Your online market is where you can showcase your freshly grown produce, meat products, cheese, and other unique items you want to offer to customers. This tool is very versatile and can be used for CSA shares, events, selling livestock, sending orders, inventory tracking and more. You'll find all your options by navigating to Market in the left menu.
Note: The menu layout has changed slightly since the video above was recorded. Overall, the concepts are identical and the video should still be very beneficial for you. Be aware the new menus are shown in the images below.
Market Dashboard
When you access the Market section, you'll first see a Market Dashboard. This is a quick, at-a-glace look at your sales, orders, products, and more. You'll find charts and graphs showing you statistics and data for your sales over time, total orders, and average order value. These can be useful for you to determine seasonality of your business, and prepare for expected busy times (or a vacation during your less hectic times of year!) You can use the date filter at the top to update the dashboard. Perhaps you'd like to see this just this month, or last quarter.
Of course, if this is your first time access the page, there won't be much here yet. Keep reading to learn more about setting up your products, designing your store, and selling to your customers.
Products
The products section is where you'll create and track the items you sell in your Farmbrite market. These could be products you want to sell online in your Farmbrite store, or items you'll sell at a farmers market in person through the Farmbrite POS. You might add CSA shares, varieties of meat and produce, tickets to classes or events, or really any items that you sell! Products can also be subdivided into product variations to account for sizes, package quantities, and other product differentiations.
The page shows you a list of your products with the available quantity in your inventory. You can use the filter in the upper right to find products in specific categories or statuses, and click the column headers to sort the page. We know you are always coming up with new and creative products, so you can easily add new ones using the New Product button. If this is your first time adding your products, you could also upload them from a spreadsheet for easier setup.
Your products can also be connected to your inventory items, making it easy to pick the products for your orders from your inventory. This helps with harvest to sale traceability by connecting the harvests you add to your inventory with the sales orders for customers. It also helps you keep track of how many you have for sale, and how many might be set aside for other uses or existing orders.
Orders
The Orders section of your Market displays past orders for you to review. This includes administratively created orders, those added through the online store, and ones from the POS. Like the products page, you might find it helpful to use the filter button in the upper right to find exactly what you're looking for. Maybe you want to find orders that need to be picked and shipped, or take a look at last season's orders to be prepared for your upcoming CSA distribution.
You can also manually create new orders from this page as well, allowing you to enter them after an event if you didn't use the POS. You can even email an invoice to a customer from an order that makes it easy for them to pay online; this might be helpful if someone calls in an order over the phone.
Settings
Now that you have products created, you'll want to configure your market. You will have many options for customization including logos, banners, information about your business, payment methods accepted, taxes charged, and more. You'll see these expanded in a secondary menu when you choose Settings.
- Settings - You'll find basic settings like order numbers, notification emails, taxes, and delivery fees here. You can also connect your Stripe online payment processing account here to enable credit card process through your shop, POS, and orders pages.
- Online Sales - This is where you can set up your online shop and open your point of sale register system. You'll also have selections for required fields in the online store, promo codes, and a pay later option.
- Look and Feel - You can upload a banner and logo here, which will be used in your online store and on invoice and receipt documents.
- Contact Details - Add your social media and other contact information here so your customers can get a hold of you if needed.
- Pickup Locations - If you offer pickup for items ordered online, you can define where you customers can pick up the items here. This might be your farm, a local farmers market, a grocery store, or anywhere else you'll meet a customer to fulfill an order.
Creating Orders in the Online Store and POS
We learned about the Orders page above, but also wanted to highlight two additional ways you might also add orders to your market.
- The online store is customer facing and meant to showcase your products and services available online. Farmbrite hosts the shop, and you can link it on your website or send it to your customers directly. Your customers can browse through your products and categories and add their desired items to their cart. They'll then checkout and provide their contact information and payment, or opt to pay later via an invoice if you'd like to offer that option.
- The Point of Sale (POS) is similar, but meant for internal use at your farm store or a farmers market. You might access this on a tablet at the market to process orders and take online payments. The POS can be connected to a Stripe credit card terminal to take in-person cards, or your customers can scan a QR code to use their device's digital wallet for quick payment. The layout is similar to the online store above, but with a side bar cart displaying the items in the order included as well. The POS can also optionally bypass collecting customer information, helping you more quickly serve your customers in a face spaced environment.
Market Reports
You'll find lots of useful information on your Market Dashboard, but if you'd like to dive a bit deeper into your market orders, Farmbrite offers standard market reports to help you see what orders are in progress, have payments due, or have been completed. You'll also have reports for top customers and top products to help prioritize your business operations and develop market strategy. If those are not enough, you'll find custom reporting options for you to build unique reports tailored for your needs.
Other Items to Note
Shop refunds- Since payment is processed through Stripe, you would also do refunds through them. Log into your Stripe account to do this and for more information. You can also account for the refunds in your Farmbrite accounting as well.
Quick Pay - Farmbrite has an option to use Stripe's Quick Pay processing. You can use this at off-farm events or at your farm stand. This lets a customer scan your unique QR code and then is quickly able to pay for your farm products. This is a contactless payment system which is a convenient way to offer credit card payments to your customers.
Now that you understand the market basics, move on to other articles in this series to get more in-depth information and tutorials about each of these features.