I’m currently in a mode of needing to completely re-tool our farm website and on-line store and the choices are overwhelming.
All the work comes at the worst possible time, lambing! It was prompted by a subscription renewal due end of May for an add-on service to our on-line store to calculate sales taxes. The price for that service went from being $235/year to $2987/yr!!! Colorado charges sales tax and has delivery fees that vary across the entire state. Food is taxed some places but not others. So I get that it’s a complex thing to calculate but it’s not worth 10 times the price in a one year bump! The shopping cart tool I use does not support any less expensive choices that are even close to the same price I was getting. The least expensive is still a whopping $1288/yr!
Farm shops that sell perishable products plus non-perishable ones (wool, yarn and meat) are faced with lots of choices but all seem to have one or more issues. I have to sell by weight when the packages are labeled with a weight and price. That means until I actually pick the pieces out for a specific order I cannot know the final price. Most general purpose shopping cart systems cannot handle this. Most vegetable focused systems deal with it by charging by the piece, a bunch or 6 or something. Meat is USDA inspected and labeled and until my current stock of pre-labeled with a price meats are gone I am forbidden from charging anyone more than the price listed on the package. Our sheep are of varying sizes when they are slaughtered. So a rack from one can be 2/3 the size of a rack from another so I need to handle the differences in my store.
I also need to handle sales of entire animals based on carcass weight. I will not ship meat (too restrictive and too much liability of the package is delayed) but I do ship other stuff so need integrated shipping options.
MailChimp, my newsletter tool also is removing a few key features so I’m looking at alternatives for that as well.
And nearly ALL of the packages, even Farm Focused ones do not handle live animal sales. So I still have to do all of that work via individual email. There are too may regulations and testing and inspections for live animals for most shopping cart systems. There are some on-line live animal auctions but none that handle my breed and are only once or twice a year at best.
I’m in the throes of comparing the top candidates now and hope to get one settled on, my wool and meat inventory moved over and set up again all during the lambalanch expected any hour now.
Just a rant, not really expecting any solutions. But if you buy farm products direct from a farmer via an on-line web site and they have a system that you, as a customer, find attractive and like please let me know the web site so I can take a look and see what they are using.
