Carvers Ridge and Market Down Davis are teaming up to bring you a new and exciting kind of market. As we wrap up summer and transition into fall and holiday shopping seasons, we know that these should be the best months of the year for small businesses.

The months of social distancing through 2020 have interrupted gatherings and markets across the country and things don’t appear to be opening up again any time soon. We’ve decided to take advantage of technology and our “new normal” and host virtual markets each month beginning on September 26. The best part is you don’t have to worry about travel time, expenses or over-booking your calendar because we do all the work of selling your products for you during our virtual Market Down Davis.

Carvers Ridge already has the technology through our Comment Sold platform to hold live and pre-recorded video sales, making order taking simple for us and shopping effortless for our followers. What we are offering you is the opportunity to submit 1-3 items per month to be presented in our market collection videos. These items will be available to our Facebook and Instagram audiences, on our website and most excitingly – on our brand-new mobile app. You have complete control over your product selection, quantity available and pricing and can even suggest some descriptors and talking points for our video segments if you wish. * Special note, since your items will be featured along with items from other vendors in the same sale, shipping costs per item will vary greatly. For ease of our customers, and to encourage them to purchase from multiple vendors, we will be offering free shipping on their Market orders. Since you are responsible for shipping your items out, please be sure to build whatever amount you feel you need to cover shipping costs when you price your items.

How to participate

Participation fees will be $25 each time you participate. These fees will cover our time creating listings for your products on our platform and generating your order download. On Friday of each week, we will send you a spreadsheet of your orders to fulfill along with the shipping information. Once you have confirmed with us that you have shipped or delivered all orders, we will cut you a check for your sales minus a 25% commission. This commission covers the costs of including you in our market including the video presentations, credit card processing fees and marketing materials.

In order for you to have the best return on your investment, we will need you to ship or deliver your submissions to our office at 718 Davis Ave, Corning, IA 50841. Since we are not able to have shoppers visit your booths and handle products themselves, the next best thing is for us to be able to interact with your products during our videos and talk about the fabric, fragrance, texture or color live and be able to answer questions shoppers may have. You are welcome and encouraged to submit your own photographs if you have product photos that you just love and feel best represent your style. If you do not submit any photos, we will take one photo of your product staged to include with your product listing. We completely understand if you would like to have your samples returned. If this is the case, please include a prepaid return shipping label and we will carefully package and ship your product back to you. If you choose not to have your product sample shipped back, it will be included in the giveaways that will be held at the beginning of each market video, the week after your product was featured. The bonus for you in participating in the giveaway is that even if you aren’t participating in the next week’s market, your business will get a shout out as one of our giveaway donors.

To make our virtual Market Down Davis the most successful – we will be careful and intentional about how organize our market selection. We will not put any two vendors selling like products (ie: jewelry or soaps) back to back within the market live. We get our best engagement from videos with a runtime between 45 minutes and an hour. To produce this length of video, we need 35-50 products. We will not accept more than 75 product submissions for any singular market.