Las Lomas Lavender & Honey farm is a one-woman operation on California’s Central Coast overlooking the Elkhorn Slough. Owner Cathy Carlson bottles up lavender essential oil, bundles white sage, and harvests Kaffir lime leaves on the property. She sells the fresh and dried herbs and citrus locally and nationwide with a Cottage Food Operation (CFO) permit.
Selling on Good Eggs & Facebook
Before joining Airmart, Cathy sold Las Lomas Lavender & Honey products on the Good Eggs platform. A neighboring farmer would drive the products up to the Good Eggs headquarters in Oakland. This made it easy for Cathy to work with the delivery service. But when Good Eggs began to require liability insurance that surpassed her sales, Cathy decided the costs outweighed the benefits.
After leaving Good Eggs, she tried selling through numerous other platforms, including Facebook Commerce. But she soon became frustrated when the shops she built would get deleted or the platforms would change altogether.
For a while, Cathy simply took orders through Facebook DMs. She used the USPS website to calculate shipping costs. Customers would pay via PayPal. Upon receiving payment, Cathy would purchase and print the shipping labels and then package and send the orders. For local orders, Cathy would place the packages in a box at the entrance of the farm for easy pickup.
Finding Airmart
As a farmer and business owner doing everything herself in addition to her day job, Cathy needed an inexpensive, user-friendly eCommerce platform that wouldn’t overcomplicate the order management and fulfillment process. She found that in Airmart.
Taking orders via Facebook DM was a multi-step process involving three different websites, with no way of organizing the orders. When Cathy opened a Las Lomas Lavender & Honey shop on Airmart, she was able to do everything from accepting payment to printing shipping labels all in one place.
“I love that Airmart is so easy to use,” Cathy shared. “And if I do have trouble with something, the team is always available to help with a phone call or an instructional video that explains everything.”
Join Cathy and bring your farm online with Airmart.