The Farm Stand feature allows you to sell your products directly to consumers without them having to purchase a share. This can be a great way to get new members, as well as to allow you to sell excess product, or manage a pickup-only on-farm store. Farm stand is not currently very well setup as a POS, though it could be used that way in a pinch with a tablet for customer self-checkout.
When you create a Farm Stand delivery, you are setting a period in which customers will be able to purchase a set amount of products. You can set a minimum amount that customers must spend on products as well as the cut-off time for when the Farm Stand will close so that you can begin packing orders. In order to keep the farm stand experience simple for customers, only one Farm Stand delivery can be open at a time.
Prerequisites for setting up Farm Stand
- Ensure you have Farm Stand enabled for your account with your account manager.
- Confirm that your locations are accurate. This version uses postal code matching to ensure that members are only offered home delivery options for which their address qualifies. All members will be offered all active pickup locations, and any home delivery locations that do not specify Valid Postal Codes. If all of your selected locations are home delivery using this field, and none of them include a member's postal code, that member will see an alert informing them that they are not within your delivery area at this time. At this time, only Harvie support is able to edit the Valid Postal Codes field for your locations. Delivery times do not need to be accurate, you will be able to set pickup/delivery time windows when you create a delivery.
Building your first delivery
1. Login and navigate to harvie.farm/admin/delivery/farm-stand or go to "Deliveries" from your admin page
2. Click Actions in the right hand corner and click "Create a Pop-up Farm Stand"
In the form you can set the following fields:
- Delivery Label: This is the name that will be used in emails, we recommend calling it something like "Farm Stand for Nov 3rd", or something that will allow you to identify the delivery dates that this Farm Stand will be available for.
- Minimum hfs value: This is the minimum amount that must be spent by a customer in order to complete an order. It does not include the delivery fee or tax adjustments, so this is the dollar amount of actual product purchased. If you don't have a minimum, you can leave it blank.
- Farm Stand Close Time: This is the date and time at which the farm stand will close, and customers will not be able to make any more purchases.
- Delivery options: Select the Farm Stand locations where members can pickup/receive delivery for this Farm Stand delivery. Set the pickup/delivery window for each delivery option.
3. Confirm and proceed to create your Farm Happening
A good title for your Farm Stand happening is along the lines of "New in the stand", or "This week on the farm". Farm Stand happenings should generally cover the new items coming out of the field, and any specific products that you'd like to highlight: think grocery advertisement more than update about the farm to members.
4. Save your happening and proceed to the Delivery Builder - Estimate
NOTES: Farm Stand is different from your regular deliveries in that there are no extras - enter all of the products that you would like to sell through your Farm Stand on the Delivery Estimate page.
For each available Farm Product:
Farm Product: Select base product, and click the edit button to override the name if needed.
On Hand Quantity: Set the total number of units of this product you have available, e.g. 25 for 25 5lb bags of apples, or 5 if you have 10 half pound packages of bacon.
Unit Type: Select the unit type of the product. For 5 lb bags of apples, select bag, for half pound packages of bacon select lb.
Price: Set the price per unit for the product. For 5 lb bags of apples a price of $5 would result in customers paying $5 / bag. For half pound packages of bacon, a price of $14 would result in customers paying $7 / half pound package.
Share Quantity: Set the amount of product that will be added to the customer's cart each time they click "Add to Cart". For5 lb bags of apples, set share quantity to 1 (1 bag added per click). For half pound packages of bacon set share quantity to .5 (.5 lbs of bacon added per click).
5. Click "Complete Estimate and Review"
6. Once you are ready to open your Farm Stand, click "Launch Customization Period"
Congratulations! Your Farm Stand is now open!
An email will be sent to your farm stand subscribers based on their location preferences - your admin email is CC'd.
IMPORTANT - Your shop URL is different from the old farm stand and will look like this
You can retrieve this by going to "My Farm" and copy and pasting the "Shop" URL
This would also be a good time to post on social media announcing the Farm Stand is open and send to your "warm leads" list.
From here on out, managing your Farm Stand is exactly like managing any other delivery.