Providing year-round staffing for a small community farm

"We are a community farm in upstate New York. We needed a way to offer our vegetables for sale that would provide our customers with the convenience of extended hours of operation and the ability to pay by credit card -- but we couldn't afford to hire staff just to babysit a small store. Now in our 2nd year, our farm store is open year round from dawn to dusk and operates entirely on a self-service basis thanks to KioskBuddy.

The interface was super easy for all our customers to adapt to, and the reporting provides us much-needed overviews of how our sales are going without a bunch of record keeping on our own. Plus our customers regularly tell us how much they love that we are operating the store on the honor system -- it gives us a very small town feel that is hard to capture.

Many thanks to KioskBuddy for providing a flexible, simple technology solution that had us up and running in just days and is now key to keeping our operation going. P.S. Our sales have nearly doubled in just a year!!"

- Susan Knapp

"Our first year of operation (2020) was a big success. We were all pretty stunned when we beat our projected earnings by $10k (a 25 percent increase). Once we got up and running, we never closed the store for the winter (as we had originally planned). Rather, we reached out to other farms and started marketing their products as well as our own storage crops (think sweet potatoes).

We never had to worry about a low sales week due to bad weather -- because we weren't staffing the store. We just kept going.

Once the warmer weather rolled around, we kicked off our 2021 year with a flower and plant sale. We find it so easy to create and swap the items in the catalogue, and the detail screen is good for making a sales pitch or publicizing another farm where a product comes from. We use the promo codes for all sorts of applications: from special weekend offers to regular discounts for small wholesale purchasers who don't want to place a regular weekly order with our farmer, but rather prefer to shop in the store. The new version that feeds all the detailed data back into Square closed a big gap in reporting -- thank you! We've had a great experience with your company and we are spreading the word to other small farms in the Northeast. Not everyone has the unique circumstances of our farm -- lots of land, reliable internet, great location in town, and community support as a not-for-profit farm. But for us, KioskBuddy is a perfect fit."

- Susan Knapp