The Practical Online Storefront for YOUR Local Market
The only online pre-sales platform designed for community level farm to table markets.
Designed for local farm to table markets just like yours!
An Online Storefront is Your Market's True Partner
Farm Fresh Network is more than a generic ecommerce website. It’s a dedicated partner for your local market.
Our platform, tailored for local farm-to-table markets, is designed to complement the physical market you’ve worked so hard to build, not replace it.
Vendor Empowerment
Vendors confidently drive pre-market sales to predict demand, minimize waste, and increase revenue. FFN empowers vendors to effortlessly manage listings and connect directly with loyal customers, in real-time and for follow-up sales.
Automated Simplicity
Seamlessly automate routine tasks like inventory, orders, and payments. Liberate your managers from tedious admin work to focus on what’s truly important, your market, not your admin.
Seamless Integration
Launch a fully e-commerce-ready platform in just one day! Our tailored storefronts perfectly suit your local community market, while seamlessly integrating with you and your vendors’ current online footprint.
Community Centric
Build stronger community ties with tools that allow your vendors to build personal relationships, educate future growers, and develop customer relationships through your market.
How Is FFN Your Market's Partner?
Your tailored storefront is set-up and managed by FFN as it gathers orders, updates inventory, notifies vendors, and drives foot traffic to your market.
4-Step Process to Build Your Online Storefront
Expanding a market online is often seen as a difficult technical undertaking. But FFN’s pre-built e-commerce platform and hosted site management eliminate that barrier. Our seamlessly integrated online storefront makes it effortless for local markets like yours.
How to Expand Your Market Online in 4 Simple Steps with FFN.
With FFN’s pre-built hosted online storefront, you don’t need to know websites or coding, just your market and its vendors. FFN manages all the maintenance, security, and updates to your websites. Your vendors manage their inventory, customer service issues, and follow-up sales through your market. Your admin…can make a coffee run.
STEP 1: We Plan It
Our services always start with a conversation. We want to know what your market does, the experience you provide, and what you want to accomplish with the market. We work directly with our customers, so this is just the first of many conversations.
STEP 2: FFN Builds It
FFN builds your market so you don’t have to. You run a market, we’re the technical experts. We’ll create your market in 24 hours with the following:
- Incorporated market branding
- Integrated existing market online foot print or create a new one
- Customizations made with prior arrangement
- From this point on, FFN will maintain the backend of your website as long as you have it, at no charge
STEP 3: Vendors Fill It
While the market is e-commerce ready in 24 hours, your market will need inventory to sell. Your vendors populate their own products in the online market.
- Can be done by the market manager, but we recommend the vendors do this so they control their own space.
- Inventory includes pictures of products, descriptions, prices and SNAP/EBT compatible products
- Inventory can be listed separately or as a product type with multiple versions
STEP 4: You Open It
It’s time to open your market for pre-sales!
- Your basic website comes with all the necessary requirements to start selling on Day 1.
- There are no hidden fees, required apps or plug-ins to bring your market online.
- Customizations are available at your request but are not required for e-commerce activity.
What is the FFN Advantage?
Designed specifically to support vendors and market managers, FFN provides unique advantages that create a seamless market experience.
| Vendor Advantages |
|---|
| The platform assists vendors in managing real-time inventory levels through purchases made online, allowing vendors to forecast weekly requirements. |
| Vendors have the freedom to manage their business through your market, to include customer service and sales follow-ups. Your vendors are your marketing team. |
| Direct interaction between customers and vendors through seamless vendor portals allow vendors to build followings and engage with customers. |
| With guaranteed sales on market day, vendors can clear overhead prior to market day. This makes them less subject to market fluctuations/cancelations |
| Manager Advantages |
|---|
| Easily integrate existing vendor profiles and online footprints into the market system, for a natural transition from vendor to market experience. |
| The market doesn’t assume the overhead burden of keeping inventory on-hand, vendors maintain their own inventory until drop-off / market day. |
| The platform manages routine tasks such as inventory adjustment, sales notifications, sales calculations, commission splits and order labels |
| No set-up work, no back-end site management, no need to know anything about websites. We handle the details at no extra cost, and no hidden fees. |
FFN Has The Numbers!
Our Online Storefront was Built with Your Farm Market or Co-op in Mind, and We Have the Numbers to Prove It.
90%
Online market operations automated
40%
Average revenue growth in our clients’ first year
20%
Consistent year-over-year growth after launch
24 Hours
Set-up time for your online storefront.
How Does FFN’s Pricing Benefit Our Customers?
We have one rule: Your costs only change when you’re ready.
At FFN, we prioritize pricing transparency to foster true partnerships with local communities. Our unique services are offered at price points designed to support, never hinder, the growth of local farmers’ markets, food co-ops, farm markets, and food pantries.
What can You Do with FFN's Pricing?
Grow Your Impact
Hybrid neighborhood markets are a cornerstone in the community economies they serve. While the product pricing may be competitive with commercial prices, the services, the nutrition, and heart are beyond that system. Though nothing is free, the cost of doing business should be in keeping with those we serve. By ensuring the best quality platform and services available, our clients can make the biggest impact possible.
Scale Your Business
The lifeblood of every business is new business. Without the ability to scale with ease when you need to, growth cannot happen. That’s why FFN’s low entry price point, and stabilized cost schedule and optional customizing is an industry leader. Our clients know their costs, can accurately forecast overhead over the long term, and scale when their ready. At no extra cost.
Do More
When our clients know their costs months in advance, can plan for change, and rely on a powerful platform, they can do more. No market set out to be encumbered by their own growth. FFN’s platform ensures your market has the freedom to reach the goals it set out to accomplish.
Hybrid Markets create stability
Our hybrid strategy of online engagement with physical market participation creates a unified, sustainable market system. By leveraging online pre-orders to drive foot traffic for in-person pickups, FFN strengthens the physical market’s role as a vital community hub.
This proven hybrid approach fosters consistent growth year over year.
We emphasize the physical market’s irreplaceable value for social connections, local vendor exposure, and a healthy community economy. FFN ensures long-term stability using community-driven success for farm-to-table outlets like local farmers’ markets, food co-ops, food pantries, and farm markets.
Levers our markets use to build sustainable success
Drive Community Involvement on a Wide Scale
- With FFN your market doesn’t just engage your customers for four hours on a Saturday. The open online market continues the engagement through the week. The vendor sites in your market are open 24/7 so your vendors can stay engaged and your customers informed.
- But it doesn’t stop there. FFN offers a social platform that connects your community. A platform your market manages, not some faceless social media platform. Your unique community, your unique market shouldn’t be hampered by your market’s availability, both should stay engaged through out the week.
- The USDA’s Farmers’ Market Promotion Program (FMPP) carries requirements to not only expand online and create a tighter social fabric, but also to educate. FFN provides a learning platform for markets needing to meet that requirement. Through market inspired learning programs, your community doesn’t just stay engaged, it prepares for the future between market days.
Give Local Businesses A Platform with Visibility and Accessibility
In the chaos of your market day, your vendors only get so much interaction between rushes and working products. The vendor spaces on your online market is a place where they can catch up on missed questions or put out new information. Because it’s through your market, they have a platform they otherwise may not be able to have.
Support Building Community Centric Systems
- Every community has talented makers, bakers, growers, and producers whose skills can drive local prosperity. But many communities don’t capture these talents and instead let them be exported away. With FFN your market injects their products and sales directly into the community economy.
- Studies show markets generate nearly $2 per dollar spent, creating 32 jobs per $1M in sales. Compare that to only 10.5 jobs for wholesale markets. FFN’s hybrid platform ensures these talents stay local and generate community success.
Build Food and Economic Security into Your Community
- Multiple studies show that healthy markets add significantly to local markets. For every $1 spent at a local market, almost $1.50 is spent in nearby businesses. With online sales driving guaranteed foot traffic to your market, that’s guaranteed benefits to your community economic centers.
- For many communities, food and economic security aren’t just buzz words, they’re real concerns. Healthy community markets have a magnet effect where success builds on itself. When vendors see a market that works, they tend to gravitate to that market. This gravitation of vendors and generation of income is a building block for underserved communities creatin stability.
- Local communities need this access to their own foods and products. This provides access to proven denser nutritional values, less reliance on commercial logistics, and the stability of locally procured goods. These are heavy responsibilities that only local farm-to-table venues like your market can meet.
Ensure Regular Access to Healthy Local Foods
- Local meats, dairy, and produce from farmers’ markets often outshine commercial options in nutrition. Harvested at peak ripeness, local produce retains 20-30% more vitamins like vitamin C. Pasture-raised meats and dairy offer 2-4 times higher omega-3s and 3-5 times more healthy fats., reducing inflammation.
- FFN’s online storefront ensures these fresher, nutrient-dense foods reach your community through your market. With your hybrid market, pre-sales and quick pickups allow first access to these foods by those who truly need them but can’t spend time in the market. Your market’s accessibility is key to your community’s success.
Ready to Grow Your Market?
Start reaching more customers and automating your market today. We’ll guide you through every step of launching your online storefront.
