Internet Strategies to Improve Farm Business Management

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Your First Steps

It is not necessary to have all the bells and whistles on your first website. Start small and simple if this is your first time developing a business website. You can always add more content and features in the future. Brad Hollabaugh shares this example; assume that you want to sell your product through your website. You could get started by posting your products and pertinent information on the website with a form that can be downloaded and completed by the customer who then faxes the form to you to complete the transaction. Eventually, as you become more comfortable with doing business in this way and your web programming skills improve you can include the tools necessary to allow credit card transactions to occur on your site.

Special Customer Areas

For those of you who may want a very sophisticated website, creating a special password protected area for your clients is a possible option. Many businesses allow customers to keep track of their accounts on-line. Banks, utility companies, and creditors rank among those offering this service. Offering clients an area where they can track their purchases or the work they have hired you to perform along with payment information (charges incurred, amount paid to date, next payment date, amount due, etc.) is one option.

Another option is to have on-line records of actual production information for each client. For instance, how many heifers does each producer have at your facility, what is their progress, and what is their expected return date to the producer. For custom crop work, you may like to provide yearly quality information or yield data. If you wholesale your products to other retailers you may want to allow them to place orders on their own account pages rather than through a general shopping cart.

What is extremely important, no matter how much content you have on your site is that the language you use is clear and accurate. Don't assume that the people viewing your site will understand what it is you're trying to tell them. You must be explicit. Rod Hissong relates a story where he had stated on their website that cows were milked 24 hours a day, every day. Someone didn't understand his meaning and thought that each cow was being milked all day as opposed to the ten minutes each cow was actually in the parlor for each milking. After receiving a call from the person asking about this Rod made some wording changes to the website to eliminate any potential confusion.

Clarity is particularly important if you have a shopping cart as part of your website. The customer needs to know exactly what the product is, how much it costs, and how much it will cost to ship it to them. Brad Hollabaugh explains how you can end up with customer dissatisfaction issues if your customer orders your product believing it is one thing but then sees that it is something different than expected upon product arrival. Joe Phillips adds that it is important to stick with the prices that you have posted on your website. If you change your pricing structure you've got to remember to make the updates on your website as well. You can't change the price for a product after a customer has placed their order.

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These materials were developed as part of the Southern Rural Development Center’s National e-Commerce Extension Initiative. They are based upon work supported by the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under Award No. 2005-45064-03212

Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture or the Southern Rural Development Center.