Category: Announcements

Farmers selling local food on generic e-commerce platforms are forced to pre-package and price their products in set quantities like “Strawberries – 500g”. For pastured meat farmers that means selling by average weight and annoying customers who end up with smaller cuts of beef, pork or poultry.

From Day 1 at Farmwell, we offered farmers and food hubs the chance to price their products in any quantities they want… kilograms, pounds, gallons, boxes, bags, etc.

Many of our customers have been asking us to take this a step further. Not every local food buyer wants a whole kilo of this or an entire litre of that.

Buying local online saves a lot of time, which means people can buy more frequently and in smaller quantities.

So we listened and spent time thinking how this could be done in the most simple way possible.

Typing decimals would be a pain. We didn’t want to lose those easy order buttons everybody loves either. Additionally, no farmer wants the hassle of getting orders for 23.085 lb.

After experimenting a lot with the design, we came up with a solution that people are finding pretty helpful:

Handy pre-filled order buttons with the option to choose partial quantities in amounts that makes sense. Small increments for small orders, bigger increments for bigger orders.

Lets look at strawberries at $18/kg.

If someone just want’s to buy a bit, there are smaller options:

 

If they want more, the units get bigger too:

 

It get really simple when big quantities are ordered:

And if a buyer starts off with a small amount and then adds more of it later (cause it’s just so yummy), Farmwell adds them together and rounds it off to the most appropriate amount.

After all, your local food e-commerce system should be doing this kind of heavy lifting – so you don’t have to.

Thank you to all of our dear customers who requested this feature!

 

 

 

 

Sept 23, 2014

Farmwell was at times unacceptably sluggish for people outside of North America and Europe. Especially Australians and New Zealanders we’re getting too many opportunities to practise patience.

The performance of some pages was simply unacceptable.

But today, I’m happy to let you know that we’ve just rolled out a number of updates to our servers and worldwide distribution network to speed things up. Now when you view a page, much of the content comes from servers nearby you (unless you live in Antarctica or Timbuktu).

That means it should be noticeably faster for everybody with a half-decent internet connection.

We’ll be monitoring things going forward and we’ll always be doing stuff to make it a little faster here and a little faster there, but there should be a noticeable improvement as of today.

So now you can save your patience for life’s more important things.

Flickr Creative Commons photo by Kerri Lee Smith

Aug 12, 2014

We are pleased to announce that farms and food hubs can now hide their Farmwell site from the public (and search engines).

This is done by locking it with a password. This especially useful for members-only co-ops and buying clubs. Anyone without the password will only see an empty page:

And for everybody’s convenience, you only have to enter the password the first time you visit a locked page (or unless the password changes).

If you wish to make your Farmwell site private, go to your Settings and switch off public visibility, like this:

 

 

May 15, 2014

Many of our food hubs have been requesting to list food on behalf of farmers that aren’t already on Farmwell or that maybe don’t have an internet connection.

After all, there’s a whole generation of farmers out there who’d rather “stick with farmin’ and leave the sellin’ to the young bucks and does.”

Food hubs were pleading with us to do something. No only were some of their best farmers not online, but some have yet to buy their first mobile phone!

Something had to be done.

So we went back to the drawing board to see what could be done. The question was how can we make this happen while still maintaining field-to-fork transparency for consumers?

The answer was simple:

Let food hubs manage a farm’s profile and list food on their behalf, but make the food hub responsible to consumers by having them sign the statement of quality guarantee. That means food hubs will be rated based on the quality of the food they source. By putting their reputation on the line, food hubs get the extra motivation to really know their farmers, and locavores get even more great fresh local food from traditional farms that don’t have internet access.

Here’s how easy it is for a food hub to add a farmer:

1) Add a farmer/producer in a click.

2) Tell the farm’s story.

3) List their food with ease.

4) After, you can switch between your hub and farms like this.

All food is instantly added to your food hub’s online offerings:

You’ll notice that each food shows who grew it and where, with links for more info.

Pretty easy, eh? You can also watch this 7 minute video to see it in action, or sign up now for a free trial and give it a go yourself.