Nearby Shops lets you recommend useful Tambala businesses to people attending your event.

You can use it to help attendees find places to eat, accommodation, merchandise, transport and other services connected to the event.

Done well, this makes your event page more useful and gives your partners and nearby businesses more visibility.

What should you recommend?

Choose businesses that genuinely help someone attending the event.

For example:

Food and drink vendors.
Accommodation for people travelling from another city.
Official merchandise sellers.
Transport providers.
Event sponsors and partners.
Other useful businesses close to the venue.

The goal is not to fill the page with as many businesses as possible.

Recommend businesses because there is a clear reason an attendee may need them.

Open Nearby Shops

From your seller dashboard:

Open Events.
Select the event.
Open Nearby Shops.

From here, you can discover Tambala businesses and choose which ones should appear with your event.

Find businesses to recommend

Use search and the available filters to find relevant businesses.

You may be able to browse by the type of business, product category or location.

If your event attracts people travelling from elsewhere, look for accommodation.

If people will need food before or after the event, look for restaurants, food sellers or vendors.

If location matters, use the nearby or district options available in Tambala to find businesses that make sense for the venue.

Before adding a business, open it and check that it is actually relevant to your attendees.

Add a business to the event

When you find a suitable business, choose Recommend.

It will be added to the list of businesses connected to your event.

You can continue adding other useful recommendations within the number Tambala currently allows.

A smaller list of strong recommendations is usually better than a long list of businesses with no obvious connection to the event.

Explain the relationship

Where available, choose the relationship that best explains why the business is being shown.

For example:

Food Vendor — serving food or drinks connected to the event.

Official Merchandise — selling authorised event merchandise.

Sponsor — supporting the event.

Partner — working with the organiser in another way.

Accommodation — a useful place for attendees to stay.

Transport — helping attendees travel to or from the event.

Choose the relationship honestly.

Do not describe an ordinary nearby business as an official sponsor or partner unless that relationship actually exists.

Put the most useful businesses first

The order matters.

Think about what attendees are most likely to need.

For an event with many visitors travelling into Lilongwe, accommodation may deserve a prominent place.

For a food festival, official vendors may be more important.

For a concert, merchandise, food and transport may matter most.

Arrange the list around the attendee experience rather than simply putting your favourite businesses first.

Review featured products

Tambala may show products from a recommended store alongside the recommendation.

Check that the products being shown make sense for the event.

If a store sells many different things, you do not want an unrelated item distracting from the reason you recommended the business.

Where the option is available, remove featured products that do not help the attendee.

Use Nearby Shops to help people plan the whole experience

An attendee may need more than a ticket.

Someone travelling to an event may be thinking:

Where will I stay?

How will I get there?

Where can I eat?

Can I buy merchandise?

What else is nearby?

Nearby Shops gives you a way to answer some of those questions before the attendee even arrives.

That can make the event easier to attend.

It can also strengthen your partnerships

Nearby Shops can be useful for businesses you already work with.

A sponsor can receive additional visibility.

A food vendor can be easier for attendees to discover.

An accommodation partner can receive bookings from people travelling to the event.

An official merchandise seller can send customers directly to the products they are looking for.

This makes the event page part of a wider network of businesses around the event.

But keep the recommendations useful to the attendee first. If the section becomes nothing more than advertising, people are less likely to pay attention to it.

Keep recommendations current

Review the list as the event gets closer.

Remove a business if the relationship has ended or the recommendation is no longer useful.

Add new partners or services when they become relevant.

If an accommodation provider becomes fully booked, for example, another option may be more helpful to attendees.

The recommendations should reflect what is useful now.

The important thing to remember

A good Nearby Shops section answers:

What might someone attending this event also need?

Then recommend businesses that help with those needs.

Do not add businesses simply because you can.

Make the list useful, relevant and connected to the event.

If you want to sell your own food, merchandise or packages before the event, see Manage Event Pre-Orders.

For the rest of your event information and ticket setup, see Edit and Manage Your Events.