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Establishing Your Online Small Farm Store - A Step-by-Step Guide

farmer setting up their online farm store in their barn

In today's digital age, creating a digital presence for farm products is not just a trend but a necessity. Setting up an online farm store can open new avenues for reaching customers and increasing sales or re-enforcing existing customer relationships. From choosing the right payment provider to selecting the perfect website platform, each step is crucial in ensuring a seamless online shopping experience for your customers. In this guide, we will delve into key considerations essential for crafting a compelling online farm store that is effective with minimal maintenance.

💳 Step 1: Choosing the Right Payment Provider

The first step in establishing an online farm store is selecting an appropriate payment provider. From the numerous options available, choosing one that aligns with your business needs and offers secure but convenient payment processing is essential. The provider should:

  • Integrate relatively easily with popular accounting software like Quickbooks
  • Have decent handheld point-of-sale terminal setup and support.
  • Support payment from commonly used payment issuers like Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express, Apple Pay and Google Pay
Popular payment providers, such as Square, are trusted by many customers and ubiquitous in farmers' markets. Square does not have the lowest transaction fees. Still, many farmers' market vendors know how to use their technology, from entering your inventory to setting up their handheld point-of-sale terminal. So you can get help from other farmers' market vendors. Other payment providers like GoDaddy and Clover will entice farmers to join their platforms with lower transaction fees. Unfortunately, the farmer must depend on their customer support and cannot get much help from other vendors at the market.

🛍️ Step 2: Choosing an Online Store Platform

After conducting in-depth interviews with numerous small farmers, key insights revealed that farmers prioritize accessibility and efficiency. They desire an online farm store platform that simplifies tasks such as

  • effortlessly adjusting online shopping hours
  • seamlessly managing online product inventory with minimal time investment
  • implementing controls on online sales quantities
  • assistance with the farmer's desired
  • facilitating low-hassle order fulfillment processes

As a farmer ready to start an online farm store, the most crucial consideration is the time spent managing the site. Setting up a store website could take some time. It depends on whether you are just switching between store platforms or if you are starting from scratch. The most critical aspect is how difficult it is to maintain. Does it cost a lot of money to maintain? How much time would you spend updating the site? It's easy to estimate the money spent each month, but it is hard to determine the time you will spend without trying out the website platform. Ask other farmers market vendors with small farm store websites how much time they spend to give you an idea.

Most payment providers offer online store websites after you upload your inventory to their catalog database. Unfortunately, none of these store website options satisfy all the requirements that small farmers desire.  We have interviewed farmers who have struggled with these solutions, and most concluded that these platforms are not well-suited for small farmers.

We recommend considering tailored platforms like ours, Tangaza.io. Other farm-specific web store platforms are Farmigo, Grownby, and Barn2Door. Each of these solutions cater to specific attributes a farmer may desire. For example, Barn2door appears to work well for farmers who ship their produce directly to customers and have predictably moderate or high revenue. Our product, Tangaza.io, is tailored for small farmers with inconsistent or lower revenue, doesn't do deliveries, only pickups, and satisfies all the requirements discussed at the beginning of the section. We aim to prioritize accessibility and efficiency and constantly evolve to keep storefront maintenance costs and website management low for the small farmer and maximize the website's effectiveness.

🥔 🥩 Step 3: Deciding Which Products To List Online

We recommend listing unique products you sell in that area, which will help you stand out "online" from other farmers. For example, if you are a farmer selling chestnuts in a rapidly urbanizing area where chestnut consumption is growing, that is the kind of product you want to list. Unique products that have some demand, either seasonal or year-round, encounter less competition in internet search tools and are thus easier to find.

If the farm store platform exposes your store to Internet search crawlers, as Tangaza.io does, the Internet search engines will identify these unique products in your area. If someone types 'chestnuts near me,' your website may appear in the top search listings.

List high-value items like farm shares or workshops as highlighted items on your website. Many people do Google search for "farm csa near me" or "veggie csa near me", so folks in the USA do desire such products. Tangaza.io and Farmigo provide partial payment options for these items, a helpful feature for customers who need to spread the cost of these high-value but incredibly satisfying purchases.

Consider starting a Facebook page, or Instagram page or newsletter, then list your high value or unique products on these platforms. Check out this post from MyDigitalFarmer about newsletter writing. It's awesome.

Tangaza.io makes it super easy to post on Facebook or Instagram with our Facebook friendly product links.

If you are an established farmers market vendor with regular customers, consider listing the items your regular customers purchase on your website and let your customers know that they can easily preorder these items from the online store. This level of customer engagement reinforces your relationship with your customers by providing another predictable way for them to purchase from you. Tangaza.io takes this to a new level with our upcoming 'quick buy' option where your customer is shown previous orders in a dialog and, with a few clicks, can pre-order frequently purchased items and checkout with one click Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Conclusion

Setting up an online farm store requires planning and attention to detail, but the rewards can be significant. Start your journey now and learn how to make this technology work for you. We at Tangaza.io  are passionate about using the latest computer technology to empower farmers to reach their ideal customers and establish long-lasting relationships that foster the growth of local food consumption. Our customers have seen the benefit of an online store and use it to sell out farm shares, workshops, and frequently ordered items.

We work closely with our subscribers, always looking to simplify customer purchasing, order fulfillment, or revenue sharing between farmers.

If you have any questions or just want some advice or guidance on the best tech for your online store, please send us an email us at info@tangaza.io or leave us a voicemail at 919-214-9506.