Enhance Online Sales and Customer Retention

Online sales have steadily grown since the U.S. Department of Commerce began tracking sales in 1999. That growth spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly accelerating online food purchasing (Thilmany et al., 2020).  Online shopping has become a routine part of how many people purchase goods, with “more than half of US adults shop online at least once a week, and 16% do so at least once a day (Lebow, 2022).  This reflects a lasting change in consumer behavior rather than a temporary response. 

As consumer demand for online purchasing increased, many producers also adopted e-commerce tools and platforms (Thilmany et al., 2020). Long-term success with online sales stems from a combination of factors, including understanding your customer base, having an appropriate online sales platform, providing an exceptional customer experience, and engaging in strategic promotion.

Choose the Platform that Best Supports Your Business

If you have chosen to enter the e-commerce realm, selecting the right platform (the software that will host and publish the online store) for your business and the products you sell can play a significant role in its success and sustainability.

With the plethora of platform options available, selecting the best fit can be both time-consuming and overwhelming. There are website platforms created specifically for agricultural businesses, and platforms that are more general in nature. In addition, there are platforms that cater to Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm businesses.

Another option is to join a multi-vendor platform that serves a large area near you. Multi-vendor platforms have emerged with the goal of supporting farmers in a given geographic area. Advantages of using this type of platform include:

• Joint marketing that benefits all businesses on the site,
• Potential cost-effectiveness for individual businesses, and
• Ability for the consumer to purchase multiple businesses in one place. 

However, you do lack individual control over the platform and must trust that the individual or business responsible for maintaining it does so.

Platforms that specialize in event registration should be considered by businesses, particularly agritourism operations when you want or need to manage customer/visitor numbers. Like e-commerce platforms, ticketing platforms provide users with various features, including reports and social media integration.

Table 1 shows a selection of e-commerce platforms available.  The CSA Innovation Network published a guide that lists additional platforms that you may wish to consider.

Table 1. Selection of E-commerce Platforms, categorized

Non-Ag Oriented

• Big Commerce
• Shopify
• Wix
• Square
• WooCommerce

Ag-Oriented

• Barn 2 Door
• MyRealFoods
• 1000EcoFarms
• GrazeCart

CSA

• Harvie
• Farmigo
• GrownBy
• Local Food Marketplace
• Local Line
• Happy CSA
• CSAware

Multi-Vendor

• Delivered Fresh
• EatFromFarms
• Local Orbit
• WhatsGood
• Local Food Marketplace
• Market Wagon

Ticketing

• TicketSpice
• TicketBud
• FarmPass
• SimpleTix

E-commerce platforms need to differentiate themselves from each other, and often this is accomplished by offering additional features and/or integrations. However, this comes at a cost, either through higher subscription fees or add-on fees. Therefore, it is important for you to conduct a thorough assessment of both current and future e-commerce needs, including time and cost. For more information about selecting an e-commerce platform, watch the webinar recording Retail Farm Market School: Expanding Farm Sales with E-Commerce. 

There are many other considerations, such as how to properly cater to your customer base and ensure that you choose a platform that can grow with the business should it succeed and expand. Realize that the need to switch platforms as a business expands can be very costly and time-consuming, requiring significant effort and labor. Therefore, thoroughly research the process before beginning. 

Enhance Customer Experience and Anticipate Customer Expectations

The experience a customer has on your website is a major contributor to initial purchase and retention, that is, whether the customer returns in the future.  Fundamentally, customers expect websites and online stores to be easy to use. If your online store is difficult to navigate, for instance, requiring excessive clicks or having unclear categorization, customers will be discouraged from making a purchase.  

Visual Appeal

The consumer purchase experience improves, and impulse purchasing increases when an online store is visually appealing (Liu, Li, and Hu, 2013). Aspects of visual appeal include ease of use, product diversity and availability, and imagery. 

Images on your website should accurately portray your products.  Of consumers in one survey, “63% use product images, 61% use multiple images, and 66% rely on the ability to zoom in on these images” to inform their decisions (Holmes, 2021). Invest in the necessary resources (camera, lighting, etc.) to ensure your images are of the highest quality. Hiring or bartering with a professional photographer is an alternative for anyone who may struggle with photography. Poor-quality or stock images have been found to deter online shoppers, while high-quality images increase trust with sellers (Lewis, 2021).

When narrowing down your choices of online sales platforms, looking at the design and organization of other online stores may be helpful. If a particular online store has a style that appeals to you and you think it would fit your business, you can typically determine the platform either by looking at the site footer or source code.

Customer Reviews

Product reviews have become an important tool for customers, particularly when researching local businesses and new products. Customer reviews are among the top aspects of a store that respondents use to research and make purchasing decisions (Holmes, 2021). One survey found that 98% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, while another survey revealed that 45% of individuals agreed that customer reviews on a website are very helpful (Pitman, 2022; Statista, 2022). 

Similar to an online store’s visual appeal, 25% of consumers indicate that product reviews would encourage them to purchase more online (Chevalier, 2022a). Considering that younger consumers expect more reviews when browsing products online than their older counterparts, businesses targeting this audience segment should consider the potential benefits of selecting a platform that offers the option for customers to post reviews (Chevalier, 2022b).

Checkout Process

The customer experience during online shopping includes the checkout process; therefore, the payment process should be smooth, simple, and quick. A difficult or confusing checkout process may cause customers to abandon their purchase. Characteristics of an ideal checkout process include:

• Not requiring an account to be created,
• 1-page checkout or have a progress bar,
• Continuously updated order summary, and
• Offering multiple payment methods (e.g., credit, debit, ACH, digital wallet, etc.)

Customer Service

High-quality, timely customer service, also referred to as customer care, is important to customers and may encourage them to increase their online purchasing, as indicated by 42% of survey respondents online (Chevalier, 2022a). To provide the care online shoppers expect, it’s important to understand why they are reaching out, their communication preferences, and to have a response plan in place that allows you to respond appropriately. The articles, Cultivating Your E-Experience: Understanding Aspects of Customer Communications and Cultivating Your E-Experience: Responding to Consumer Communications will help you better understand expectations and prepare for a satisfying customer care experience.

Subscriptions

Convenience is a key driver for online shopping, and many customer expectations revolve around this. One way to retain customers through convenience is by offering subscriptions. According to a Clutch press release, “more than half of online shoppers (54%) say they are a member of a subscription box service” (Panko, 2019). Of the three types of subscription models – replenishment, curation, and access – convenience is the most important reason for continuing a replenishment subscription and the second most important reason for continuing an access subscription (Kelley, 2021). If you offer or plan to offer subscriptions, ensuring that your online sales platform can accommodate and facilitate recurring processing, payments, renewals, or cancellations is crucial. 

Shipping, Delivery, or On-site Pickup

Order fulfillment through shipping, delivery, or onsite pickup is the final step in the online shopping experience, where attention to meeting customer expectations is vital. Customers expect their orders to be delivered within a few days of their online purchase, especially given the immediacy offered by large online retailers like Amazon. Fast, free shipping was rated by nearly 80% of survey respondents as the top factor that would encourage them to purchase more online, making it necessary for businesses offering delivery to have a well-planned process in place (Chevalier, 2022a). For businesses that sell perishable products, it is essential to give extra thought and care to order fulfillment. To learn more, see the articles Best Practices for Online Order Packaging, Shipping, and Pick-Up and Shipping Dairy Foods Direct to Consumers.

Features such as delivery option choices and order tracking, and shipping or fulfillment notifications are items to consider when researching and selecting your online store platform. Each adds an element of convenience and builds trust, further enhancing the customers' experience ordering products from your online store.

Additional Elements of Value

The customer's online shopping experience can be further enhanced with high-quality content that complements the products you sell. For example, information and stories about your farm, recipes that can be made with your product, or videos on how to care for, store, or use your products.

Strategic Promotion

Promoting your online store and marketing that aligns with your e-commerce presence is crucial, as it will drive consumers to your online store and increase consumer confidence in what they are purchasing, as well as in your business’s customer support. For more information on e-commerce promotion, visit this article on Promoting Your E-Commerce Site.

As online shopping continues to rise, selecting the ideal e-commerce platform for your business model and being attuned to providing an exceptional customer experience should help you improve online sales and customer retention.

Where trade names appear, no discrimination is intended, and no endorsement by Penn State Extension is implied.

References and Resources

Chevalier, Stephanie. (May 4, 2022a). Factors that would encourage consumers in the United States to purchase more online in 2018. Statista.

Chevalier, Stephanie. (May 4, 2022b). How many reviews do you expect when looking at a product online? Statista.

Cornelisse, S. (December 13, 2021). Overcoming Consumer Barriers to Online Purchasing. Penn State Extension.

CSA Innovation Network Report. Farmer to Farmer Ecommerce Platforms

Holmes, N. (April 26, 2021). Here’s the Most Important Product Content to Your Customers. Widen.com.

Kelley, K. (2021). Subscription Boxes for Ag Businesses. Penn State Extension.

Kunst, Alexander. (April 25, 2022). Attitudes towards online shopping in the U.S. in 2022. Statista.

Lebow, S. (August 17, 2022). Most US adults shop online at least once a week. Insider Intelligence.

Lewis, V. (January 22, 2019). Cornell Research Shows Poor Image Quality Can Affect Online Sales. Cornellsun.com

Liu, Y., Li, H., & Hu, F. (2013). Website attributes in urging online impulse purchase: An empirical investigation on consumer perceptions. Decision Support Systems, 55(3), 829–837.

National Young Farmers Coalition. Farmers Guide to Direct Sales Platforms.

Panko, R. (September 30, 2019). More Than Half of Online Shoppers (54%) Are Members of Subscription Box Services, as Industry Caters to Consumers’ Desire for Convenient, Personalized Experiences. Clutch.co

Pitman, Jamie. (January 2022). Local Consumer Review Survey 2022. BrightLocal.

Thilmany, D., E. Canales, S. Low, K. Boys. (October 26, 2020). Local Food Supply Chain Dynamics and Resilience during COVID-19. Onlinelibrary.wiley.com