If you are interested in selling your farm products online – via the internet, here are some helpful tips.
The internet is a brimming marketplace with millions of customers not limited by location. Hence, it provides a platform for farmers to sell to an ever-growing customer base.
The internet is a great way to increase your farm visibility and grow a customer base. It also provides a great platform to sell directly to customers and offer different services such as consultations either through your farm website or social media platform.
How to Start
1. Create an Online Presence
Get a website for your farm (you can use free website services like wix.com and wordpress.com till you can afford to pay for one). Social media accounts on platforms suited to your farm like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are a great way of creating an online presence.
After creating one of these, be sure to put all the information about your farm on these pages. Your location, what you sell, contact details and any other information that will enable a customer find you. An online presence allows internet savvy customers find you when the search for products like yours. It also exposes you to customers that may not be accessible to you due to location or other reasons.
You can sell directly to customers online through your website also.
2. Build a Customer base
Congratulations! Your farm is online, but it doesn’t end here. It is time to build relationships with prospective buyers of your products.
This becomes a task of convincing those who visit your pages to buy from you. There are several strategies to engage your customers and we will be discussing that in our next post.
To start, your pages (website or social media pages) must be filled with content. Ensure that all the information a customer needs about your farm is on those pages. Post interesting things regularly such as news about farming, tips on how best to use your products and any other bit of content that appeals to your customer.
Note: While you should advertise your products on your pages, please don’t make that all you do. Create a balance between your products advertisement and beneficial content.
Do this and you will gradually build a relationship with customers.
3. Be Online
Imagine opening a shop and never going there. Your website and social media pages are not just to be created but constantly managed to ensure productivity. Your page is your online store, and like your physical store you must show up daily to engage your customers.
It allows you monitor customer trends, latest news in your industry, opportunities to grow your pages (subscribers or followers) and a platform to network with other farmers in your field through groups, pages or trends.
Selling online requires the same commitment as selling offline.
4. Online Farmers’ Market and Groups
This is a great way to sell your products online. Sites like and others offers you a platform to advertise your products for free on their websites. This increases visibility for your products and is cost effective as the marketing costs falls on the site rather than you.
Also, there are Facebook groups dedicated to the buying and selling of agricultural products. Joining these groups and posting your products gives you an increased advantage of making a sale online.
Things you need to start Selling Online
A website and functioning social media pages
Email support (to reach out)
Payment Platform (if customers are to buy directly from your sites)
Shopping Cart (to allow customers buy more than one product. Ask your website provider for this function)
A team or individual to manage your online store
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