How vendo organizes vendor types
DRAFT · checked against one caseThe vendor-category taxonomy
vendo groups vendors into four transaction-type categories: retail/street, catering/private-event, food truck services, and bulk/wholesale/B2B. This page shows that grouping exactly as it stands today, including which parts of it we can actually back up and which parts are still a guess. Nothing here is a finished schema. It is a proposal that has been run against exactly one real case so far, and it is expected to change as more cases come in.
The founder's own sequencing preference is to build from real cases, not speculation up front. This taxonomy will not be treated as settled until 2–3 more real vendor cases have been checked against it.
UPDATE Since this page was written, three market surveys (tamale, churro, and aguas frescas carts, not one vendor's real booking, real competitor pricing research instead) cross-checked the pricing pattern behind vendo's approach, specifically so it would not rest on one vendor's numbers. The core finding held for prepared hot food, and surfaced a real new question: catering pricing looks driven by whether labor and service are part of the sale, not by what the vendor sells. See pricing for the short version. This strengthens the pricing claim; it does not count as one of the 2–3 real cases above, which is still open.
The one thing this is not
This taxonomy sorts vendors by transaction type: who the vendor is transacting with, and under what commercial shape. It is deliberately separate from vendo's presence schema, which already exists and is already gated in the platform's place-quality checks. Presence answers a different question entirely: where a vendor physically shows up, on a scale from a fixed site to a host venue to a route to fully roving. A fixed-site vendor and a roving vendor can both be doing retail/street business; a route vendor could just as easily be doing catering runs. The two axes are meant to compose, not collapse into each other, and this taxonomy does not touch or duplicate the presence vocabulary at all.
Four categories, ordered by how well-grounded they are
Retail / street
The vendor sells directly to individual walk-up customers, at a fixed site, on a route, or roving. This is the "normal" transaction shape the presence schema was already built around, so a retail/street vendor with a self-managed profile is exactly the platform's existing listed-vendor case: no certification is required for a vendor to be listed. The one real case run through this draft so far, an elotero from a gala case study, runs retail/street as his baseline: a known route, honest street pricing, a normal working day. His own confirmed street prices, contrasted against what an identical item runs at a private event, is the clearest sourced data point behind splitting retail/street out as its own category at all.
Certification status (whether a vendor holds a formal permit) is a fact about paperwork, not a stand-in for food safety or trustworthiness, and this taxonomy deliberately does not frame it that way. Whether that split is even worth surfacing publicly, versus staying an internal-only distinction, is still open.
Catering / private-event
The vendor is booked for a specific event by a specific client, a one-off or occasional engagement, at negotiated pricing distinct from their everyday retail price. This is the category the one existing case study actually documents in depth: the same elotero, booked for a 200-guest nonprofit gala. The case surfaces a real structural difference from retail/street for the identical product: event pricing runs meaningfully higher than street pricing, and a single compressed service window can force staffing decisions a normal spread-out route day never has to make. The platform's modeled role here is advisory only, helping a vendor sanity-check a price, never taking a cut and never becoming party to the booking.
The event-pricing comparison itself rests partly on estimated, not confirmed, menu prices, so treat "event pricing runs higher" as directionally supported by one case, not proven. Whether this category splits further by client type (recurring corporate vs. one-off vs. nonprofit) has no data point yet beyond that single gala.
Food truck services
Vendors operating from a truck rather than a cart or stand. The presence schema already models the location side of this fine (a truck is typically a route or roving vendor, occasionally parked at a host venue for a scheduled stop), so nothing new is needed there. But no case study has been run for a food truck yet, so everything about how food-truck economics or transaction patterns actually differ from a cart or a catering booking is currently unexamined.
The single biggest open question in this whole draft: is "food truck services" a distinct transaction type at all, or is it really a format that cuts across the other three categories, the same way presence already sits orthogonal to all four? Deliberately left unresolved rather than decided from a desk.
Bulk / wholesale / B2B
Vendor-to-vendor or vendor-to-business transactions, not consumer-facing. Flagged in the source draft as the most speculative of the four categories, by a wide margin. The one case study touches only the buy side of this shape (the elotero himself sourcing from wholesalers), which is adjacent to this category, not an example of it. The one thing that can be said with any confidence is that this category is not consumer-facing, so most of the platform's consumer-facing doctrine does not obviously apply, though that assumption itself hasn't been tested against a real case either.
Whether bulk/wholesale belongs on the platform at all is still open. This category is meant to gain no further structure until a real B2B or wholesale case exists to test it against.
What this taxonomy is waiting on
Every "known" fact above traces back to a single real case: one elotero, booked for one nonprofit gala. That case was enough to justify splitting retail/street from catering/private-event, because it produced a concrete, sourced price difference between the two for the same vendor selling the same item. It said almost nothing about food trucks or bulk/wholesale, which is why those two categories carry a lighter "barely grounded" tag above rather than a confident description.
The plan is not to reason the remaining categories into shape from a desk. It's to keep dropping real vendor cases in as they come up and check, each time, whether a new case fits cleanly into one of these four categories or breaks something. Food truck services and bulk/wholesale/B2B are the two most likely to need to be rewritten wholesale once that happens. Until 2–3 more cases land, treat every category on this page as a working label, not a finished decision.