ecommerce
Ecommerce Remoldeling
Posted May 5th, 2009 by simon.huntley in
We are remodeling and upgrading our ecommerce system this Spring to make it easier to manage for administrators (that's you!) and easier to buy for customers (that's sales!).
If you are currently using ecommerce and have suggestions, be sure to let us know. Or request a demo and check it out for yourself.
For That Special Someone .. Beans
Posted December 11th, 2008 by simon.huntley
For that special bean eater in your life, the "Desert Island Sampler" includes the Pebble Bean, Yellow Eye Bean, Midnight Black Beans, Christmas Lima Beans, and the Vaquero Bean.
If that special bean eater in my life reads this, they may just be getting a preview of Christmas day!
But seriously, Steve Sando at Rancho Gordo does a great job with his dried, heirloom beans and online ordering. Attractive website, plenty of information, easy ordering, blog and integration with email marketing.
Hey, it sold me. He is a great example of doing it right and someone to look to as you create your online marketing plan.
A Few [Farm] Web Marketing Principles
Posted November 5th, 2008 by simon.huntley
Some ideas to chew on..
Working with many farmers with many different website goals, I have come up with a few general principles for farm websites. These have been covered in many other articles in more depth, but I hope it is useful to have them in one place.
Update Often / Make it Easy
A successful website grows slowly over time and gives return visitors something new to read so they will keep coming back and stay excited about new developments on the farm (surprisingly enough, customers are interested in details like chicken tractors and disease control).
Farmers are busy people, so the only way to keep a farm website fresh throughout the year is to make it easy to update, create new pages, or post a blog entry. The best way to do this is to have your website built with a Content Management System (CMS) like Small Farm Central, Drupal, Wordpress, or any other system that makes sense.
Aesthetics
A farm website should be simple and elegant without using unnecessarily flashy elements. There is so much beauty on each farm: capture a bit of the farm with a representative photograph, put it in the header, add a clean navigation structure, and you have a great farm website.
Commerce
E-commerce can be a powerful addition to a farm website from pre-selling goods at farmers markets to selling to chefs to marketing items that will ship across the country, but farmers need to be comfortable with the process themselves and give it time to work.
Customers will not just come out of the blue to order on your website: you need to advertise, tell your local customers, write a regular mailing list, and any other strategy that is available. It is a powerful tool, but not a free ride to extra sales.
Content
Use photographs liberally to illustrate points; take time to write about the passion that keeps you farming year after year; make sure visitors know what is currently available and where they can buy your products; and remember that customers are interested in the details that it takes to grow the food because it keeps them connected. These details are something they cannot get from any other source.
Contact
Make it easy for customers to contact the farm through the website - a link that is clearly labeled "contact" on each page of your site is a good goal.
Blogging
A farm blog can be a powerful way to communicate with customers because it encourages interaction through comments, keeps the site fresh, and is a good place to tell the farm story over the course of a season. It can be very easy: try posting a photo of farm work with a few explanatory sentences.
Take note: either do it right or don't do it at all. A stale blog is detrimental to your goals and is much worse than not having one at all. The time investment will only pay off over time; think years instead of months, so a long term view is needed to successfully use the farm blog.
Community Connections
Getting listed on local food internet directories is important for a few reasons:
- It increases Google's trust of your own site and will result in higher placement in search results.
- Interest in local, authentic food is high - eaters in your area are searching for the products that you have and these links make it much more likely that they will find you.
- It's free!
Patience
Web marketing will not double your sales and customer base overnight.
On the farm, building healthy soil is a long term goal that requires a long-term strategy and consistent effort throughout the year. Success is incremental and difficult to see in the span of months or a season, but very obvious looking back over the years.
Execute your web marketing in the same way; create a strategy that makes sense for the amount of time you want to devote and then carry out that strategy over the long term to see results. Do not give up or radically alter strategy just because results cannot be seen after a few weeks or months.
Email Mailing List
Have one; allow prospective customers to sign up for the list on your website.
It's Time to Think About Late Fall Sales
Posted July 21st, 2008 by simon.huntley
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.
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.
New ideas at the farmers market: easy for farmers and customers
Posted April 15th, 2008 by simon.huntley
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.
Hi, I'm Simon Huntley, the lead developer here at 
