It seems just about every farm which sells direct to the public has a website these days. But how many have good websites?
In fact, what is good? In the fast-moving web world, that changes almost monthly. A pretty design and the standard ‘farm fresh’ marketing pitch is oh-so last decade.
“We’re past the point of convincing farmers that that the web is a huge marketing opportunity,” says web designer Simon Huntley of Small Farm Central, located in the small town of Swissvale near Pittsburgh. “Farmers understand that a website is important and can benefit their business. The problem is knowing exactly how to do it.”
It’s all about the details—particularly having low-cost, easy-to-use functionality that can boost sales and profit margins while simultaneously helping to better manage your farm business.
For example, anyone selling at a farmers’ market can get a leg up by allowing their customers to place pre-orders.
“When someone comes to your booth and buys a few vegetables, you tell them to go to the website before the next market” says the 27-year-old Pennsylvanian. “They’ll get the first choice of everything, and won’t have to fight the crowds because their order will be waiting for them.”
And guess what tends to happens when people pre-order? They buy more.
“You want to take someone who is a customer of the market and turn them into your customer,” says Huntley. “If they’re going to spend $30 at the market, you’d rather get all of that $30 rather than just $2 or $3.”
Simple, right? But wait—as they say in the infomercials—there’s more.
At the end of season for a given type of produce or when the market is closing for winter, you can email all those customers and offer them a deal on your excess inventory. Any sweet corn or tomatoes chucked on the compost heap is strictly a loss; anything diverted from that fate is strictly profit.
But that’s not all.
Why not have your website help manage inventory? Again it’s a simple idea: You list how much of a given product you have for sale, and every time someone orders something, the inventory is reduced by that amount. When everything is sold, the item automatically disappears from the site.
“This is a big improvement,” says Huntley. “A lot of people sell by sending out Excel spreadsheets listing what’s available. Well, you not only have to spend a ton of time tallying up the orders, but when the item is sold out, you have write a bunch of people back saying it’s not available. It’s a lot of extra work and you’re just disappointing those customers.”
Not surprisingly, Huntley is a big advocate of social networking, whether that’s via your own email list, or Facebook and Twitter, as a “way to let people know that you’re there.” His latest project, still in development, is an application that links all of those things.
“We want it so that when people update their website, it automatically updates all their social networks. That way you can connect with people and still have time to farm.”
Small Farm Central isn’t alone in what it does – nor is the company just targeting tech-savvy young farmers. Actually, Huntley says, most young farmers either have website skills or code-writing friends who help them. Most of the 300 farm customers of his three-year-old company are older farmers who either didn’t have a website or had a lousy one. They’ve turned to Huntley’s company, in part, because it’s cheap (typically $100 to $350 for a new or re-launched website and a monthly fee of $20 to $50, depending on the service package).
To keep prices that low, the farmers have to update the site themselves but, again, the latest software makes that easy.
If you’re looking for free tips, read Huntley’s blog at www.smallfarmcentral.com to pick up pointers. For example, farmers going the Community Supported Agriculture route get their money upfront. But many customers want to pay online. Huntley’s suggestion is to let them pay a deposit, say $50, via PayPal or a credit card and then give you a cheque for the rest when you make the first delivery.
“If you selling $100,000 worth of goods, the cost of having that amount put through credit cards is $2,000 or even $3,000 a year,” he notes.
There’s a lot more, of course. These days, registering your website on Google search is a must and old standbys, such as having recipes tailored to what you’re selling right now, continue to generate sales.
All these simple things add up. As Huntley notes, if margins are only 5%, earning an extra penny on every dollar of sales boosts your profits by 20%.
You often hear farmers say, ‘Oh, I really should update my website.’
They’re absolutely right—they really should.
(Glenn Cheater is editor of the Canadian Farm Manager, the newsletter of the Canadian Farm Business Management Council. The newsletter as well as archived columns from this series can be found in the News Desk section at www.farmcentre.com)
