A courier quote for a box of salad leaves, two dozen eggs and a chicken tells you everything you need to know about shipping produce. The postage costs more than the food, and the food arrives warm.
Farm shops are not small versions of national retailers. They sell heavy, fragile, perishable things to people who live nearby. That is a constraint, and it is also the whole advantage, because the two ways of getting food to a local customer both beat a courier on cost and on quality.
Collection is the default, not the fallback
Start with collection and add delivery only if the demand is there. Collection costs you nothing to run, it has no failure mode involving a doorstep in August, and it brings somebody onto the farm, where they buy the things they had not planned to.
What makes collection work online is the slot. "Open Tuesday to Saturday" is a shop sign. An order needs a specific window, because the whole point is that the box is packed and waiting.
- Set windows you can actually staff. Two hours on a Friday afternoon and three on Saturday morning beats "any time" that nobody is there for.
- Put the address and the parking on the confirmation. Farms are hard to find and satnavs are wrong about them. A sentence about the gate and the track saves you three phone calls a week.
- Say what happens if they do not come. Perishable goods and a no-show is a real cost. A short policy, stated before checkout, is enough.
Pickup points are set up in shop settings, alongside the rest of the fulfilment options.
A delivery round beats a delivery service
If you do deliver, deliver like a milk round rather than like a parcel firm. Fixed days, fixed areas, one van, a route you already drive.
That turns delivery from a per-order cost into a per-round cost, which is the only version that works at farm-shop margins. Twelve drops on a Thursday in one postcode group is a cheap hour. Twelve drops across the county on twelve different days is a business you do not want.
The way to enforce it without an argument is geography and a minimum:
- Deliver to named areas only, by postcode, rather than "local deliveries available".
- Set a minimum order that covers the drop. Most farm shops land somewhere between twenty and forty.
- Give a free-delivery threshold slightly above your average order. It is the most reliable way to lift basket size, and unlike a discount it costs you fuel you are already burning.
Zones, thresholds and per-area charges are all in shop settings; the general trade-offs are in Shipping Options for a Small Online Shop.
Cut off the orders before you pick them
The single most useful rule in the whole system is the cut-off, and it is the one most farm shops add only after a bad week.
Orders for Thursday close Tuesday at six. That gives you Wednesday to pick, to substitute what the weather took, and to tell somebody before they arrive rather than after. Without it you are packing an order that arrived at midnight for a van that leaves at eight.
Say the cut-off next to the slot, not in the terms. It is not a restriction, it is the reason their box is fresh.
Decide about substitutions before it happens
Produce fails. A frost, a wet week, a hen that stops laying. The customer ordered chard and there is no chard.
You need one policy, stated on the page:
- Substitute with something similar, and say so on the packing note. Best for boxes, where the customer bought a selection rather than a list.
- Refund the line and send the rest. Best for named items somebody specifically wanted.
- Ask first. Honest, and expensive in time. Fine at ten orders a week, impossible at a hundred.
Whatever you pick, tell them before they collect. A surprise substitution found at the kitchen table is a complaint; the same substitution mentioned in an email on Wednesday is a farm shop doing its job.
Post only what survives the post
Some of what a farm shop sells travels perfectly well and is worth listing for customers outside the round: honey, jam, flour, cheese with a rind on it, cured meat, dried beans, a hamper at Christmas.
Keep those in a separate category with their own postage, so somebody two counties away can buy the jam without being told they are outside the delivery area. What you must not do is let the fresh produce fall into the same postage rule by accident. Perishables and parcels want different handling, and mixing them is how you end up posting salad.
The order it goes together
Collection windows first, because they are free and they work. One delivery day next, in the tightest area that has demand. Postage for shelf-stable goods last, if at all.
The farm shop website builder page shows how the whole thing looks, stock that changes with the season is covered in Selling Stock That Changes Every Week, and the collection-or-delivery argument from the food-service side is in Collection or Delivery?. You can start for free with this week's list.