Can You Sell Your Produce On The Internet?

You can buy just about anything over the Internet. This can be verified simply by browsing through the zillions of listings on eBay (www.ebay.com). But eBay is not the only game in the virtual town called the Internet. You can also look for items to purchase on numerous other Web sites, many of which will even list prices from dozens of vendors so you can get the best deal.

Well, what if you wanted to sell your greenhouse tomatoes on the Internet? Can you? I don’t know anyone who is doing this, but I don’t see why not.

The key to Internet produce sales would be the same as for any product: buy a domain name to help people find you, find a host server for your Web page, hire a company to design your Web page or make your own, and sign up for a “merchant account” so your customers can buy with a credit card.

The one additional area for produce sales would be some very well thought out packaging. In fact, you might want to visit a local company that is an expert at packaging anything, and get their recommendations, or even use them to package and ship each order. You certainly don’t want your valued customers to receive punctured, squashed, or puréed tomatoes instead of those perfect tomatoes you sent.

Marketing Frontier

Is anyone doing this yet? There must be some people at the frontier of marketing produce on the Internet. Just for fun, I did some poking around on eBay, looking for greenhouse or hydroponic tomatoes. The result? I got numerous “hits,” but none of them were bona fide produce. They included everything except tomatoes. There were books, posters, fabrics, seeds, greenhouse plans, tablecloths, and all kinds of decorative tomatoes (glass, plastic, etc.).

Even if you limit the search term to tomatoes, and look only in the “home and garden” category, the closest you will get to real produce is either seeds or dried tomatoes. It looks like there are no tomatoes to purchase, but I still think it would be an interesting marketing experiment to try eBay. If you do try it, let me know how it works.

Another approach is to use a marketing Web site that has been designed with agricultural producers in mind and takes the pain out of Internet sales. There is such a site, and it is called MarketMaker.

MarketMaker is a program developed as a joint project by University Of Illinois Extension, the Initiative for the Development of Entrepreneurs in Agriculture, the Illinois Department
of Agriculture, and the Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research. It was so successful in Illinois, it has been expanded to several other states. Currently, the following states have partnered with Illinois so that their growers can benefit from MarketMaker: Kentucky, New York, Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska, and Mississippi.

It is this simple: First, you go to the MarketMaker Web page for your state. (You can be sure that more states will be added to this pioneering program in the near future.) Each state
has a similar Web page, but the local sponsors are listed for the state you are in. If you want to try it out, go to http://ms.marketmaker.uiuc.edu to try out Mississippi’s page.

Once there, you click on “Register Your Business” so you can be listed.

As you will find out, the service is free. Or, if you want to see how easy it is to find something, click on Begin Your Search. Here you can search for a market based on various demographics, or find a business. For the latter choice, try picking Producers/Farmers, then Vegetables, then Tomatoes, then Hydroponic, and finally Fresh. Next fill in the multi-state bubble, and highlight all of the states listed (using control-click to get more than one) and hit the search key.

There are already 40 greenhouse tomato vendors listed in MarketMaker, even with only seven states participating as of this writing. Is your state not yet one of the lucky seven? If
so, call your state department of agriculture. With MarketMaker, who needs eBay?