Is E-commerce Right for Your Farm Business? Key Considerations and Strategies

Understanding the Basics

The world of e-commerce presents a promising avenue for farmers looking to expand their sales, but diving in requires thoughtful planning and dedicated effort. In a recent webinar hosted by Katie and Sydney from ChopLocal, numerous insights were shared about what it takes for farmers to succeed in online meat sales. Here, we explore these valuable points to guide your journey into e-commerce.

Watch the recording below or scroll down for a summary and full transcript.

Inventory Management: Balancing Multiple Channels

One of the core strategies for e-commerce success is effective inventory management, especially if you're selling through multiple channels. It's crucial to ensure you don't deplete inventory in one area while trying to fulfill orders in another.

Avoiding Stockouts

This challenge of balancing inventory can be mitigated by using integrated inventory management systems that track stock levels across all sales platforms. By doing so, you can prevent a scenario where customers place orders only to be disappointed by out-of-stock notifications.

Marketing: The Lifeblood of E-commerce Sales

Consistent marketing efforts are integral to gaining traction in the e-commerce space. The webinar highlighted that over 40% of farms with sales exceeding $100,000 were very comfortable with marketing, compared to only 18% of farms with sales under $100,000.

Multichannel Approach

Successful e-commerce farmers use a variety of marketing channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, Google Business, and email marketing. Providing value through informative and entertaining content not only attracts potential buyers but also fosters loyalty. A crucial tip is to allocate about 10% of your sales to marketing efforts.

Shipping: A Pillar of E-commerce Success

Shipping logistics can significantly impact your sales performance. Farms that incorporate e-commerce and shipping into their operations almost double their annual meat sales compared to those that do not. However, excelling at shipping requires mastering several factors, including cost management and packaging.

Optimizing Shipping Costs

Consider the use of styrofoam coolers and gel packs to maintain product integrity during transit. Additionally, strategically offer free shipping at a certain order value and find the optimal order size to maximize your shipping boxes' space.

Photos and Product Descriptions: Capturing Customer Attention

High-quality visuals and detailed product descriptions are essential components of a compelling online store. Eye-catching, colorful pictures, particularly those that feature family or baby animals, help create a connection with potential buyers.

Multiple Angles and Complete Details

For each product, include 2-3 photos showing both raw and cooked states. Ensure that your descriptions are thorough, covering weight, contents, and farming practices. This transparency helps avoid customer uncertainty and reduces cart abandonment rates.

Building and Sustaining an Online Presence

Launching an online store and expecting immediate success is unrealistic. Establishing a consistent customer base typically takes six to twelve months, with significant growth visible after a couple of years.

Encouraging Customer Reviews

Collecting customer reviews and offering discounts for feedback can enhance credibility and trust. Promoting your online store through your existing social media channels can also help overcome the initial resistance some might have towards technology.

E-commerce Costs: Budgeting for Success

Running an online store involves various costs. These include platform fees, which can range from $30 to $400 per month, credit card transaction fees between 1.5% to 3%, and shipping costs.

Selecting the Right Platform

When choosing an e-commerce platform, factors to consider include user-friendliness, customer interface, and available integrations (e.g., shipping platforms, point of sale systems, email marketing, and accounting software). It's also important to decide between pricing per pound and using weight ranges, as this can impact customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Patience and Commitment: The Final Ingredients

The journey to e-commerce success is not a short one. As emphasized by Sydney in the webinar, dedicating time, skill, and effort to responding to customer inquiries and committing to shipping are vital.

Persistence Pays Off

Farms that persevere often see increased profits over time. Katie's survey findings from ChopLocal show that e-commerce can boost annual meat sales, with steady growth over six months to two years.

Final Thoughts

For farms considering the leap into e-commerce, it's about more than just having an online presence. Consistent marketing, efficient inventory and shipping management, high-quality photos and descriptions, and persistent effort are all part of the recipe for success.

Full Transcript:

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:00:00]:
Okay. Well, with that, we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you guys for joining us tonight. Hopefully, if you've kind of been on the edge about whether or not e commerce is a good move for your operation tonight, we'll be able to give you an answer to that. So as we get started, my name is Sydney Hadacek and I am a producer support specialist with Chop Local. And I'm joined tonight by Katie Olthoff, who is the co founder of Chop Local. Before we get into things too deeply, we always like to chat a little bit about who we are at chop local and what we do. So we are an online farmers market specifically for meat.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:00:42]:
We work with dozens of farmers and small butcher shops across the country, helping them increase their profits through direct to consumer sales. Most specifically, we focus on helping them build their online stores and help them be good at ecommerce. But we also provide lots of educational materials to assist them specifically with meat marketing. We also provide a lot of these materials for free, so you can always visit sell choplocal.com to see what we have. So with that, I will go ahead and pass things over to Katie to get started.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:01:22]:
Okay, so first up, I want to address Sydney froze a couple of times on my screen, like really briefly. Hopefully that was maybe just on my end, but I hope I don't freeze for you all. So, Sydney, text me or let me know if you see any issues on my end and I'll turn off my video and see if that helps. Okay? Okay. Second, here's what we're going to cover tonight. A lot of you on the call took our survey this summer about selling meat direct to consumer, and we're going to share some of those results tonight to help inform you about e commerce related to direct meat sales. We're going to talk about the necessities Sydney is going to cover that, the cost of e commerce, some things to consider when you're choosing a platform, some things to consider for marketing success, shipping, as well as setting your store up for success. Sydney, go ahead to the next slide.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:02:27]:
So Sydney gave you the introduction to chop local, but here's a little bit more about us to kind of tell you why we're doing this tonight. What gives us this knowledge that we have to share? We have the survey to share, but we've also worked with over five dozen farms and butcher shops across the country who have online stores on the chop local platform. This is what our current map looks like. This is as of early November 2023. For people who watch this later on on YouTube. This map may look different. Our goal this winter is really to expand into some of these areas where we don't have as many farms because we want Americans all over the country to be able to find local meat or meat that was raised in a way that they feel really comfortable with. Okay, so to get started here, this is a big one.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:03:29]:
On the annual survey, we asked voluntarily, what are your annual meat sales? And this includes online sales and offline sales. These results here are only the farms. It does not include the butcher shops. What we found is that farms that do not have an ecommerce piece of their operation were selling about $75,000 in meat annually. But farms with ecommerce sold, on average, about $105,000. It's important to point out that this is a chicken and egg scenario. We don't know if those farms were selling more before they entered into ecommerce, and that's what enabled them to maybe cover the costs of ecommerce or if they were selling less and then ecommerce added sales for them. We assume it's the latter, but it's important to say that our survey doesn't really ask that question.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:04:36]:
We also asked them how long they'd had an ecommerce store. So this is something that I talk one on one with producers about a lot. That when you first launch your ecommerce store the first few months, it's not like turning on a light switch. It does take some time to build up your online customer base, and you see that between six months and two years, it's pretty steady. Then after two years, that annual meet sales number goes up even further. We also asked what percentage of your sales happen online versus offline. And I see we have a typo on this slide. Sorry about that.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:05:27]:
But if your store is less than six months old, it's going to be only about 22% of your sales that are happening online. After your store is a little bit older, you can expect 40% to 50% of your sales to be happening online. Most of these farms that are selling online are also doing something like on farm pickup, where they have a farm store, or maybe they're doing a farmers market or wholesale sales. But again, we want your expectations to be very clear that you're probably not going to have 100% of your sales happening online. You probably are going to want some sort of offline sales channel as well. Okay. And then we got into what products people are selling, and I'm going to try to go through this kind of slowly to explain this to you. But if the farm is only selling one type of meat and it's not beef, their average sales annually, online or offline, are around $40,000.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:06:36]:
So here we're talking about farms that only sell lamb, only sell pork, only sell chicken, only sell turkey, maybe only sell goat. If they're only selling beef, that number does go up, on average to close to 75,000. Now, these next two columns that you see that are around 115,000. That's if you have beef and at least one other meat, or pork and at least one other meat. And then the next one says two meats. That would be two meats that aren't beef or pork. It would be like chicken and turkey, or lamb and turkey. We saw some of that three or more meats.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:07:17]:
You're up there over 110,000 again. But it seems like beef is really key to increasing those sales. That aligns with what numbers show Americans are eating. There's a lot of beef moved in this country. A lot of beef eaten in this country. Okay, this slide again, we took these farms and the amount of their annual sales, and we separated them into three categories. Less than $100,000, between $100,000 and $200,000, and over $200,000 in meat. And the dark green column represents the farms that were over $200,000 in meat annually.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:08:05]:
And you can see that 73% of those farms have an online store, and 64% of those farms offer shipping, which we're going to talk a little bit more about shipping later on, too. Only 30% of those farms are offering one type of meat, and in most cases, it was beef. It's hard to get over $200,000 in meat sales with any of the other proteins. Unfortunately, we also asked a little bit about subscription boxes. This is a newer trend that we're seeing just in the past few years. But about 43% of those farms over $200,000 are using subscription boxes as part of their sales strategy.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:08:49]:
All right, so now we're going to jump into things that you need to be considering when you're thinking about starting your online store. So when we talk to potential vendors, we really think there are three essential components that you should have, and that is time, skill, and effort. And we've listed a few of the most specific things that we think you should have before starting an online store.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:09:15]:
The first thing is.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:09:19]:
Time to respond to customer inquiries in a timely manner. So, a few of the questions that we see almost daily on chop local are, when am I going to get my order? Was this product raised organically, grass fed, those are the sorts of things we see every day.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:09:37]:
How does shipping work for you?

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:09:40]:
So do you have the time to commit to answering those customer questions? The next thing is commitment to shipping once a week. Now, not every farm or butcher shop with an online store ships, but it definitely is trending in that direction. So we want you to think about do you have the time to commit.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:09:59]:
To shipping if you're going to have an online store?

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:10:04]:
The next big question we want you to ask is, do I have an inventory management strategy? So Katie talked a little bit earlier about how most farms have multiple different channels that they might be selling through. So whether that's farmers markets or just selling word of mouth to your local customers, it's likely that in addition to your online store, you'll have other channels. So we want you to think about how that will affect your inventory and make sure that you don't deplete inventory in one area while trying to sell to another. I'm actually going to shut my video off just in case I'm freezing a bit. Sorry about that. Internet, am I right? So moving on, the next thing, and probably one of the biggest, we would say, is being able to commit to consistent marketing efforts. Katie mentioned this, but it's unfortunately not just like flipping on a light switch. When you have an online store, it's not just going to click right away.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:11:08]:
And so we want you to be able to put in the work when it comes to marketing efforts. So whether this is through Facebook, Instagram, email marketing, different ads in your area, those are all great options. But just know that it will take some effort from your part when it comes to marketing your products.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:11:28]:
The next two things are just things.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:11:31]:
We want you to keep in mind so that your expectations are set as you go into this. So the first is to expect some failures, right? Specifically when we think about shipping, you know that there are going to be failures. It happens. Products thought things don't move as fastly.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:11:49]:
As we thought they would.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:11:52]:
And so being able to expect those things, incorporating those potential failures into your pricing so that when they do happen here and there, it doesn't come as a huge surprise and hurt your bottom line too much. And then the last thing is patience, knowing that it can take six to twelve months or even a few years.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:12:11]:
Before things really start to gain some.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:12:15]:
Traction and really get that consistent customer base on a week to week basis. So knowing that things might not click right away, but they're coming. So as you think about the costs that come with ecommerce, we have three things that we really want you to consider. So the first, obviously, the biggest are your platform costs. Now, the range that we see here is very wide. As you can imagine, the platforms that are designed a little more generally and not so much for farmers or busher shops are going to be on the less expensive end, while the platforms.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:12:57]:
That.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:12:58]:
Are designed for farmers and do provide some more support and resources are going to cost you a little bit more. To give you an idea, we see anything from about $30 a month to $400 a month, depending on what you're looking for. So we really encourage you to do your research and find a platform that.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:13:16]:
Fits within your budget.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:13:20]:
The next thing kind of comes with the territory of ecommerce. So credit card fees, these, again, can range, but we do see anywhere from about one and a half percent to 3% for credit card fees. So that's another thing that you want to think about to incorporate into your pricing. Last is shipping costs. As we've talked about, we see more and more people shipping with their ecommerce platforms. So thinking about how shipping is going to affect the way that you price your products is really important. All right, moving on. So you've decided that you want to get into ecommerce.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:14:00]:
So you're considering what platforms might work for you.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:14:05]:
And we want to give a disclaimer that we're not trying to tell you that chop local is just the end all, be all of online stores for selling meat. We know that it's not the perfect solution for everyone out there, so we want you to decide what's important to you.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:14:21]:
There's probably not one perfect fit for.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:14:25]:
Any operation, but that's why it's important to do your research, pick out the features that are important to you, and go with that. So getting into these different considerations, the first one is ease of use, and this is kind of twofold. So you want to think about two different things, kind of the vendor tools.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:14:44]:
And the customer interface.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:14:48]:
So we've seen some platforms that are designed really specific for farmers and butcher shops. And while that's great, and it makes it super easy from your end, sometimes this sacrifices the customer experience at the same time. And so we want to be able to help you find a platform that's a good balance between those two things. Because, of course, if the customer doesn't have a good experience, obviously the chances of them coming back to purchase again decrease. And so being able to find a balance, like I said, between those two things is really important. The next thing to consider is the integrations that platforms offer. Now, this list right here is by.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:15:28]:
No means all encompassing of integrations that.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:15:33]:
Different platforms offer, but these are just a few of the most common that we get asked questions about on the day to day. So the first would be a shipping platform. This is really important because it saves you time and effort so you don't have to manually pull all those orders in every single time.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:15:50]:
The next would be a point of sale.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:15:54]:
So especially for those of you that do things like farmers markets, a point of sale is probably pretty important to you. So another good thing to consider and then the last two things we have on here are email marketing and an accounting software. So again, like I said, not an all encompassing list, but they are some important things that you should think about when you're thinking which platform would work best for your operation. The last thing that we have here is weight and how you want to handle this. When it comes to how you are going to sell your meat, there are basically two ways in which you can handle this. The first is price per pound or otherwise known as exact weight. And then your other option is to sell by weight ranges. Now, depending on which of these you choose, it can really affect your inventory management.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:16:46]:
And so you want to think about that before you make a decision. So one thing we like to advise potential vendors on is that when you're trying to decide between these two and you might be Swede one way or another, we want you to know that customers today are really comparing your store to other online shopping experiences, not necessarily the experience that they have in a grocery store. And so what I mean by this is that they want to know the price that they are going to pay before they check out. So sometimes when it comes to pricing by exact weight or price per pound, it does cause some uncertainty on their end because they're not sure of the exact price that they will end up paying. So just another thing to think about at the end of the day, I think for the most part, we do see a pretty even 50 50 split.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:17:40]:
On how different platforms offer this.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:17:44]:
So really that again, is up to you. Now, Katie, we'll talk a little bit about marketing considerations.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:17:53]:
All right, so as we mentioned, we've both said it before, it takes some time to build up your online store. And we asked in our survey this year, how comfortable do you feel with marketing? And what we found is that the people who were more comfortable with marketing had the higher sales. That doesn't sound super surprising, right? But it's interesting to actually see the data. So for farms that were over $100,000 in sales, over 40% of those people said that they are very comfortable with marketing. For farms with less than $100,000 in sales, only 18% of them said that they were very comfortable with marketing. What we have found through chop local is that marketing, you get better at it the longer that you do it, because you learn what is working for you. And as Sydney mentioned earlier, consistent marketing efforts are really important. We saw a variety because we asked also what channels do you use for marketing? And the answers included Facebook, Instagram, Google Business profile, a face group instead of a Facebook page, as well as email marketing.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:19:16]:
And the number of people using those different platforms really kind of goes along with the popularity of the platform. So there are more Facebook users than Instagram users. That's the same for our farm population. That's marketing. What I have found over the years is that you will use the channels that you feel most comfortable with and those are the customers that you'll end up going to. So if you're not an Instagram user, making Instagram the core of your marketing plan is probably not going to work out for you in the long run. Now, regardless of what these marketing channels are, here are some ideas of what you can share. One rule of thumb with social media is that you want to provide value to your followers.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:20:05]:
Either you're providing them with information or you're providing them with entertainment. You're not just reminding them that they can purchase from you. That's very important. But here are some other ideas. Feature some products and talk about the cut. Give some recipe ideas. Give some cooking and grilling tips. Make them really feel like they are learning something from you and you are the expert on that meat.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:20:31]:
Okay, you can also, as I said, it is important to remind them that you have these products for sale. It's also important to remind them of your shipping options, your pickup instructions, which farmers markets you'll be at, where they can get your product. Then you can also provide some social proof. So social proof means any way that you are showing off the fact that other people buy from you and they're happy. And that may be things like a picture of a customer at your farmers market table interacting with you, or a picture of you dropping off a box that you're shipping through FedEx or ups. Something like that that shows or reviews something like that that shows that other people have purchased. And last but not least, farm content or butcher shop content consumers want to see behind the scenes. And that's one of the big benefits of them buying directly from you is that they can get to know their farmer, get to know this small business, and they want to see these pictures of what's going on inside the gates or inside the doors of your operation.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:21:46]:
We asked what the marketing spend was annually, and this included ecommerce fees, farmers market fees, everything, advertising. And again, no surprise, we see that the farms that are selling more are spending a lot more on marketing. We recommend when you're starting out, you probably need to spend about 10% of your sales on marketing efforts. That obviously $1,500 is not 10% of $100,000 in sales. But some of that could be that they are spending a lot of time on free marketing efforts like social media, instead of on paid advertising or paid marketing. Either way, it needs to be part of your strategy, whether you're selling online or offline. We can't ignore that. Consistent marketing just has to be done.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:22:45]:
And then we promised we'd talk a little bit about shipping. So there are plenty of farmers out there that have an ecommerce store and they're not shipping their meat. Most of those farmers either have like a farm store for on farm pickup or they're doing farmers markets and people can preorder or maybe they're doing delivery. Average sales for those farms annual meat sales is around $80,000. Now, average meat sales for farmers who are shipping is closer to $150,000. So it's almost double for the farms that have ecommerce with shipping. Now, before anybody gets too excited and they're like, I got to get an ecommerce store tomorrow and start shipping so that I can double my sales. Remember that it does take time to build up to this and it depends on what products you have and really what kind of local customer base you have that's willing to provide that social proof, those reviews, that word of mouth, take that leap to ordering online and things like that to really make this work for you.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:23:59]:
When we talk about shipping, the biggest question that I get asked all the time is how much is shipping going to cost? Or someone has already attempted shipping and they know that it's expensive. We have a shipping webinar that we can send you after this. Since you're attending this one. Shipping should cost you $25 to $35 to ship in a two day ground region, which is going to be kind of your region of the country for the most part. We asked this on the survey last year, and average shipping costs have actually gone down since last year. And I don't think that's because the cost of a styrofoam cooler or the cost of UPS shipping is decreasing. I think it's because farmers are getting better at doing it more effectively. So that $60 plus thing, I would say that those are people that tried it once.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:24:56]:
They didn't get training that they need in order to do it less expensively. You see a lot more people in kind of that $20 to $40 range. And that's in line with what we would expect when you use the methods that we suggest. Just really briefly, we do suggest using a styrofoam cooler because they hold the most, and they are the most effective at keeping things cold. We don't typically recommend dry ice unless you have a great supply of it that is close by and cheap. Typically, we recommend gel packs instead. And there's a specific gel pack. It's called an ice blanket.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:25:36]:
It looks like big bubble wrap, but each of the little pockets is a gel pack. We really like those from shippingcoolers.com. They tend to do a really good job. And then, like I said, we stick with a two day ground region. We're not trying to overnight it. If you try to overnight it via air, that's when you're getting into that 60, 70, $80 pricing.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:26:01]:
Okay, so once you've made the decision, you're ready to set up your store. We've got some tips for success for you here. And these are tips that really can apply to any platform you use. So we want you to be using these no matter what kind of store you use. So the first is no hidden fee. According to a Shopify study, the number one reason shoppers abandoned their cart at checkout is because the extra costs were too high. So whether this be surprising, shipping costs, credit card fees, delivery fees, any sort of thing like that that they were not aware of when they were just on the product page.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:26:44]:
Is going to.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:26:44]:
Cause them to maybe abandon their cart. And so providing all of those costs up front and incorporating those into your product prices is going to lead to more success. The next thing is shipping, and maybe more specifically, free shipping. Now, according to another Shopify study, 66%.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:27:04]:
Of consumers expect free shipping for all online orders.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:27:10]:
Now, we know that this might not apply specifically to shipping meat because that can be a bit more expensive than maybe other things that might ship. But we encourage you to think about at what threshold of an order value can you offer free shipping to your customers. People are definitely looking for it and expect it. And so we want you to think about how you can incorporate that into your ecommerce plan. Next, and this kind of applies to the shipping discussion as well, is to find your sweet spot. What is your perfect size order that can help you maximize your space in.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:27:46]:
Your box, in the pricing of your.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:27:50]:
Shipping in the best way possible. So you want to consider the product sizes and weights and how again, you can maximize your box space. Next is reviews. And you hear us kind of talking about the same things over, but it's because we truly do think that these kind of things are really important. These reviews, like Katie said, really give proof that customers have ordered from you before and enjoy your products and find value in them. And so displaying these prominently on your website is going to be really important. So you can either ask your customers directly, talk to them when you're doing.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:28:30]:
A pickup or a delivery.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:28:34]:
Post something on your Facebook and ask your followers to give you a product review. Anything you can think of to encourage those past customers to leave you a review. The other thing you can do is offer a discount or a coupon code on their next order for those customers who are willing to give you a review. So when it comes to your product pages and what you kind of want to display visually, we have a few tips for you here as well. So the first thing to think about is photos. We want you to be really conscious about the photos that you choose to use on your website because this is really what people connect with.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:29:14]:
So colorful green pastures, vibrant photos really.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:29:21]:
Tend to do well. The other thing is family photos. People like to know, kind of like to connect the face with the business and know who they are purchasing from. So those photos go over well as well. And then the other thing is baby animals.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:29:37]:
We all love them, so that's another.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:29:41]:
Popular choice as well. Next thing is to highlight your farm or your butcher shop. Why should people be purchasing from you? What is special about your products and why does your operation stand out? So really take this time to brag on yourself and tell people what's so special about what you are offering. When we move into product photos, we'd like to recommend that you use two to three photos per product. It's always a good idea to include both a raw and a cooked photo here. We know that not everybody has photos of their products and so it is okay to use stock photos.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:30:20]:
But this disclaimer that we want to.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:30:24]:
Give is don't copy and paste from the Internet. Make sure you are using a stock photo website and especially we don't want you to copy and paste from a food blogger when it comes to the product description, we want you to be as complete and as detailed as possible.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:30:41]:
So that means including the number of.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:30:46]:
Either steaks or beef sticks or whatever it may be, the number in that package, the weight per package, the thickness of whatever cut they might be ordering bone in or boneless. All of these things might differ a bit from product to product, but the most important thing is to be as.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:31:05]:
Complete as possible because we don't want.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:31:09]:
Customers to have any sort of uncertainty when it comes to what they are getting. The chances are is if they have to ask questions, it's more likely that they might abandon their cart. So make sure that you have those complete product descriptions. A few other things that you might.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:31:25]:
Consider in your product description are offering.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:31:30]:
Recipe ideas, maybe offering cooking or grilling tips. When it comes to a specific cut, you might also include alternative cut names, a few of your farm practices, specialty claims like high marbling, those sorts of things can also be helpful when it.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:31:47]:
Comes to complete product descriptions.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:31:53]:
We'll go back to Katie.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:32:01]:
Don't worry. Zoom just told me that I was muted, so I think I'm back now. After you have set up your store, the next step is really getting your customers to use it. And one of the things that we have found is really beneficial is to run a sale or offer a coupon or discount that is specifically for your farm store or for your online store. We know your customers might be really used to texting you or messaging you their order. You kind of have to be a little bit pushy about encouraging them to use the online store instead. The other thing is to promote your store via social media and not just put a link in your profile, but again, remind people as often as possible they can order online and use a direct link to that store as much as possible so that they can just click on it really easily and get to where you want them to go. With that said, there will be some customers who just won't use it, and sometimes it's because they just aren't comfortable with the technology.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:33:11]:
Maybe it's a certain age or demographic of your customers that don't use it, but you have others that would be like power users. That is pretty normal. But if that is something that's happening really frequently, which we hear from some people, is that people just won't use their online store at all, that's a sign going back to what Sydney talked about, that maybe that balance between the features for you as the seller and the features available for the customers, that balance just isn't there or there's something that's ultimately really confusing for them. We do see this with people selling by exact weight. Some software platforms allow you to essentially the customer puts a deposit down and then when the farmer fulfills the order, they go in and put the exact weight and it charges the full amount for the customer at that time. Some customers don't really like that, and so they will message you instead to find out what you have in stock, how big it is, exactly what it's going to cost. You tell them exactly what their price is going to be and then they decide yes or no and we'll pay you for it. But these are some signs that you maybe should change.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:34:24]:
Take a look at the information you're providing. Maybe there's not enough of it. Maybe they have questions or maybe the platform isn't a great fit for them. Okay, so we covered a lot there. Hopefully it gave you something to think about. If you are thinking about moving into ecommerce at this time, you can go ahead and start putting questions into the Q A box if you have them. If not, we encourage you. Or if it's a question that you'd rather ask us one on one, please contact Sydney or I via email.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:35:02]:
You can also visit sell choplocal.com, fill out that vendor inquiry form and we'll get back in touch with you. And as we mentioned earlier, marketing is so important for your success. So our next webinar next month is going to be all about using canva for your direct to consumer meet. Actually, Sydney used canva to make this PowerPoint instead of the normal software that we use, and she thought it worked really well. And so we're going to be sharing some different ways that you can use canva and how it can make your social media better as well as make your stories better. Okay, well, I guess that's it for tonight. Thank you everybody for hopping on with us. Follow up with Sydney or I if something pops into your head later, we will send out this recording, probably tomorrow.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:35:59]:
And you can check our YouTube page for our other webinars if you're interested in kind of continuing to learn from us.