Selling Meat or Cheese on GrownBy
GrownBy works for selling Meat, Cheese, or other products that are pre-packaged and sold by weight. In this article, we cover a few different ways a Farmer might sell Meat or Cheese on GrownBy, and our suggestions for how to handle different scenarios. This article will help you understand how to set up your Products and manage your inventory.
Our suggestions fall into five categories:
- Standardize variable-weight products into standard sizes/prices
- Use approximate weight ranges (either with or without refunds for overage)
- Use specific weights
- Invoice or refund after the order is placed
- Shares or bundles
Standardize variable-weight products
This approach avoids the complication of exactly matching your customers’ order fulfillment expectations by offering variable-weight products as more standardized products. If you need to issue a partial refund or invoice for fulfillments that vary significantly from your estimates, GrownBy makes that easy too.
Standardized Items
The easiest and most straightforward way to handle selling meat or cheese in GrownBy is to standardize your products. In the case of cheese, you might choose to sell a whole, half, quarter, and eighth wheel and set those prices to accommodate small fluctuations in specific size. You could also set those prices to include shipping, packing, and other logistical costs and overhead related to the sale.
When it comes to meat, it might be more challenging to take this approach since there are typically so many more products available from a meat seller, and the farmer often has little control over unit sizes. However, some products—like ground meat, bacon, or sausages—are typically easy to sell as standard units rather than by weight.
Selling variable products as standardized units in this way is a common practice in e-commerce. It helps to include expected weight ranges in your product descriptions, so customers are not surprised by a little variability.
2. Approximate weight variability with Buying Options
Using Weight Ranges
Another way to set up Meat and Cheese is by using weight ranges. This way, you can use average pricing to sell your pre-packaged or frozen items that are not precisely uniform in size.
When you set up your Product, deselect “Manage Stock Globally”. You will now be able to input your Stock separately for each Buying Option that you enter in the next step.
Next, input the Unit you use for the Product. The following field, Cost Per Unit, indicates the cost of a bought-in and resold good or the cost of production. If you know this number, you can enter it here. If not, leave it blank. Price Per Unit is your per/unit price (ie $7 per pound). This is where you’ll want to put in the price your customers will pay!
When pricing by weight ranges, it helps to price at the top of the range so that you can easily issue partial refunds to your customers after order fulfillment, if you so choose. If you underprice significantly, you will need to send an invoice to collect the difference. Adding a price buffer to variable-weight items ordered online is a common practice in the grocery industry.
Under Buying Option Name, you can enter any number of ranges of price. In the example below, we have Whole Chickens ranging from 4-5.4 lbs and the farmer has set them up in .4 lb ranges. In Units Each, enter the average weight that a Product in that range will weigh. If you use SKUs, enter those here and then fill in the number of Products you have Stock of in each Buying Option/weight range. It should look like this:
Customer View for Weight Ranges
When the customer chooses whole chickens, they'll see a selection of weights as a pop up and GrownBy will calculate and provide the price per pound based on the average weight you entered and the Price per Unit above. Once you have your Products set up in the Dashboard, we recommend that you double check your shop to make sure it's looking good to you. If there are less than five of an item in inventory, they show in red. It looks like this:
Editing Existing Products by Buying Options
Regardless of how you set them up, you can continue to edit the main price or add Stock to your Buying Options after you set-up your Product.
In the Product view of your Dashboard, click the arrow in between the image and Product name. Your full list of Buying Options will appear below. You can edit anything that appears in Blue. By clicking the main Price at the top of the Product ($7.00 in this example), you can adjust your Price per Unit. Because all of your Buying Option prices calculate from this price, this will change the Buying Option Prices below as well. By clicking the numbers under In Stock, you will be able to adjust your inventory. It will look like this:
3. Using Specific Weights
If you sell each product by the specific weight of the package, you can sell by the unit and simply track the inventory of each package that weighs a certain amount.
When you set up your Product, deselect “Manage Stock Globally”. You will now be able to input your Stock separately for each Buying Option (weight in this case) that you enter in the next step.
Next, input the Unit you use for the Product. The following field, Cost Per Unit, indicates the cost of a bought-in and resold good or the cost of production. If you know this number, you can enter it here. If not, leave it blank. Price Per Unit is your per/unit price (ie $17 per pound). This is where you’ll want to put in the price your customers will pay.
Under Buying Options & Prices, list the weights of the packages you have in stock. GrownBy will automatically calculate the price per package based on the Price Per Unit you entered above. List how many of each you have in stock. It will look like this:
Customer View for Specific Weights
When the Customer chooses a Product set up this way, they’ll be able to select any of the weights available in one of two ways, depending on where they click. They will either use this pop up window (if they are adding it directly to their cart from the shop view).
Or they will click through to the Product page and select the weight they’d like there:
Specific Weights for Larger Quantities
If you do not want to use the Deposit method explained above, you can also create a Product with an approximate weight and later adjust the amount billed to the Customer. To adjust down (i.e. the customer overpaid), you can issue a partial refund to credit or Farm Credit to your Customer. To adjust up (i.e. the customer underpaid), you can add an additional Invoice for the Customer via the Customer Detail Page. Click on New Invoice. The pop-up that appears looks like this:
As we noted above, this invoice will not be automatically attached to a specific Product and so, the income will not appear in your Sales data tied to what you sold. If you would like the income to be attached to your Product, you can create a Buying Option under that Product and Create an Order for your Customer for that specific Product.
4. Invoice or refund to exact amounts after fulfillment weight is known
These approaches work well for higher priced items like animal shares or wheels of cheese, where the final sales price is greatly affected by the variability in weight. However, you can easily use this method for smaller purchases as well.
You can choose to enter your products in your shop in whatever way works best for you and your customers. Once a customer has ordered a product, you can either refund or invoice them for the difference in price.
Note: Invoices are not tied to specific products or orders so using this method will result in inaccuracy in your final sales numbers.
Partial Refunds
If you have set up your products with imprecise weights, your next step after receiving and fulfilling an order may be issuing a refund. Please see this article about Partial Refunds for information and instruction about this topic!
Selling a Larger Quantity or Whole/Half/Quarter Animal Using Deposits
In many cases, using weight and price ranges and averages (covered above) is a simple way to sell Products that are similar in weight but not precisely the same. Sometimes you may want a more precise price, especially when the difference between approximate and actual weight is large, as is the case when you are selling large quantities in a single transaction.
You can set this up in GrownBy by requesting a deposit for the whole, half, or quarter animal and then by later invoicing the customer for the remaining balance once you know what it is.
To do this, first create a product for a deposit. In your Shop, it might look something like this:
After the animals have been packaged and you know the total hanging weight and price, you could charge the remaining balance in a few ways. The easiest way would be to Invoice the customer by creating an Invoice via their Customer Detail page.
GrownBy will send the customer a link to pay the invoice online. This method is smooth and simple, but GrownBy will not know that the income associated with that invoice was for the Product in question. If you wish to keep track of the income more closely, you could create a Product with buying options for the individual remaining balances and then create an order for each customer. You could hide the product afterward so that it won’t be visible to you or customers. The product could look like this:
GrownBy will send an Invoice with a link to pay the bill. All of the income associated with these products will be categorized and will show in your sales tab.
5. Shares or Bundles
In addition to selling Meat and Cheese a la carte, farmers also use GrownBy to sell their products as shares, boxes, bundles, or packages that are sold either as Standard Products or Subscriptions. One way of setting this up looks like this:
Bundling multiple variable-weight items into a single Product or Share helps average out the variability in each item across multiple items, lowering the stakes that your steaks in stock won’t quite match the inventory in your GrownBy shop.
To set up a weekly meat or cheese share on a Subscription schedule, you can follow the instructions in the article about Adding a Share. A meat/cheese share should be set-up as a Primary Share if any customer can buy it, or as an Add-on share if you want only Primary Shareholders to be able to buy it.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact support@grownby.app or schedule a time to talk with us here!
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