A shop for a farm that does not want to build one.
A direct-to-customer storefront, hosted, at a rate that leaves the grower something. Most farms that try to sell direct fail at the third step, which is not the website.
Where a farm selling direct actually fails.
-
Not at the website. Everybody builds the website.
A farm can have a functioning online shop in an afternoon for about thirty pounds a month. The tooling has been solved for a decade and it is not where anybody comes unstuck.
-
They fail at packing, and then at postage.
A box that costs four pounds to pack and nine pounds to send, holding sixteen pounds of produce, is a business that is losing money on every order and cannot see it because the money arrives first and the costs arrive later.
Almost every farm shop that has quietly closed its online arm closed it after somebody finally costed the packing bench.
The website is free. The cardboard is not.
-
And then at the second order.
First orders come from a burst of attention — a local paper, a television programme, a post that travelled. Second orders come from remembering, and nothing about a one-off box makes anybody remember.
A farm with a thousand first orders and eighty second orders does not have a business, it has had a good week.
What the storefront costs, against the alternatives.
| Route | Take rate | Who packs | Who carries the courier cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| This storefront | 6% of the order | The farm | The customer, shown before checkout |
| A national marketplace | 15–30% | The farm | Usually the farm, absorbed in the price |
| A supermarket contract | Not comparable — a price, not a rate | The farm, to their spec | The farm |
| A box scheme aggregator | 25–40% | The aggregator | The aggregator |
| Building your own | 0%, plus about £400 a month all in | The farm | The farm |
01/ 03
What the storefront actually does for a farm.
It costs the box before the first order.
The set-up asks for the weight, the dimensions, the cardboard cost and the courier band before it will let a product go live. If those numbers do not leave a margin, it says so in red and refuses to publish until the price changes.
That single screen is more useful than everything else here put together, and it is the thing no general e-commerce platform will ever do, because refusing to let somebody sell is bad for a platform on a percentage.
- Costed before launch
- Cardboard, tape, filler, courier
- Refuses to publish
- If the margin is negative
- Take rate
- 6%
It makes the second order the default.
Every storefront ships with a standing-order option turned on and a one-tap pause. A farm selling a monthly box at fourteen pounds with sixty per cent retention is a better business than one selling a forty-pound hamper once.
Retention is the only number on the dashboard that is shown in a large typeface. Order volume is shown small, deliberately.
- Standing orders
- On by default
- Pause
- One tap, no email
- Headline metric
- Retention, not revenue
And it will tell a farm to stop.
If a storefront runs three months with a negative contribution after packing and postage, it emails the farm with the arithmetic and a recommendation to close it. About one in six should.
A platform that only ever encourages is a platform that is being paid by volume. This one is close enough to cost that it can afford to be honest.
- Reviewed
- Every quarter
- Recommends closing
- Roughly 1 in 6
- Notice to leave
- None required
What a storefront comes with.
Included
- A hosted storefront on your own domain
- Costed packing and postage before anything goes live
- Standing orders, with a one-tap pause for the customer
- A quarterly contribution review, in plain arithmetic
- Your customer list, exportable, always yours
- Leaving whenever you like, with the data
Not included
- Any exclusivity — sell wherever else you want
- Any obligation to stock Diddly Squat products
- Any listing on this estate’s own shop
- Fulfilment — you pack it, we do not touch it
- A guarantee of any traffic whatsoever
- Payment processing on this demonstration build
Why the customer list belongs to the farm.
The standard marketplace arrangement is that the customer belongs to the platform. It is the whole economic basis of the model: a farm that cannot contact its own buyers cannot leave.
That is a rational way to build a marketplace and a poor way to treat a supplier who has spent twenty years growing the thing being sold. The list here is exportable in full, at any time, without asking, and a farm that leaves takes it with them.
It makes the business less valuable and considerably easier to defend.
At a glance.
6% take rate
Card processing and hosting, roughly.
Costed before launch
Cardboard and courier, not just price.
Your list, exportable
At any time, without asking.
No exclusivity
Sell anywhere else you like.
The other side of the same idea.
Group buying — the same farms, buying inputs together instead of selling produce apart.
