What is a Booth Price Card?

What a booth price card actually is

A price card is among the smallest pieces of a booth's signage, and one of the easiest to leave off. It sits directly on or beside an item and states two facts: what it is, if that isn't obvious from looking at it, and what it costs. That's the whole job. Everything else on a table — the table-header sign, the payment-methods card, the custom-order slip — exists to answer questions a shopper will ask. A price card exists to answer the one a shopper is least likely to raise: asking a stranger "how much?" costs a browser something socially, and setting the item back down costs them nothing at all.

A price card is not the same thing as booth rent — that's the chair fee a hairstylist or barber pays a salon to work there. The two terms share the word "booth" and nothing else.

Tented vs. flat, and when each one wins

There are two working shapes, and a table usually wants both:

• Flat cards lie directly on the table. They take almost no space, which makes them the right fit for a shelf or basket of small items priced the same or nearly the same — a row of them in front of a stack of similar pieces reads cleanly without eating the display.
• Tented cards fold into a small standing triangle, so they read from a few feet back and from an angle, not just straight down. That makes them the better choice for a featured piece, the front edge of a shelf, or anywhere you want the price visible before a shopper has picked the item up.

A tented card has a second advantage a flat card can't offer: a back face. Because a tent card folds, the inside of the fold — the panel that faces away from the customer, toward you — can carry a note only you'll ever see: what the piece cost you to make, the count you restock it at, or a line you meant to say when someone picks it up. Printed upside down on the flat sheet, it lands right-side-up the moment the card is folded and standing. The customer only ever sees the front.

Standard sizes, and why a shared trim size matters

There's no single body that sets a required price-card size, but the practical reasoning is the same wherever you land on one: a card small enough to sit beside a single item without dominating it, and large enough to read at arm's length. What matters more than the exact dimensions is consistency across the table — one card trimmed at a slightly different size than its neighbor, or a card cut freehand beside one cut with a straightedge, reads as unfinished even when the pricing behind it is careful.

The reason a shared trim size matters goes beyond how it looks side by side, too. If every card on the table — small flat cards, small tent cards, and a larger featured-piece tent card — is a whole-number multiple of the same base cell, the cut lines line up across every sheet you print. That means a table's worth of cards can be printed as one batch and cut in a single pass along shared lines, rather than measured and cut one size, and one sheet, at a time the night before a market.

Printing at actual size, and why "fit to page" is the trap

A price card is designed to an exact trim size on paper, but many consumer print dialogs offer a "fit to page" or "shrink to fit" setting, which rescales the PDF to fill whatever paper is loaded in the tray. Nothing on screen necessarily announces that it happened — the card just comes out a few percent smaller or larger than it was drawn, which is invisible until you try to fit a "3.5 x 2 in" card against a ruler, or line two differently-scaled sheets up against each other.

The fix costs one measurement. Print with scaling set to 100% / actual size (not "fit" or "shrink to fit"), and if the sheet carries a printed calibration line — a rule marked at, say, 100 mm or 4 in — hold a tape measure against it before you cut anything. A rule that reads short or long tells you the print job scaled the page, and you can fix the printer setting and reprint before the scissors come out, not after.

The common mistakes

• No price at all. The quietest way to lose a sale on a booth table — every browser who can't see a price has to choose between asking and walking, and only one of those is effortless.
• A price a shopper has to ask for. Functionally the same problem as no price, just with an extra, more socially awkward step in front of it.
• Cards in mismatched sizes. A table of hand-cut, differently-sized scraps reads as an afterthought, even when the craftsmanship on the table is not.
• Ink that dies the night before. A color cartridge running dry at 11 p.m. is a cheap thing to plan for and an expensive thing to improvise around — worth having a low-ink or plain-paper fallback ready before the night you need it, not during it.

Try the free version first

The free Booth Price-Card Set carries three finished price-card sizes — a small flat card, a small tent card, and a larger tent card for a featured piece — each shown filled in for an invented maker and then blank and ready to print and cut, with the same printed calibration rule so a mis-scaled print is caught before it reaches your scissors. It's free and ungated, no email required.

For the rest of a table's signage — the multi-buy offer sign, payment and scan-to-pay cards, an allergen-and-ingredients card, a wholesale card, custom-order slip, and the table-header poster, all imposed on the same shared cut-and-fold grid alongside a fillable calculator that works out the number that belongs on the offer sign — see the Craft-Fair & Market Booth Signage, Price-Card & Table Kit. For the rest of the market-table side of the catalog, see templates for craft sellers.