Farm Sites
I have put a lot of effort into developing software for the use of small farms that sell directly to the public through farm stands, farmer's markets, CSAs or other means. There is an online database of all the produce that the farmer is growing and can include descriptions, pictures, prices and recipes. Each item of produce can be marked as available when it is in season. A visitor to the site can look at all of the produce, only the produce that's available or do a search on multiple categories such as lettuce and tomatoes if they want to make a salad.
In order to maintain the site, the farmer logs into a special administrative page and then has complete control of the information in the database. Normally all that will be done during the growing season is checking or unchecking the available box on the various items of produce or perhaps changing a price here and there. This procedure shouldn't take more than 5 or 10 minutes and then the available produce will automagically appear on the produce page.
This software is still very much of a work in progress and I am open to suggestions for new features and improvements. I will give special rates to the next couple of farms that want to be part of the development process. There is a demo site at Test Site. The administrative interface is at Administrative Demo. Please feel free to play with the administrative interface as much as you want. You have to log in with the user name 'demo' and the password 'demo'.
If you're not sure if your farm really needs a web presence, take a look at this brochure put out by the United States Department of Agriculture: How to Direct-Market Farm Products on the Internet.
Online Ordering
There is an example of online credit card ordering at Wet Look Auto Detailing. It uses an online credit card company that charges rather high per transaction fees but there is no monthly service charge. This makes it ideal for an online store that is just starting out. There is only one product here at the present time -- a pdf file that can be downloaded after the credit card transaction is approved.
