ecommerce

Do sales stop "cold" after the farmers market closes or you shut the doors on your farm stand in the Fall?

In October and November, there is usually hardy produce in the garden, meat in the freezer, and the chickens are still producing their eggs. Customers are still hungry for local food and it is finally cool enough in the kitchen to do some real cooking.

If you have been collecting email addresses all summer for your mailing list, your customers are just an email away. Use the Small Farm Central mailing list manager or send one on your own to let your customers know about your availability this fall.

Of course the ecommerce extension makes this process easy and efficient. Just set up your inventory, send a note out to your customers to tell them that the online store is open for business, watch the orders come in with email notifications, and then print a report when you are ready to pick and pack.

As you just sweat through another muggy summer day, it seems a bit premature to start thinking about the cool days of fall. The idea of heavy coat is so foreign at this time of year -- it is hard to remember being cold. But if you want to sell in that shoulder season, it is time to start collecting email addresses, planting a bit extra to sell during those after market months, and start informing your customers that this service will be available during the cooler months.

On a more summery note, I like the colorful ecommerce pages Green Gardens Community Farm in Battle Creek, MI created with Small Farm Central:

Or take a look at the "item detail" page for Kale that shows the customer exactly how this crop grows.

I have worked farmers markets. I have gotten up at dawn to pick, clean, and pack produce. I have started the drive to the farmers market in the mid-afternoon sun, set up a stand that highlights the abundance of a farm in the summertime, sold produce for several hours, packed the truck, driven back to the farm, unloaded after dark and to bed.

I understand how exciting markets are, but I also understand the work that goes into them. That is why Small Farm Central is helping farmers streamline the ordering process and increase sales at their markets.

We are offering a new stand-alone service (or in conjunction with a full website) that allows you to pre-sell your farmers market products online. Again, you do not need have a regular Small Farm Central website to take advantage of this service.

Some customers just want "easy"

There are many customers who come to a market to socialize with friends, take a walk with the kids, and interact with many different farmers and vendors. These are the types of people that make farmers markets one of the vibrant expressions of community that we have in small towns. These people are not in the market for online ordering.

On the other hand, there are always customers who rush out of work as soon as possible to get to the market only to be disappointed by the quality of products that are left near the end of the market and may or may not complain to you. It is likely that they don't come back to your stand or the market.

For these people, the possibility of ordering online a day or two before the market makes a lot of sense. These are working people who are online most of the day and can take a few minutes at lunch to place an order and will be very excited to think that they have a box waiting for them at the market when they get there late. This type of customer will be likely to order their whole week of food from your farm instead of shopping around because you have made it so easy. If you could get 20-30 of these customers to make a $20-30 purchase on your site as a pre-sale each week, you have $400-900 in extra sales each week.

Easy on you too

Like the rest of the Small Farm Central system, the farmers market pre-sales component is designed for use by farmers without technical knowledge. Create the items you want to sell, list the inventory you have available, and your store is ready to go.

Many farms will have a window that the online store is open. If your market is on Thursday evening, perhaps you list your inventory and open the store at 8am on Monday morning. When the store is open, you will send out a mass email to your customers telling them the store is open for orders. The store will stay open until 6am on Thursday when you click one button in the control panel to disable access to the page.

Then you can create a report that lists all the sales made from Monday at 8am to Thursday at 6am. One feature of the reporting capability is that in additional to listing individual orders, it also lists an aggregate total of items that were ordered, so you can see how many bunches of kale or pounds of ground beef were requested in all of the orders. This report will help you easily plan for picking and packing the truck.

For more detailed info see:
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com/market-preorders-details

Payment processing

Once the customer has created an order, you still need to get payed.

You have the choice of sending the customer through a credit card processor (we use an easy to set-up service called Google Checkout) or having the user create an account with their contact information. If you choose the second option, the customer can come back the next week and just type in their user name and password so they do not have to re-enter contact information. This helps you identify particular customers and track them over time. Using the second option also has the advantage of saving the 2% of sales that the payment processor will take.

One feature that will aid some farmers in payment processing is the ability to have "private store" pages, which are only accessible by certain types of users. A farmer may have a committed group of customers (this works really well for restaurants and CSA sales, but could also apply to farmers markets): they can limit a particular ecommerce page for access only by users within a particular group. This has the potential to eliminate the payment processing fees, but also limits orders to trusted customers, so there are not any fraudulent orders.

The possibilities!

Online pre-ordering is not a new concept -- many farms have been running an email list with products for sale and working responses into an Excel spreadsheet. The difference here is that a little technology makes this process much less time-consuming for the farmer and enticing to the customer.

What if you had a few hundred dollars in sales in your pocket before you started picking, packing, and driving?

Getting started..

Currently we have a special going to get you started with farmers market pre-ordering this year for $185 -- this includes the new member fee and 6 months of service (normally this would cost $220). For each month that you want to use the service beyond that, it is $20/month. You only pay when you are using the service, so you can let the service lapse in the wintertime and restart it for the 2009 season without payment of the new member fee again.

If you are ready to get started:
http://smallfarmcentral.com/buynow

If you want some more information on farmers market presales and ordering see:
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com/market-preorders
http://www.smallfarmcentral.com/market-preorders-details
Farm ecommerce brings direct, local sales to farms

I hope everyone is having a productive Spring. I know you are busy preparing the fields, fixing machinery and planting, but I really think online pre-selling is one way to vastly improve your marketing this year without breaking your rhythm in the fields.

Ecommerce is a smart way to build another revenue stream for your farm. This is Part 9 in the "Farming the Web" course in farm web design.

Ecommerce and the small farm can sound like opposing forces: ecommerce encourages sales across state and national boundaries, while small farms focus on the local market. Ecommerce can be very effective to sell goods nationally or internationally, but it takes a very robust and focused marketing plan to get your message out on the Internet. It is very difficult to retain the attention of the average web surfer, especially to the point of actually buying a product from your farm. Many farms will be best served by using ecommerce to augment existing customer relationships and to make it easier for these local customers to patronize your business.

In the past, I have discussed the softer side of web marketing most often on this blog, such as posting photos and writing blogs. Having ecommerce capabilities is a great feature because as customers connect with your farm through your postings on your website, you can guide them directly to the stores. This is how Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo is able to make a third of his sales online.

But how can ecommerce work into your current local marketing plan? I'll list a few of my ideas and things that have been tried in the past. These are just starting points: the ways you use ecommerce on your website are only limited by your ingenuity.

Restaurant Sales

Many farms already have existing restaurant customers. What about using internet sales to streamline that relationship for you and the buyer? With the Small Farm Central ecommerce system, you may create a "store" page that is only accessible by the restaurants you already have a relationship with. There is a mechanism for creating a user account in the control panel that gives each user a unique login name and password, so that they can login to view the available items and build their order at their leisure. Also note that ecommerce does not necessarily mean "credit cards." With Small Farm Central, you have the option of taking their order and invoicing through your traditional invoicing system just in case you don't want to give up that 2% to the credit card company.

I know that the personal contact with the chef or buyer at a restaurant is very important. Ecommerce does not necessarily replace the human touch unless you allow that to happen. Say you make your restaurant deliveries on Thursday afternoons: you post the items for the week on Monday morning and call the restaurants later that day. If they are ready to make the order over the phone, you can go into your control panel to manually create the order for the restaurant buyer. Otherwise, if they would rather make the order at their leisure, allow them to login to your site with the login and password you provided and make the order at their pace. This workflow gives you the best of both worlds: allowing tech-savvy buyers to use the online system and keeping the hands-on ordering approach for those customers who are not ready to go online.

Farmer's Market Preorders

For farmers who go to a farmer's market and want to get higher revenue per customer, a preorder situation may make sense. Two days before the market, post the inventory of products you will make available for preorders. Then allow customers to come online (who have been primed at the market about this idea in previous weeks) and make their order. Just before the market, print out all the orders and box up the orders before you leave or as part of your market setup.

Preorders will take time to grow, but after a number of years I wonder if farmers could forgo the market all-together and rely on these dedicated weekly customers. This is way for busy customers to streamline their farmer's market shopping and for you to build a strong relationship with each customer. Customers who can't arrive at the beginning of the market will also appreciate getting first pick of items.

CSA Shares

Sell your yearly CSA shares online. Making the CSA sale easier for your supporters will create higher retention rates. This is especially useful for email announcements about the share sale because you can simply link to the CSA share store on your site and watch the orders roll in!

CSA Weekly Extras

Many farmers offer extra items each week that are above and beyond the cost of the CSA share. Whether the items are bulk products like bushels of apples, boxes of basil, and meat products or products from other sources like coffee, dairy products, and baked goods, an online sale is ideal because you can limit the "CSA Extras" store to just CSA members using a private "store" page option (as detailed in the restaurant ordering section) and tightly control inventory. So if you only have 25 dozen eggs to sell in week, the option to buy eggs will not be available after the first 25 are sold.

6 benefits of using Small Farm Central's ecommerce solution

I will probably cover these in more detail soon, but here are few benefits to using our ecommerce solution:

• Control inventory: let the computer shut off sales of sold-off products.
• Take credit cards (or not).
• Take control of your sales: Ecommerce allows you to create your own sales. Over the long run, a well developed marketing plan will create local markets for your produce that rely on your website instead of farmer's markets, coops, restaurants, and grocery stores.
  
• Take down barriers for customers: people spend more and more time online and are hopefully looking at your active farm website from time-to-time. Make it easy for customers to support your farm financially.
• Order processing: Email invoices are automatically created for customers and your farm.
• Control your data: Download excel files containing orders, customers, and inventory for your own records

Cost and Contact

The Small Farm Central ecommerce system can make all of the above possible. There are some other options that cater to farms, such as LocalHarvest's product but that system is mainly for shipped, value-added products and does not integrate directly into your website.

The cost for Small Farm Central's solution are as follows:

Basic: one "store" page, only publicly accessible stores, and up to 10 items -- $10/month.
Advanced: up to 10 "store" pages, public and private stores (for CSA extra sales and restaurants), and up to 250 items -- $20/month

Please contact me at info@smallfarmcentral.com if you would like to test drive the product!

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Small Farm Central bridges the gap between technology and agriculture by providing web services to direct marketing small farms across the country. We help farms reach their marketing potential with inexpensive, professional websites that any farmer can use. Come get a free demo today.

Be creative: post your website at buyhandmade.orgIf you sell products through an ecommerce system on your farm website that can be shipped, you need to get the word out about your products. (By the way, the Small Farm Central ecommerce system is coming along well and will be ready by the middle of November, 2007.)

Try posting your site at:
http://www.buyhandmade.org/

People are taking a pledge to buy and sell handmade gifts for Christmas this year and many businesses that sell handmade products are posting links to their websites. This is a great way to get receptive eyes to your website during the holiday season.

I am currently designing an e-commerce extension to the Small Farm Central software and I'd love to hear what you want to sell online and how I can serve you with this system. I currently will  support the following sales types:

• Mail Orders: This is classic ecommerce that would allow anyone in the world to order your value-added, shippable products.
• Restaraunt sales: Each restaurant has a unique username and password to log-in to your store where you list products available during a given week. The chef can reserve and pay for the items online and then arrange a drop-off.
• CSA Share Sales: Each spring thousands of CSAs sell shares to members - allow your members to pay online directly through your farm website.
• Buying Club Sales: Your weekly customers can pick their items through an online system so they get exactly what they want instead of the classic CSA system. This one is the most unformed in my head and I am not sure exactly how it will work or what type of farm it could serve. I am talking to Neil Stauffer of the Penn's Corner Farm Alliance this week about his ideas because he wants to run a service like this in 2008.
  

Are there any other types of sales that you would like your farm to be able to make online? If you want to be involved in the design process, please make your voice heard and many of your requirements will go directly into the software.

We are using Google Checkout which will allow you to create an immediate trust with your customers that is extremely important with credit card sales over the Internet. We will never hold your bank account information or the credit card numbers of your customers - we will allow Google to do the heavy lifting (and security) in this situation. The buying process will be completely on your Small Farm Central site, but when the customer is ready to checkout they will be sent to a Google site to finish the checkout process and then a link will allow them to come back to your farm website.

We are excited to bring this new product to you and hope that there will be some input from the community. There are several existing Small Farm Central members who are driving the development so far, but there is room for more voices. Leave a comment or contact us to get involved. This service will be up and running for the Christmas rush.