How Products Work

WATCH THE TRAINING ON WHAT IS NEW WITH PRODUCTS HERE!

Harvie has a central database of base products from which other products are derived. We set some reasonable defaults for these products, but you have the ability override anything that you like (such as name, image, price, unit, etc.) when you define your Farm's Products. If there is something missing from our database, let us know!

Adding a Farm Product

Go to the Products List under Settings

Click on "Add new"

Enter your information and then Save. 

First you select the base Product for your Farm Product.

To search for an item, click on the Product field on this form and search for the product. If you don’t see it, be sure to check for any alternate names.  For example, “zucchini” isn’t in as a product, but “summer squash” is. Don’t worry, you will be able to override any product name in the "product name" field to call it what you like.

You'll be able to specify the description, producer, and dietary tags as needed. 

Once you’ve selected the product, you can use the following fields to set a default price for the item for your farm and to override the default Harvie settings for packing order, product name, unit type, image and category.  Any of these fields can be updated at any time by going to the Products listing and editing them.

Product Description

Set a description for the product which should be seen by members on the customization page or for placing an order in the farm shop. Think about what would add value to the member experience, demystify the product, or encourage sales. For products with an "Ingredient List", that could be good to put here.

Try not to include information that could be contradicted by a variant of this product.

Producer

If you need to keep track of who is your supplier of the product, place the name of your producer here. Reporting will be developed to help you use this to track sourcing.

This field will also be seen by members during customization or farm shop ordering.

Tags

Set as many tags as apply to your product. This can be used in reporting, but it is especially important for member experience tools. A member will be able to filter the items which they are seeing during customization or farm shop ordering based on these tags.

Future features are planned to allow new members and existing members to be able to do bulk actions on their preferences based on tags.

How Products relate to Member Preferences

Members set preferences for each individual Base Product. So if the member rates Kale as a "Not for me", then they should never get any kind of Kale, whether Russian, Lacinato, Tuscan, etc., so long as each of your Farm Products uses the same Base Product for Kale.

How specific should you get with Farm Products?

If you need to track a similar product, but with differing traits in Description, Producer, or Tags, you probably want to make a new Farm Product.

It may seem sensible to get very detailed with your Farm Products, especially if you have many standard varieties of a product, but for a few reasons we advise a certain level of generality. We'll address those reasons as we consider an example:

Suppose that you have an orchard that produces some different varieties of apples: Jonagold, Honeycrisp, and Cripps Red. On most days at the market, you offer each of these varieties in multiple base quantities and units: each, pound, peck, and bushel. In this scenario, I would recommend that you make three different Farm Products: Apples (Base Product) -> Jonagold Apples (Farm Product), Apples -> Honeycrisp Apples, and Apples -> Cripps Red Apples. It is within your power to instead make twelve Farm Products, one for each combination of Variety and Unit, but I do not recommend this for the following reasons:

• You can achieve this greater specificity in a Delivery makeup. Reserving this additional detail for definition at the delivery will keep your Farm Products flexible and re-usable.
  • This improves reporting on your products
  • You won't accumulate as many outdated products if changes occur.
• We are actively working on updating how Farm Products work, and soon we shall be introducing a means to make Farm Product Variants to cover the exact use case for the different Units (and more!).

Product Hierarchy and Example