A Grower Told Me It's Too Hard to Keep It All Updated

I emailed a few fruit growers last week. One of them wrote back, and it was easily the most useful reply I got.

They said fresh fruit is very hard to predict, and they've already got so many platforms to update when they're open, when they're closed, when the cherries run out. Keeping all of them current, instantly, is too hard.

Fair enough. I'm not going to pretend SideStall isn't another platform. It is.

But there are two different problems tangled up in that reply, and only one of them is really about us. So here's my honest answer to both.

You don't have to predict anything

Nothing in the app asks you what you'll have next Tuesday. You list what you've actually got, and when it's gone you switch it off. There's no forecast to fill in.

If counting stock isn't your thing, you don't have to. The app says it straight: 0 shows as out of stock, so set a high number if you don't track it. Put in 9999, sell all day without thinking about it, and flick the item off when the tray's empty.

And if you'd rather know before you pick, that's what pre-orders are for. People reserve what they want ahead of time, so you're packing to real orders instead of guessing how many punnets to bring down.

Updating a stall isn't writing a post

This is the bit I'd push back on, gently. The word “update” is doing a lot of work in that reply, because on most platforms updating means composing something. You've got to find a photo and think of something to say. That's the tiring part, and it's fair to not want six of those.

On SideStall it's a switch. There's nothing to write.

• Sold out of cherries: one toggle on that item, and buyers see it greyed out as unavailable.
• Closed the same days most weeks: operating hours is seven rows, one per day, and you mark a day closed by toggling it off. If your times are the same across the week, the app has a button that applies one day to all seven. Set that once and leave it.
• Shut today when you'd normally be open: the stall itself has a switch. Turn it off and it stops showing to customers.
• Still open but you've had enough orders: instant orders pause on their own switch, and the app is clear that orders already placed aren't affected.

That's the whole job. About the same effort as turning your sign around when you carry the trestle table back up the drive.

If the part that's really wearing you out is orders arriving in six different inboxes rather than the stock itself, I wrote about getting orders out of your DMs a while back, and most of it applies to fruit just as well as it does to cake.

Nobody needs it instant

The word I'd argue with is “instantly”. Nothing bad happens because your stall was an hour behind.

What loses you a customer is someone driving twenty minutes on a Sunday for cherries that sold out at nine. They don't email you about it. They just don't come back, and they mention it to a few people. One switch on your way inside prevents that, and it doesn't have to happen the second the last punnet goes.

Pre-orders work the same way. If a request comes in while you're up a ladder, you've got 48 hours to answer it. If you don't get to it, it cancels itself and the buyer's told, so nobody's left hanging while you're picking.

Two things we can't do

Worth saying plainly, because you'd find them out anyway.

1. If someone pays cash at the gate, the app has no idea. Nothing about a cash sale tells us the tray's empty, so that switch is still yours to flick. We can only see what goes through the app. Plenty of gates run unattended on an honesty box and always will, and that's genuinely fine, it just means the updating stays manual.
2. It's still one more thing. I can tell you it's quicker than the others, and I believe that, but it's not nothing.

If you're only ever going to keep one of them honest, keep the one that takes a second to change. I'd like that to be us. If it isn't, that's a fair call, and I'd rather hear why than not hear back.

What I'd actually do

1. List the lines you sell most weeks, not everything you might ever have.
2. Set the stock high on anything you don't count, and use the item switch instead.
3. Set your hours once and leave them.
4. Flick the stall off when you're shut and on when you're not. That's the habit worth building.
5. Turn pre-orders on when the season gets heavy, so you're picking to real numbers.

Listing a stall is free and takes about ten minutes. There's more on how it works for sellers if you want a look before you commit to anything.

And if all of this is still more than you want to take on, tell me that. Email me at hello@sidestall.au. I read every one, and the reply that started this post was more use to me than a good week of sign-ups.

Santo