The world runs on smartphones and tablet computers. With a flick of the thumb on the touchscreen, we can order rides, request food deliveries, and book vacation homes and flights.
Four years ago, the debut of the HitchPin app brought this “gig economy” convenience to farmers and ranchers. Simply put, using HitchPin’s free listings, farmers can find personalized service providers to help them during the planting and harvesting seasons. Instead of using classified ads and word of mouth, a service provider, like a custom picker, for example, can list their service, the radius they’re willing to travel, their prices, and more. Customers can then hire and pay for them using the app’s escrow service, just as you would if you were hiring an Uber or booking an Air BnB listing.
For farmers, for farmers
Since its debut in 2018, founder Trevor McKeeman says thousands of farmers have built or expanded their farming businesses through farming gigs on HitchPin.
McKeeman grew up on a farm near Enterprise, Kan., and HitchPin grew out of a desire to help farmers like his family and neighbors back home. Farm gigs and direct sales are some of the most popular ways farmers get cash flow and offer the opportunity to expand their operations. He saw the rise of app-based gig services that use excess capacity and discovered how these features could be tailored for a farming clientele.
Today, HitchPin is headquartered in Manhattan, Kan., to be close to the farmers and ranchers it serves.
Showcases
The next step for HitchPin was to create Storefronts, a new free tool for HitchPin users.
McKeeman explains that farmers have always had side businesses that bring cash flow to their farms. Whether it’s direct sales of produce or meat to consumers through farmers markets; or selling seed, hay, or other crop inputs to other farmers, many farms have multiple businesses.
But farmers rarely have the time or money to create a website or fully utilize the power of digital communications to expand their customer base. Instead, they use word of mouth or classified ads to make those sales.
Storefronts on HitchPin provide users with this online URL footprint. This is a customized website for the user’s business, which pulls all of their sales listings into one online location to share with potential customers.
Users reserve a custom URL for their online store and it takes less than five minutes to set up, according to the company.
“We took that ability to list any kind of product or service, and with Storefronts we packaged that into something that now brings together all of your individual listings,” says McKeeman. “So unlike other marketplaces where you might have a listing here or there, Storefronts brings it all together and you have your own URL.”
Your website
It’s not Craigslist, or Facebook’s Marketplace with passive listings, he adds. Storefronts provides the infrastructure for farmers to not only list their products and services on a Facebook page or group, but also on a website that has their own custom URL. Storefronts also process online payments securely using HitchPin’s escrow feature and take advantage of HitchPin’s search engine optimization capabilities to reach more customers.
As McKeeman explains, Storefronts allows farmers to continue the business of farming and gives them their own place on the Internet.
Even more exciting is how HitchPin’s Storefronts allow farmers to provide details and documentation about their products for sale. For example, a company may be looking for age- and source-verified cattle. Farmer Johnson has listed on the Johnson Farms Stores page an age- and source-verified cattle pen, and provides third-party documentation to support these claims. With a few clicks, that buyer can now view that cattle and that paperwork, and buy it.
A more pressing example, McKeeman says, is that drought-stricken farmers have spent days trying to find forage for their livestock, but their near-and-familiar sources have been tapped. By using Storefronts listings, a shopper can expand that circle and connect with a wider base of suppliers that they may not have opened to before.
Shoppers can also find storefronts from farms they regularly do business with and follow them in the app as well.
To learn more about HitchPin’s new Storefronts capability, visit hitchpin.com.
[ad_2]
Source link
