per booking.
• Booking fee, paid by the customer — blank means no customer fee. Capped at $25.00, because a member of the public pays it.
• Both fees are charged per ticket on the organization’s venue seat sales (a free $0 ticket carries none; a box sold as one is one ticket), and per booking everywhere else.
• Flat fee and interval — shown for a flat plan. Once saved, Create Stripe price makes the recurring Stripe price the operator subscribes to.
• Free bookings per month — shown for the free plan; blank follows the platform default.

The card also shows what the operator sees on their own Booking fee switch. Operators can choose only between two shapes: they absorb the platform fee (both fee fields blank), or their customers pay it (operator fee 0, customer fee equal to the platform default). Save anything else here and that is a negotiated rate: the operator’s switch turns read-only and tells them to contact support. That’s how a special deal survives an operator clicking the switch. To hand the choice back, return the fields to one of the two shapes.

Market booth bookings are priced per market, on the market’s own Platform pricing panel. There, vendor bears the fee = “customer pays”, market = “operator absorbs”, and a split or a non-default fee is negotiated.

What’s in System settings?

• Unverified user accounts — accounts that never completed email verification, the usual explanation for “I registered but can’t get in.”
• Text messages (SMS) — one On / Off switch for every text the platform sends: appointment and experience reminders, and the text opt-in on booking forms. It is off until someone turns it on, and should stay off until the Twilio texting campaign (A2P 10DLC) is approved — without one, carriers drop every text after Twilio has accepted it, so nothing arrives and nothing says so. While it is off, each text is recorded as skipped (sms_disabled_platform), booking forms don’t offer text reminders, operators can’t add new text messages, and email is unaffected. Turning it on sends no backlog, and texts go only to clients who agreed to them: bookings taken while it was off weren’t offered the choice and stay email-only. A change applies everywhere within 30 seconds and is recorded in the audit log.
• Platform settings and Configuration keys — platform-wide configuration.
• Stripe annual market fee and Create annual price — the pricing objects behind market activation and subscriptions. See Billing.

Guardrails

Every override is audited. Use them for support and launch assistance, not as a routine way of working.

A few principles worth holding to:

• Prefer the read-only view when you’re only diagnosing. Most support questions are answered by looking.
• Overrides bypass the checks that exist for a reason. A billing override means a market is running without having paid; an onboarding override means a step was skipped. Both are correct occasionally and corrosive as habits.
• Leave a trail. The audit log records what changed, but not why. Note the reason wherever your team tracks support work.
• Platform pricing changes affect real invoices. Confirm the arrangement before applying a per-market fee override.

Next steps

• Payments & Payouts — fee structure and Stripe Connect
• Billing — activation and subscriptions from the operator’s side
• Troubleshooting — common issues to check before overriding anything