How eCommerce helped an organic vegetable grower to spare an entire day every week
If you have a business that sells small-batch manufactured products, organic food or veggies that have a limited shelf-life, and you need to figure out how to streamline your sales channel on social media, this case study is for you!
You’ll meet Sáfárkert, an organic vegetable grower and veggie box delivery business in the Budapest area. Their tomatoes are like nothing I’ve seen lately at my local market, vary in shape, deep red, and full of flavour. A real gem in the urban summer! The kind of products you’d dare to serve to your chef friend (and I did.)
Before we started working together on their business, I already was a loyal customer, so I could understand and spot inefficiencies in their customer journey. See how we engaged in a collaboration to re-define their core sales channel!
Here’s, specifically, what we’ll go through in this case study:
1 - Sáfárkert’s brand superpower
4 - Finding and implementing an optimal solution + a Google form solution for you
Sáfárkert’s story - organic veggie gardening on the family land
A young couple with a toddler taking over the grandparent’s land to grow vegetables - a story many of us can only dream of. They value slow life, community, and family heritage, and dedicated to mirror these values in their business. Summer of 2020 was their third season, so they already gained some traction and experience in how a season in their business works. Growing organic vegetables under Hungary’s climate is a seasonal business. They operate actively from February until early September when they take a break so they can return the next year recharged and happy. They sell from mid-June to late August, which makes their entire revenue season to 2.5 months of the year.
BRAND SUPERPOWER
Having an authentic voice and an easy-to-understand value proposition helps to build an audience
For Sáfárkert, it was vital to identify a loyal, kind and flexible audience within their delivery area. All of the boxes they’re able to produce are sold out each week. They started by testing themselves out in traditional distribution channels, like farmers markets to realise that their audience lives somewhere else.
They turned to social media and launched an Instagram page, where they share almost exclusively authentic, unedited photos of their produce and the garden. Organic vegetables are a gratifying product: a healthy lifestyle is in fashion and will stay for many many years to come. Natural consumer goods offer a low entry point to a wide range of customers, and depending on the production method (in this case: vegetable growing) can be scaled quickly. Moreover, their honest appreciation towards the art of vegetable gardening comes through Sáfárkert’s profile, helping them to build an Instagram audience that has grown organically from 150 to 2000 in under two years.
Sáfárkert’s veggie products, image sourced from their Instagram page
Pain Points
It's delivery day already! Where has the time gone?
After a brainstorming call, we identified the following pain points we could start working on together:
Their business process required one full day to admin the orders + another day to deliver the boxes
1-2 messages got lost each week > order was not booked > customer disappointed
Manual inventory management is fussy
No time left to work on the business.
We were looking for ways to coordinate orders with minimal investment in digital and overhead expenses.
Businesses like Sáfárkert that have a limited selling season have to be mindful about their overhead expenses. Does it make sense to pay 29 USD / month for a Shopify online store that would be inactive from September to June? What is a reasonable investment in a digital infrastructure that supports such commercial activity?
ROADMAP
Our 3-step collaboration
We’ve created a roadmap, implemented an optimal solution, tested it out & left time for fine-tuning
After our initial call, I offered a Roadmap to identify the scope and possible directions that the project can take until we find the most suitable option for Sáfárkert. When I say roadmap, I mean a detailed Google doc where I outline the possible solution options to a given pain point. My approach is to either list the opportunities as they scale, starting with the smallest and most straightforward option and ending up with the broadest scope we can think of, or to give an array of project elements we can pick and mix from to reach the same goal.
Once we agreed on the scope, we started to drop down the project to manageable chunks and tasks.
TIP: On the suggestion of the client, we embarked on Infolio, a task management tool. It’s free, has a kanban-style board view of your to-dos plus a team messenger.
Order coordination is not as easy as you’d think
Our goal with Sáfárkert was simple: we wanted to capture and track orders by using Sáfárkert’s existing communications channels (Instagram and Facebook) while having a method where the orders with completed payments can be easily seen and filtered out.
Any eCommerce solutions would be perfect for solving this; however, we almost immediately tapped into two factors that narrowed down our further options:
Payments needed to be processed via bank transfer.
As Sáfárkert’s number of products have a weekly limit, we needed inventory management to make sure there’d be no orders coming in that they won’t be able to fulfil.
Implementation
First idea: discarded
We almost settled for this free Google form workflow - feel free to grab it
There are numerous applications available to design and disseminate online forms. The simplest and most widely known is still Google forms. It offers a classy Google look and minimum brand customisation: you can change accent colours and upload your logo and a banner image to the header.
My first approach was to set up a Google form where Sáfárkert can capture which of their veggie boxes the customer wants and where the product can later be delivered. Online forms have two ends: there is a survey-type of the end where you add your questions, and that’ll be visible to the customer to fill in, and there’s a database behind it. In Google, this is a spreadsheet living on your Google Drive and where the filled-in answers are directed.
For an online eCommerce business, this database streamlines the critical information: what product, to whom and how should be fulfilled. But, Google forms have been designed to capture infinite inputs (like survey entries, for example) and not necessarily a couple of dozen requests for a limited availability product.
How to set limits to a Google form
After setting up a form, there’s a slider that lets you adjust when your form accepts responses, the humble 'Accepting responses' switch. If you leave it on, people will be able to fill it in, if it’s turned off, the link of the form will direct the visitor to a page telling them that the form doesn’t accept responses.
When you don’t want to sit in front of your Drive and watch how many responses you’re at and when the last one will arrive after you need to close the form, you might want to set response limits.
Response limits are not a built-in feature of Google forms, but you can choose from a couple of add-ons that do the job for you. Installing add-ons is simple. Once you open a form, tap on the three-dot button at the upper-right corner and select Add-ons which will open the window for Add-ons. Here’s how you’ll find the add-ons to your Google form:
I tested out formLimiter, and it worked like a charm.
I settled for formLimiter so I could make a smartened up form that automatically shuts down when I need it. This add-on automatically sets Google Forms to stop accepting responses after a maximum number of responses, at a specific date and time, or when a spreadsheet cell contains a specified value. Plus, if you want, it sends an automated email to you once the form is closed.
Google form + formLimiter would have been an excellent option for Sáfárkert if they only had one unified type of veggie box each week (e.g. one product type), so we could track their incoming orders neatly.
We settled for Shopify Lite
Inventory management is at the heart of any product-based online business
We had to drop the online form option because it still did not lead Sáfárkert to a solution that’d bring significant ease to their operations.
We did an in-depth look around, fancying more complex online form software like Wufoo, Typeform, and JotForm, but the price of the features started to go up quickly for basically the same purpose that a Google Form could serve. For example, a basic Typeform subscription that allows the functions we’d needed down the road (like logic jumps, integrations and respondent email notifications) starts at 30 EUR / month. That’s more than a Shopify Basic plan.
And, inventory management was still something we couldn’t appropriately cover with the above. Inventory management for Sáfárkert means the right stock, in the right place, at the right time. We decided on an eCommerce solution that helps the customers to pull their veggie box from the optimal fulfilment location: they can ask for home delivery or use any of the two in-store pickup options in Budapest.
Shopify is a powerful eCommerce platform that allows marketers to build their online store in a what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor. But, if you prefer to keep your sales where you’re in touch with your customers (like on social media) and don’t want to drive them elsewhere (to a website), Shopify Lite is what you need.
We set up an account for Sáfárkert and configured Facebook Shop as a sales channel. Facebook Shops is a simple version of your online store that lives inside the Facebook and Instagram mobile apps. And with Shopify's integration, your products, inventory, and back-office will stay in perfect sync with your Shopify store, so you can run your business in one place while selling on many sales channels. Instagram product tags became available to Sáfárkert, too.
This way, they could keep their communication on the channels their customers already knew and preferred. Go where your customers are, right?
TESTING & FINE TUNING
A stress-free weekly business workflow for a veggie box delivery
As a business operating in a cycle week-by-week, the most important is that you have a process in place. That was the case with Sáfárkert: they already had a stable process in place, we just tweaked a little on it, so they eliminated the stress and have now an online system that doesn’t make human errors.
Keeping production, marketing and sales activities in a flow guarantees that you can fulfil every order with ease.
After we set up the Facebook Shop for Sáfárkert, we went on to make test purchases to see how a customer goes through a shopping experience with them.
Once we’re confident it’s working as we wanted it, we outlined how their workweek will look like, having a whole new eCommerce automated process.
Here’s a stress-free weekly to-do list
Day 1
Refresh your inventory
Start a marketing campaign on social media
Day 2 and 3
See orders coming in
Check if they are ready to be marked and fulfilled and set their status on Shopify
Do as much customer care as you like
Day 4
See if you any products left that you could sell and run a quick blast campaign on your channel
Day 5 - the day before delivery
Mark all orders to ready for delivery/pickup so your customers will be notified via email
Get your products ready to be delivered
Get your delivery route prepared for your driver/delivery company
Let’s wrap this up
If your business is in a similar position to Sáfárkert, especially if you’re wanting to streamline your online sales channel while keeping a close touch with your audience, I hope this case study gave you a lot of food for thought.
We went through their weekly business flow, identified where they can improve and set those tools into action.
This part of the journey is just the beginning:
Sáfárkert still has to deliver value to their existing customers and future potential customers.
They still have to continue evolving and tweaking various parts of their business process flow along the way.
But now all these things are more approachable and straightforward to them!
I hope that the tools and tips I provided in this case study help to remove a big chunk of the overwhelm and give you actionable things that you can apply in your business right now.