Are you using point of sale (POS) technology, like Square, in your market? With some forethought you can set up your system to not only take credit card sales and track your revenues, but also to collect data that you can use to improve your returns. Grocery stores, with the adoption of barcode scanners, use customer loyalty cards and product data to do this and have been doing this for years. This technology is available to you.
In a study of meat vendors at farmers markets using Square, Rigotti, LeRoux and Schmidt (2023) helped farms set up Square to capture specific data about what items were sold, the volume of the item and the price. The goal of their research was to identify factors that would increase “customer transaction size” or, in plain English, get customers to buy more. They found that customer transaction size was affected by the number of payment types the farms accepted, accepting more forms of payment (cash, credit cards, SNAP etc.) increased the amount that customers bought. The time of day as customers who came to the market earlier in the day purchased more and the amount customers purchased declined every hour. This implies that the serious shoppers and restaurant buyers tended to get in early, before the market got crowded. Customer density at the stand was also associated with lower sales per customer. As the stands got crowded, each customer bought a little less.
So, some takeaways from this research are: (1) make it easy for customers to buy more by accepting as many forms of payment as possible. (2) Get to the market as early as possible and be set up and be ready to sell as soon as you can so that you don’t miss the serious customers. And (3) try to set your stand up to reduce crowding and encourage customers to shop longer and buy more.
Finally, my recommendation is to use YOUR POS to evaluate your product mix and test different pricing and marketing strategies this season. If you need help with this let me (Liz Higgins) know. You can also contact Matt LeRoux (mnl28@cornell.edu) of the Dyson School for more information about this work and future related projects he is planning in this area.
Source
Rigotti, L, M. LeRoux and T. Schmit (2023) Improving Farmers Market Returns for Meat Vendors using Point-of-Sale Customer Data. WP 2023-01. Dyson School, Cornell University.