If your business is organic box delivery then foodey is made for you. Box delivery schemes are becoming ever more popular. The soil association now recognises over 500 organic certified delivery schemes alone, and there are many more schemes running all over the country. In times of economic uncertainty they can also be a good value alternative to often expensive supermarket offerings.

One of the challenges for box sheme operators is reaching your target market and receiving orders. Taking phone orders is great – but not always convenient for your customers. A dedicated web shop lets your customers order from you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Foodey is designed to enable box schemes to do just this.

In this article I’ll walk through the steps to setting up your own online shop for your box scheme and adding your first box to your shop. You might be surprised at how easy this is.

The first step is to sign up to foodey. If you haven’t already you can do so here. There are four plans – each designed for businesses of different size. To get start you can register for the free plan and then upgrade later to add features as you require.

Your shop will have it’s own unique name and unique web address. For example if your shop is called “BestBoxes” your shop name will be “Best Boxes” and your shop address will be http://bestboxes.foodey.co.uk

Once you have registered you will receive an email with your username and password. You can login to your control panel – go to the login page and enter your shop address, in the next page enter your password. You should now be in your shop administration area. (a quick link to your login area is http://<your shop name>.foodey.co.uk/admin)

Administration dashboard

Congratulations – you’ve now setup your own shop. You can view your shop by going to this address http://your shop name.foodey.co.uk (replace your shop name with the name you have chosen for your shop) or click on the link in the top right of your dashboard titled “View your live shop”.

So you have your shop up and running. Before you can start selling you need to add products!

Select products from the top menu. To add a box click on the button “Add a new box to your shop”

You should now see the screen to add all the details of your box to your shop:

Add a new box

You need to give your box a name, for example Summer veg, or Family pack. Optionally you can then describe who the box is suitable for example: perfect portions for a family of 5.

The next step is to specify the box status. If you are ready to sell the box straight away then set the box as active.

What’s in your boxes?

Not to add contents to your box. You can have as many or few combinations of contents as you wish. For example if you want to sell carrots, cauliflower, courgettes, potatoes and spring onions in this box just add the items in the Add a box item and click add item.

The minimum items sets the minimum selection a user must make from the available list.  The items per box sets the maximum items a user can select as contents in their box. This forces your customer to choose a minimum selection and a maximum selection of items when ordering their box through your web shop as below.

View of the product selection on your shop

Price

Next add a price. If your box price is £15.95 then enter 15.95 in the price box.

Pictures

Finally if you have images of your box you can upload them here. This will really help to sell your products, the number of images you can upload depends on your plan.

Once you have added your image click on the Save Box button. And that’s it – you’re done. You’ve created a shop and added your first box for sale. If you take a look at your shop again now you will see a single box for sale. You can repeat this process up to add more boxes and to create a full catalogue shop.

That’s it for part one – in part two we’ll look at how to customise your shop by adding your own custom pages, logos and colours to mirror your brand.