So why should farmers bring together their online and offline sales? Here are a few critical reasons:

Better Customer Experience

• • Increased profits
    • By offering different sales channels, you can increase your customer reach. Many customers may prefer ordering online vs at your farmstand, store, or farmers market, and even the other way around.
  • Better customer experience & information
    • An integrated system provides a better customer experience – for example, customers can use account credits while shopping at your farmstand the same way they can use them online.
    • Regardless of where a customer makes their purchase with your farm, with the LFM system you can access complete customer purchasing and transaction history.

Better Data for Business Decisions

• • Up to date inventory – always!
    • Integrating all sales enables farms to have better inventory and information on what products are selling where.  Many farms find it challenging to track their product sales at farmers markets and farmstands and hence don’t have accurate data to make decisions.  Pulling that information into the same system used for online sales provides better information for decision making.
  • Valuable sales information at your fingertips
    • Where do you sell the most? What sells the best and where?
    • Using the LFM platform you can easily and quickly pull the data you need to make better business decisions at no additional cost!

Consolidated Reporting

• • No more tedious spreadsheets!
    • By integrating your online and offline sales with a platform like LFM, you can eliminate costly human errors and time consuming data entry.
  • Your entire farm can work from the same information.
    • From harvest team to pack team to the sales team, LFM utilizes specific users, reports, and features to maximize the information shared with your essential team members.
  • All your revenue in one place.
    • The key to successfully increasing profits is being able to monitor your revenue and margins all in one place. A cohesive revenue report that reflects your omnichannel sales is a direct way to a better business.
    • At LFM we offer robust, comprehensive reporting to all of our customers with no strings attached. We believe your data is yours, and it is essential for increasing your bottom line.

Marketing Integration

• • Use the data to send targeted messages
    • LFM now offers Mailchimp Integration to streamline your marketing! Quickly and easily compose targeted email campaigns to your customers based on data like first and last order dates, subscriptions, and more.
    • Create custom shopping lists and featured product lists that link directly to your storefront to embed directly in your Mailchimp emails.
    • Other popular examples of targeted messaging:
      • Send pre-order reminders to farmers market attendees.
      • Send event invitations and pickup reminders to CSA members
      • Send wholesale availability to restaurants, etc.

What are the real world examples?

• • Market style CSAs and shares. Accessing a customer’s account from the farmers market and adjusting for the items they’ve purchased on the fly allows you to track in detail how the customer has used their market style CSA and ensure accurate account details.
  • Customer pre-orders and pays at pickup.
  • Customer has account credit and wants to use it at the farmstand.
  • Farm wants to analyze top selling products for each farmers market.
  • Farm has limited products available and wants to offer them online and offline, without having to remember to update inventory.
  • Food hub has a store or stand and needs to track consigned inventory in store.

What is needed?

• • An easy-to-use customer interface for ordering online
  • An easy-to-use POS system for updating inventory live from the farmers market
  • A robust inventory management system

LFM offers all of these and more to deliver true omni-channel sales.

• • Customer Types & Price Levels
  • Square POS Integration
  • Mailchimp Integration with custom, embeddable featured products and shopping lists directly linked to the storefront
  • Inventory Management
  • Subscription and Membership features
  • Recurring Orders
  • Multiple ordering periods for custom distribution management and logistics optimization
  • Pick up and Delivery locations to coordinate online sales and in person distribution
  • Easy to use order interface for updating online orders with offline sales
  • Robust product setup to customize how and what you sell
  • …and so much more!

The post Boost Your Bottom Line: Integrating Online & Offline Sales for Farmers first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

• How many customers purchased just once, never to place an order again and how does that compare to previous years?
• What was the average order frequency, compared to previous years? Meaning, how often did customers place an order? We recommend calculating this in terms of weeks and to look at order frequency for all customers, as well as repeat buyer order frequency.
• What is your average order size, compared to previous years?

We analyzed the data in aggregate for all LFM customers using our platform in 2019 and 2020 to see how they fared. Please note this is aggregate data across markets in 45 states, 6 Canadian Provinces, and 5,200 farms – selling into multiple channels – wholesale, retail, and direct to consumer.

Here is what we found:

Average order size: 1.4% decrease ($132.80 in 2019 vs $131.02 in 2020)
Order frequency for all customers: Reduced by 2 weeks
Repeat buyer order frequency: Reduced by 0.5 weeks
One-time buyers: 6% increase
Sales growth: 50.1% increase
Number of buyers: 131% increase

Our aggregate analysis:

With the significant shift to direct-to-consumer sales, we expected order frequency to shift down and the number of one-time buyers to increase. Because the data includes wholesale and retail orders together, it is not a perfect comparison, but the results are stronger than we expected. The main takeaway being that, in aggregate, LFM customers seem to be attracting a similar buyer profile between 2019 and 2020 and the pandemic provided an opportunity to attract new buyers at a faster rate than they would normally.

Although you may reach different conclusions based on your own sales and unique circumstances, there are some important takeaways:

• Retention may have decreased, but – depending on the way you measure it – it may not be as significant as you think.
• It is much more achievable (and less costly) to focus on increasing the order frequency (or order size) for those that already buy from you. If LFM customers can match the 2019 order frequency with the same number of 2020 repeat buyers in 2021, they stand to grow 35% in 2021…without adding a single new customer.
• Increasing average order size can be the easiest.

In marketing terms, Average Order Size, Average Purchase Frequency and Retention Period make up Lifetime Customer Value, which offer a more accurate picture of profitability and long-term success than purely retention. Local Food Marketplace provides in-depth reporting and exportable data to make it easy for you to access all of this information and more. Depending on what part of the equation you see the best opportunity for your business, here are some suggestions:

Average Order Size:

• Freshen up your storefront regularly so customers see new, featured items.
• Communicate – through all of your channels – email, social media, etc. to highlight products, offer recipes, and more.
• Curate your storefront. Decision fatigue is real. Depending on your buyer profile, 50-100 highly curated items often results in higher order sizes than offering hundreds of products.
• Expand your offerings. If you offer a narrow range of items, offering products in several categories will help increase order size.
• Ensure you have adequate supply of popular items.

Increase Purchase Frequency:

• Subscriptions and standing orders make it easy for busy customers to ensure they get an order from you regularly.
• Communicate – again, regular, consistent communication is key to ensure customers order from you. They need reminders to order and usually more than one, and reminders to confirm abandoned carts.

Measure & Adjust:

• Depending on the areas you decide to focus on, don’t wait to measure your results at the end of 2021. This will enable you to tweak your approach and test out different ideas. We recommend a simple monthly report showing metrics related to your goals.
• Making small adjustments over time will make it easier to course correct and know when something new is working.

Although we are in a time of lots of unknowns, farms and markets as a whole should trust in the brand they’ve built that has attracted these new customers. Take time to analyze the data and focus on customer lifetime value rather than just retention. When you are selling online or using a software platform, it is essential to be able to access and utilize your data for such analysis. Local Food Marketplace provides in-depth reporting features and fully exportable data, so that you can easily and accurately grow your business.

The post Worried about Customer Retention? Focus on this. first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

“[Growth] comes with a whole new set of questions. How do you give this legs and make it last? How do you stabilize and hold on to this market share? Where do you want to expand? What new producers or new products do you want to bring on?”

-Andre Cantelmo, Three River Farmers Alliance, LFM customer

Harvest, Order Packing & Distribution

We find that most farms and markets (before using our platform) use data exports to Excel to manage these different functions. There is tremendous room for improvement and cost savings – the challenge is that every business has different infrastructure, distribution and staff, and so a flexible but comprehensive solution that does not involve lots of spreadsheets is critical.

Here’s how LFM approaches order fulfillment:

• Give your harvest crew harvest instructions. If your harvest crew is not field packing, then they probably need different instructions than your packing crew. If you sold 2.5 lb packs of arugula to restaurants and 8 oz bags that get packed in the pack shed, your field crew needs to harvest the right number of pounds of arugula. LFM will total up your harvest quantities for products sold in multiple units.
• Crop failures, miscalculations, etc. Despite the best of intentions, the nature of farming in mother nature dictates that there are times when farms can’t fulfill all of the orders they received. LFM makes it easy to update all of your orders in just a couple of clicks.
• Pack smart. Do you use volunteers to pack? Are you aggregating from a bunch of farms that show up at different times? Or do you have an assembly line like packing system? However you get orders packed, LFM can provide packing reports sorted in the right order so you can get orders packed as quickly as possible.

Delivery

Most farms and markets started delivering orders and made a guess at a delivery fee without analyzing the cost.

Here’s how LFM can help you keep delivery costs under control:

• Automation. Make sure your customers are in your delivery area. LFM’s storefront will validate their zip or postal code in the ordering process.
• Route optimization. Delivering to hundreds of addresses every day means that you need to be efficient. LFM’s two-way integration with Routific ensures your drivers are driving the most efficient route and provides tools for customer communication about delivery status. In addition, you can further accelerate your packing by route.

Transaction Fees

Individually, $0.30 plus 2.9% or 3.5% per transaction doesn’t seem like a bad deal, but it adds up quickly and unnecessarily eats into your profit. It’s even higher, if some of your orders, such as orders with meat, cheese or other variable weight items have multiple transactions. Please note LFM does not charge transaction fees but we have architected the system to help customers minimize their transaction fees – often offering 30-50% reduction in transaction fees.

How LFM helps minimize transaction fees:

• LFM integrates with the authorize.net payment gateway, providing you access to merchant rates that are typically reserved for larger online retailers. The account and merchant rates will depend on whether you are processing payments for individual orders (considered low risk and will offer low rates) or pre-payments for subscriptions that will be delivered 6+ months away (considered higher risk by the payment card industry and require higher rates).
• In addition, LFM can minimize the number of transactions. Instead of processing payment immediately when a customer places an order and a second time to account for any changes, payment info is collected securely and then processed in bulk after meat weights or other adjustments are complete.
• LFM also offers customers the ability to edit their orders until your order deadline. Instead of submitting another order for the lettuce and head of broccoli, they can just add it to their order. This not only reduces transaction fees, but it also increases your average order size and decreases your admin time.

That’s not it! We have some more advice too…

Don’t compete with big box stores.

It can be tempting to think you have to offer the same conveniences, like same or next day delivery, as big box stores and e-commerce giants for customer retention. While some level of convenience is important, most buyers are not buying from you for convenience – they are buying the products and story you offer.

According to Darren Stott, an order fulfillment and delivery expert, “You are competing in local, direct from the farmer, high quality product. Therefore, convenience is not something you can compete on. If you do, it will cost you a lot of time and resources.“ If you are ramping up your delivery service, consider incorporating professional tools to increase your efficiency – Route Optimization, driver instructions and customer communication can make the difference in delivering 8-10 orders a day to delivering 25+. LFM has lots of tools built in for drivers to offer optimal customer service. We also offer 2-way integration with Routific for Route Optimization and driver navigation.

Think outside the box.

Don’t limit growth opportunities by sticking to the confines of your usual routines. As more and more farmers markets turned to LFM for their online ordering platform, we saw many unique and profitable models for diversifying market sales. Seasonal events and markets offered a big boon to some markets this last year; several bringing in more than $100,000 on a single day. Rather than maintaining a weekly market, a monthly market consolidates efforts and resources for producers and customers.

Online ordering and in-person sales can continue to reinforce each other as our economy re-opens. Many farmers markets have long waiting lists of vendors that wish to participate. Use online orders as a way to bring on more vendors that don’t fit in your physical space. Some vendors may not be able to sell in person; keep them involved with the online market. Even producers that sell at the physical market have to make choices about items they bring to their market due to space considerations– an online pre-order market can expand the items available and maximize their space for in-person sales. You can reach out to a whole new customer base that might not have the ability or desire to attend the in-person market, but who still want to support your business.

Join us for an upcoming webinar to take a deeper dive into how LFM can help you aim for profitable growth in 2021!

The post Getting a Handle on Sudden Growth first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Customer Communication

Pickup & delivery reminders, invoices, and payment reminders can all be automated or streamlined – saving hours every week. LFM even has an easy way to bulk message customers for last minute issues like delivery delay, pickup location issues, etc.

Order Changes

Items being out of stock, sudden crop failures, cooler issues – these things happen all too often and can take a long time to deal with – unless you’ve got a good system for it. LFM makes it easy to update orders in bulk rather than clicking into hundreds of orders the next time a storm causes problems.

Producer Communication and Updating Availability

If you manage a market with multiple producers, it can be hard to make sure everyone is on the same page and up to speed. Use LFM’s bulk communication to message all of your producers in one place. Instead of spending hours each week summarizing what each producer needs to bring for the week’s orders, you can even schedule their final order totals to be automatically sent right after ordering closes, even if ordering closes in the middle of the night. Similarly, use LFM’s flexible tools to auto-list availability based on each producer – whether they have a constantly replenished supply like a dairy or bakery or variable supply like a typical grower.

Harvest and Pack

As soon as you have an order you should not have to be re-entering data for any purpose. Whether that’s packing an order, invoicing a customer, printing out a label – anything that relies on order data should be automated. Many farms we talk to do this paperwork at night to prep for the next day and it is not scalable – LFM can automate this and offers a scalable solution that is only limited by how much you can grow and produce instead of admin constraints.

Certifications and Planning

Many farms dread the reporting for certifications and putting their production plan together. In a few clicks, you can learn how much Certified Organic Rainbow Chard was sold in 2020, what lots you sold and to whom, and your top buyers of the Rainbow chard or across all sales.

Maximizing your data from online orders is the main tool for fighting time waste. Any time lost adds up bit by bit, so developing a sales and distribution system with in-depth automation can be invaluable. Even better, solving these time stealing issues can help your farm or hub double, triple and even quadruple sales. LFM provides the necessary tools to eliminate manual redundancies and efficiently scale up your business for success.

The post Time is Money: How to Gain 20 Hours a Week first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Farmers markets provide essential services to their producers for regular sales, marketing, a customer base, and more, with producers often relying on the market for a majority of their farm income. When we transpose the traditional physical market to an online market, these services are maintained and even increased. (Check out our blog post, “How to Take Your Farmers Market Online Successfully”) Many farmers do not have the build up of knowledge, technology, and the systems needed to fully take on an online market of their own. By providing an online farmers market in addition to or as a replacement for the physical market, farmers markets are continuing to support and grow their producers’ longer term capabilities. The online farmers market service can help prepare producers so that maybe in the future it might make sense for them to have their own online stores, as well, even if it’s too much of a leap for them at this time.

What does an online farmers market do to the overall local food system?

Online farmers markets strengthen local food systems by providing a flexible alternative to the physical market. Online markets are not subject to bad weather, health crises, space limitations, or other conditions that would shut down an in-person market, thus making the local food system more resilient. Producers are able to reach not only their regular customers, but a whole new customer base that might not attend the farmers market otherwise. The farmers market plays a huge role in the fiscal stability of many local farmers, and an online market is an extension of that service.

How does the online farmers market benefit you?

In 2020, farmers markets utilizing the LFM platform saw an average order size of $59, with some markets averaging up to $179 per order. In contrast, studies done by the USDA have shown that the average amount spent at a physical farmers market to be just $15-$30 per visit. Not only did customers spend more money with LFM online farmers markets, 56% of LFM’s online farmers market customers ordered on average more than 7 times over a 30-week season (April-Oct) or once every 4 weeks. Looked at another way, more than half of online customers spent nearly $400 per season at their respective markets.

Online farmers markets provide a consistent, flexible, and safe alternative to the physical market for both producers and customers. During a time of constant regulation changes, being able to offer your farmers an alternate sales’ route that is still an entity of the farmers market brand is a massive benefit to the local food system.

The Bigger Picture

So what is the bigger picture role for farmers markets going online? For one, online markets provide a marketing system for their producers, by showcasing products and providing information all in a centralized site. Additionally, it allows your producers to experience selling online without investing a ton of resources. It’s common for farmers market vendors to resist e-commerce, but it’s crucial for agricultural sales to progress beyond one system. If farmers and markets do not go online in a way that’s approachable to them, they’re going to go by the way of the dinosaurs – and nobody wants that.

It’s important to realize how farmers markets going online is a modern approach to providing an essential service, especially to their farmers that would otherwise have a challenging time adopting an online platform of their own. When looking at the bigger picture, online farmers markets are not only helping their constituents access local food, they’re providing a much greater service to the local food economy as a whole.

The post Online Farmers Markets: An Essential Service first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

As our customers scaled up their home delivery services to meet the demand of their customers, we evaluated several route optimization solutions to integrate with LFM solution. Our decision was easy – as Routific had been a trusted solution for nearly a dozen LFM customers already and we found the solution and their team ticked all the boxes – scalable, robust, and accurate.

To date, nearly 50 LFM customers, including Delivered Fresh have paired Routific with LFM to streamline their deliveries and customer communication. We interviewed David Nowacoski, co-founder of Delivered Fresh, to learn more.

Case Study: How Delivered Fresh Uses LFM & Routific
   
David and Marla Nowacoski have a small diversified farm in Pennsylvania and are the founders of Delivered Fresh, an online foodhub that aggregates products from 57 local farmers and delivers to hundreds of homes every week. 

Delivered Fresh offers more than 500 products, ranging from milk, bread, eggs, meats, and vegetables. They’re also selling personal health products like soap, sanitizer, and masks.

“We had significant growth as soon as the pandemic began. We were up 500% literally overnight. We are closing in on a million dollars of revenue for local farms that might have otherwise been spent in big box grocery stores,” David said.

“Our customers needed a safe and convenient way to receive their groceries, and they wanted to invest in our local food system. It was incredibly motivating to help small farms distribute their products.”

Delivered Fresh carries out its home deliveries on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday every week. Tuesday is when David typically starts his route planning. 

“I honestly do not think we could be in business without both platforms. They are literally the backbone of our shop,” David said.

“LFM provides me with an attractive storefront and back office reports that are absolutely critical for my business to perform,” he explained. Specifically, David said the ability to see sales by products and sales by each individual farm allows him to isolate how a particular vendor has impacted his business. “And then Routific makes sure that I’m able to get all my produce delivered to where it needs to go, on time and when a customer expects it to arrive.”

When it came to managing his delivery logistics, David said he tried a number of different route optimization systems before choosing Routific.

“The one thing that stood out when I tried Routific was just how intuitive it was. With the other platforms, I needed someone to help guide me to set it all up. With Routific, I started my free trial and literally in less than an hour, I had my routes,” he said.

“It’s not efficient for me to give my drivers a list and just say ‘go.’ We’re trying to get to 30 to 50 stops a day, in a rural area; they’re on the road for a full 8 hours a day. It has to be optimized. The drivers need to know where to go and the most efficient routes to get there.”

Together, LFM and Routific are helping thousands of farms and food hubs find new business opportunities with the use of technology. Operating an efficient home delivery service is critical for farmers and food hubs like Delivered Fresh now and into the foreseeable future.

Introducing Routific

Here at LFM, we’re experts at helping you plan, sell, and distribute local food. We understand managing the logistics of a home delivery service can be complex, so we partnered with Routific – a delivery management platform built especially for farmers, food hubs, and farmers markets.

The team at Routific believes passionately about helping small businesses reduce waste by shaving off as much as 40% on mileage and cutting down carbon emissions. 

“In 2019 alone, our routing technology helped hundreds of local delivery businesses around the world offset more than 11,000 tonnes of carbon emissions– that’s the equivalent of planting more than 500,000 trees,” said Marc Kuo, founder and CEO of Routific. 

“It’s incredibly important to us that our technology is making a positive impact, and that’s part of the reason why we love working with farmers and food hubs who are so aligned with our mission of sustainability and protecting our planet’s resources.”

Read more:

How delivery businesses are helping to save the environment

6 ways your delivery service can lower its carbon footprint

How Routific works

Routific makes managing local delivery routes effortless and profitable. The platform helps you perform three key stages when executing home deliveries:

1. Plan and optimize delivery routes

• See a bird’s eye view of your day’s routes, and make last-minute changes with an intuitive, drag-n-drop interface.
      
    

2. Dispatch delivery routes to drivers

• Drivers can access routes, turn-by-turn directions, and delivery notes on an easy-to-use mobile app. They can even take photos as proof of delivery, which is especially important in our contactless world.
   
   

3. Communicate with customers

• Send automated text messages or emails to customers letting them know when they can expect their delivery.
      
      

Want to learn more about how Routific works with Local Food Marketplace? Register for a webinar or get in touch. 

Contact Local Food Marketplace: info@localfoodmarketplace.com
Contact Routific: info@routific.com

The post Farm-to-Door: LFM partners with Routific to help customers manage 145% increase of delivery orders first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Photograph by Profound Foods and Profound Microfarm

Located in Lucas, Texas, Profound Microfarms produces high quality, aquaponic and hydroponic lettuces, herbs, and microgreens. Farmer Jeff Bednar and his team work with LFM to provide sustainable greenhouse products to hundreds of restaurants and discerning chefs throughout the region of North Texas. In 2018, Jeff and other local farmers teamed up to form Profound Foods, a farmer-owned food hub providing North Texas Grown artisan produce, meats, and dairy to farm-to-table restaurants.

We recently had the opportunity to speak with Jeff Bednar and Josh Montgomery of Profound Foods about how LFM helps them maximize their online sales system.

LFM: Hello, Jeff and Josh! Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. Firstly, how does the LFM software platform help you to increases profitability and maximize sales?
JOSH: Before LFM, Jeff (my boss) was just taking orders completely over the phone, by text, e-mails, but most of the time people were calling their orders in. Then, orders were put in manually using the Square system. Since implementing LFM, the online ordering system has saved us 16-18 hours per week. It’s definitely helped us scale up a whole lot quicker. We can just tell our new customers and people signing up to create an online profile and then view all of our products.
In the past, Jeff would build something in Word, send it in an e-mail to prospective customers, and then take orders over the phone. We still send out an e-mail every week, but it’s now just pointing people towards our LFM online storefront. It’s saved us a lot of time.

LFM: In terms of your processes after you receive orders, how do you currently use LFM? How does that process compare to before using LFM?
JOSH: We do two delivery days right now, so we rely on LFM to send the pick lists to farmers. Then, every morning on the delivery day, we print out the pack list and use the pack list to verify that all the farmers have brought everything, that everything is in the totes, and that everything has been harvested. Most of the product comes from Profound Microfarms, so we use that list as a harvest list to figure out what to harvest, as well.
Basically, everything will come in and we use a pack list to put everything in totes. Then we have a meat list to make sure all the weights are written correctly, and then we enter the weights into the LFM system. After all of that is done and there are no more changes, we print off and sort invoices for our customers, and then we deliver the products.
Before LFM we would have to collect all of the order information from e-mails and create our own lists. We couldn’t have done what we’re able to do now with that old system. We are able to ship exponentially more products than before when we had to put all the lists together in the early morning.

LFM: How has the LFM software impacted your product harvest, pack, and distribution process?
JEFF: LFM has definitely given us more clarity – before it was way more chaotic. We are able to work with many more vendors with the automated system. We would not be able to work with as many vendors if we had to communicate to 34 farmers and ranchers if the system weren’t automated. That would severely limit the amount of producers we can work with on a daily basis.

LFM: Can you explain some ways your overall sales and distribution processes changed once you implemented LFM software?
JEFF: We went from working with 25 restaurant customers to over 100 since implementing the software over a year ago. We were able to scale to do 4x as many customers as what we had thought. I wouldn’t have had time to do the marketing side without the 18 hours we save each week with LFM.

Are you interested in learning more about how the LFM platform can impact your business?
Check out our Solutions for Farms and Solutions for Food Hubs!
Contact Us to register your free demo!

The post Quadrupling Customers & Saving Time: An Interview with Profound Foods first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

As the season winds down, are you reviewing how this year has gone for your hub and where improvements can be made? Did you experience trouble this season with a producer circumventing your hub and making sales around it? We hear on almost a daily basis the struggle that hubs face in maintaining a working relationship with their producers and avoiding the dreaded, “Sale around the hub”.

Our marketing team of Amy McCann and Ryan Crum have researched, analyzed, and written this report using input from the many hubs we work with across North America as well as their personal experience. We look at why producers may sell around the hub, what food hubs can do to avoid it, and key aspects of a producer agreement.

For more information on how LFM can help your hub make the most of your sales, and grow them, contact us!

The post Announcing LFM’s Free Whitepaper: Avoiding Sales Around the Hub first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.