Running a food hub requires a lot of administrative work. As Tandy Thackeray, the food hub manager at Siskiyou Farm Co., says in her article, How to Start a Food Hub, starting a good hub is “like running a marathon uphill, with interval sprints at each mile.”
From onboarding vendors, processing inventory (digitally and physically), marketing, managing customer segments, payments and invoices — the list could really go on. The power of having great sales software is not only accepting sales online but all the automations and workflows you can implement to improve your efficiency and cut back on manual tasks.
Local Line, sales software built for food hubs, has a suite of features that can help your food hub team save time, reduce errors, and grow. Read on to explore these features!
Unique to Local Line, price lists allow you to create unique storefronts for different customer types. Many food hubs we work with sell both wholesale and direct-to-consumer. Different customer segments often have different pricing, package sizes, availability, and fulfillment schedules. Trying to juggle these different channels using different tools can quickly become overwhelming.
With price lists, you have one inventory list under your Products table, and you can allocate products to individual price lists. You can also update the pricing, visibility, and which packages are available within each price list.
Additionally, at the price list level, you have the ability to:
In this video, we break down how to set up price lists and define unique settings.
We know manually paying your vendors week after week can be time-consuming and, frankly, annoying. There are so many different exports and spreadsheets to keep track of, as well as banking information, totals, and payment terms. Within Local Line, you can directly pay your vendors.
In your vendor payouts table, all the vendors, orders, payment status’, transaction status’, and amounts due will be visible. To pay a vendor, select the vendor and press ‘Payout.’ You can bulk-pay vendors by selecting multiple orders at one time.
You can also export all your payment data into a spreadsheet, which allows you to see the transaction status, order number, and payout totals at a glance.
Learn more about how vendor payouts work in Local Line.
Onboarding and managing vendors is a huge part of running a food hub. You may have vendors who are more involved in selling and their inventory management and others might prefer a hands-off approach.
With Local Line, you can choose between managing your vendors' inventory and having your vendors manage their own inventory. Every Local Line subscription plan has a vendor seat included.
The best part? You can have both types of vendors at the same time:
Having vendors manage their own inventory saves you time from updating values on their behalf or communicating back and forth about what they have available. Vendors or suppliers who already have a Local Line account can share their selected price list directly with you!
When re-selling and aggregating local food, adding price adjustments to your products can be time-consuming. Within individual price lists, you can add set dollar amounts, or percentage markups or markdowns to products. These price adjustments are only applied to that specific price list.
You can manually go through the list and adjust on a per-product basis, or leverage the bulk action by selecting which products you want to adjust and apply a bulk change.
Communication is a huge part of running a food hub. Within your price list settings, you can set up an automated price list email. Create a subject line, write your email copy, and set a frequency to send out the email.
Local Line users who send a weekly price list schedule see 3x as many orders in their store, and their average order size is 53.1% larger. Using this feature saves you from manually creating and sending out order reminders on a weekly basis.
Save time from manually formatting and updating important sales and order data into spreadsheets. Leverage Local Line’s 7 different order export formats. At Siskiyou Farm Co., Tandy and her team rely on these exports for their day-to-day operations–especially when it comes to order pick up day.
Here are a few of her favourites:
As a food hub manager or team member, sales software can provide immense support to help you streamline manual tasks and improve your efficiency, especially when it comes to managing incoming orders and ensuring successful delivery. Local Line not only allows you to sell local food online to your different customer segments, but it also provides all the tools you need to fulfill those orders without a hitch.
