Small Farm Central

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.

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