Farmers’ markets are physical markets that run periodically in urban and regional areas to improve access to local food and to give producers an opportunity to market directly to consumers. It's possible to add an online element onto these markets, to increase reach.
The farmer's market can create a hub profile for their market using the Hub (profile only) guide. Each farmer within the farmers market can create their own profile as well, using the producer (profile only) guide. This gives visibility to the market, and the stallholders on the OFN directory.
The market may wish to create a group page, which acts as a directory of their stallholders. This mini-directory includes a map with profiles of all producers. It can be embedded into the farmer's market's website, and it lets customers learn more about the producers. An advantage is that each producer can setup and maintain their own profiles, minimising central administration.
A stallholder can independently setup a producer shop on OFN (see Producer Shop guide). They may use this to take pre-orders for pickup at the market, or for delivery after the market. The market can encourage stallholders to expand their sales in this way, and promote their online shops.
Farmer’s market stallholders who are willing to cooperate and work together can establish a collective shop, or a hub shop. This hub has a single shopfront offering the entire product range of participating producers. Finding a way to coordinate the logistics of incoming and outgoing products can require some creative thinking, but using the farmer’s market days as a chance to aggregate and pack orders is one simple option. From there orders could be packed ready for quick pick up. Or they could be taken to alternative drop off points, or to hospitality/corporate customers who don't attend the market in person.
Setting up this model on OFN is much like setting up a Hub Shop.
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Register a profile for your collective shop on Open Food Network (e.g. Belleview Farmer's Market Online Shop). This setup tool will ask for basic information about your enterprise to create your profile. You'll be prompted to confirm the email address.
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Select the 'hub shop' package type.
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If you want to edit your profile, or add further detail you can modify your Enterprise Settings. Here you can also chose whether your shop is open to the public or private, and write a shopfront message.
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Define and setup your shipping methods. This might be 'collection from the market' or if you offer delivery it could be 'delivery to your restaurant' if you cater to hospitality customers.
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Define and setup your payment methods. You may ask that customers pay with credit card at checkout, or you might ask them to pay when they collect their order.
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Define any enterprise fees you want to apply in your shop. For example you may wish to take a small fee to cover the market's time in administering orders, or the packing service.
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Producer profiles. Before you can add in the shop's products, each participating producer needs to have a profile which the products can be tied to. There are different ways to setup the producer profiles, depending on how much control the central coordinator wants to maintain, and how much time they have to setup the profiles.
7a) If you have a central coordinator taking the role of setting up the shop, they can create profiles on behalf of the producers. This is more time consuming for the coordinator, but it gives them control in making sure the profiles are setup correctly and in a visually appealing way. Before doing this the coordinator should let producers know, and get their profile information from them. This option may also be necessary for producers who are not tech savvy and would struggle to be involved otherwise. 7b) If your producers already have profiles, you need to connect with them. The producer can grant different levels of permission to the shop, you should let them know if you want access to stock their products in your shop, or if you also want to be able to edit their products, or add them to inventory. 7c) If you want your producers to take responsibility for creating their profiles, you can instruct them to create their own profile and add in their products. They can follow the Producer (Profile Only) guide, completing all 5 steps.
- Products. Setup of products will depend on which option was used in step 7 above. 8a) If the central coordinator created profiles for producers they can also add in their product range on their behalf. They will first need to get product lists from each producer, with the required fields (name, price, category, properties etc). See instructions for setting up products. 8b) You've connected with existing producer profiles. Remind these producers to update their products, or do it for them if you have permission. 8c) Producers will setup their product ranges themselves in step 4 of the Producer profile setup process.
Once you've setup your producer profiles, shipping and payment methods, and added your products, you can open your shopfront by creating an order cycle.
**Which reports are useful to farmer's market shops? **Generally, at the close of an order cycle the central coordinator will need to be responsible for letting each producer know how much stock has been ordered by them, and by which customer. Then each producer can pack the stock ready for delivery.
The order cycle customer total report lists each customer's order, with each item they ordered. The report should be filtered by producer and downloaded as a CSV. This will tell the producer which items were ordered by which customer.
This report can also be used to calculate the total value of goods ordered from that supplier. If your shop takes payment at checkout (with Paypal or Stripe), then the central coordinator can use this report to calculate how much money needs to be paid to each supplier.
Before each order cycle, the product availability and prices for each producer need to be updated. If the coordinator owns the producer profiles, they’ll need to contact each producer, get a list of any changes to product prices and availability, and update this in the OFN. If the coordinator has taken the ‘low involvement’ route, producers will need to take responsibility for updating their product information themselves.
Below are instructions for how producers can update products before an order cycle:
_Each cycle there are 3 things to update before the shop opens:
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Mark any products that are unavailable with a zero in the ‘on hand’ field.
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For products that will be available in the coming week, do one of the following:
i) Either enter the amount that you have available in the ‘on hand’ field next to the product.
ii) or, if you have an inexhaustible amount of a product available, select the ‘on demand’ tick box that corresponds with that product.
- Update the prices_
See here for details about updating products.
Once all producer have done this, the coordinator creates an order cycle and selects all products for all producers. This will put all available products into the shop at the correct prices, with the correct stock levels.
It’s the coordinator’s role to make sure the order cycle is setup correctly. This involves setting the opening and closing dates, and selecting which producers are involved for that order cycle.
A way to streamline this process is to duplicate the previous Order Cycle and then just make smaller amendments to the dates and ready for date.
The collective should define the refund policy. To reduce administration time, the hub may chose not to allow refunds. Or if they do allow refunds, you need to clarify which party is responsible for this. E.g. before the collective has paid producer’s for their orders, it would be the coordinator's responsibility to administer refunds. Refunds requested after funds have been transferred to producers, or after the collection date, should go through producers for example.