What Will People Actually Buy?
You can build an attractive roadside stand, place it where drivers can easily see it, fill it with products you are proud of, and still have disappointing sales. Sometimes the problem isn’t the stand at all. It is simply that the things you expected people to buy aren’t the things your customers actually want.
For a new roadside stand, discovering what people will buy is part of starting the business. You may grow beautiful zucchini, bake wonderful sourdough bread, or make pepper jelly that everyone in your family loves. Those products may become best sellers, but until customers begin spending money, you really don’t know. The goal during your first weeks isn’t to prove that your original ideas were right. It is to learn enough about your customers to make better decisions the next time you stock the stand.
CKF TIP
You are not trying to prove that you guessed correctly. You are trying to learn what your customers want.
Start Small Enough to Learn
One of the easiest mistakes when opening a roadside stand is preparing too much inventory. An empty table doesn’t look particularly inviting, so there is a natural temptation to bake more bread, pick more vegetables, fill more jars and make the stand look abundant. Unfortunately, every product on that table represents something you have already invested. It may be ingredients and packaging, or it may be seeds, water, garden space and months of work. It almost always represents your time.
A better approach for the first few selling days is to offer smaller quantities of several products and watch what happens. Instead of baking thirty loaves of bread because you hope thirty people will want one, perhaps start with six or eight. Instead of preparing four dozen packages of cookies, try a smaller batch. If your garden is overflowing with tomatoes, you can still put out enough to make an attractive display without harvesting everything simply to make the table look full.
Those early selling days are doing two jobs. You are trying to make sales, but you are also conducting inexpensive market research. A few unsold loaves can teach you something without costing nearly as much as twenty unsold loaves.
Pay Attention to What Actually Happens
You don’t need sophisticated software to begin learning about your customers. Watch what disappears first, what customers pick up and examine, what they put back, and what remains untouched at closing time. Notice whether people buy one item or several things together. If bread and jam frequently leave together, for example, that may eventually suggest how those products should be displayed.
A product selling out quickly is worth paying attention to, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you should make ten times as much the following week. Increase the amount gradually and see whether the demand continues. The same caution applies to something that doesn’t sell. Before eliminating it, consider whether the problem could have been the price, packaging, location on the stand, lack of a description, or simply an unusually slow day.
Whenever possible, change one thing at a time. If you change the product, price, packaging, display and selling day all at once, you may never know which change actually helped.
Your Customers Will Tell You What They Want
Customers often provide some of the best product research without realizing they are doing it. Someone may ask whether you ever sell eggs. Another customer may want to know if strawberries will be available next week. Someone buying a loaf of bread might ask whether you make smaller loaves, and a person buying cookies may ask whether you make a version without nuts.
You don’t need to agree to every request, and you certainly shouldn’t start making products that don’t fit your business just because one person asked. What matters is noticing patterns. If six unrelated customers ask for eggs over the course of two weeks, that is much more useful information than one casual request.
Keep a small notebook at the stand and write those requests down. Your memory is rarely as dependable as you think it will be at the end of a busy day.
Consider a Suggestion Box
A small suggestion box can be especially useful for an honor stand where you aren’t present to talk with every customer. Put out a few slips of paper and a pencil with a simple invitation such as “What would you like to see here?” Customers might suggest a vegetable they have been looking for, another bread flavor, smaller packages, different hours, or a product you never considered selling.
You will probably receive an occasional silly, rude or completely useless comment. Don’t let those discourage you. Throw away the nonsense and look for useful ideas and repeated themes. Constructive criticism can also be valuable, even when you don’t particularly enjoy reading it. One complaint may simply be one person’s preference, but when several customers independently mention the same problem, it deserves a closer look.
A suggestion box isn’t a voting system, and customers don’t get to run your business. It is simply another inexpensive way to listen.
Your Best Seller May Surprise You
What attracts attention isn’t always what produces the most sales. A beautiful artisan loaf might receive compliments all afternoon while ordinary chocolate-chip cookies quietly sell out. Customers may admire your zucchini but repeatedly ask for yellow squash. A smaller jar of preserves might outsell a larger jar because a new customer is more comfortable spending a few dollars to try something unfamiliar.
Let those surprises teach you rather than disappoint you. You don’t have to stop making something you enjoy simply because it isn’t your biggest seller, but your inventory should gradually reflect what people are actually willing to purchase.
This is another reason CKF encourages new roadside sellers not to over-invest too soon. That principle applies not only to the building itself but also to what you put inside it.
CKF TIP
Don’t build tomorrow’s product line until today’s customers tell you what it needs.
Give People Choices Without Trying to Sell Everything
A little variety makes a roadside stand interesting, but too much variety can create unnecessary work and expense. Depending on what you produce and what your local regulations permit, a new stand might combine seasonal vegetables with a few baked goods, preserves, honey, eggs, flowers, herbs or other locally produced items. You don’t need every category, and you certainly don’t need twenty products in each one.
A small assortment can actually make it easier to discover what your customers prefer. If tomatoes, bread, cookies, jam and flowers are available, you can begin seeing which products attract attention and which ones sell together. As demand becomes clearer, you can gradually increase successful products and experiment with something new.
This also helps protect the owner from burnout. A roadside stand shouldn’t require you to grow ten crops, bake five kinds of bread, make six varieties of jam and stay awake half the night preparing for Saturday morning just so the tables look impressive. A smaller product line that reliably sells may be a much better business.
Make the Price Easy to Find
Sometimes what appears to be a product problem is actually a communication problem. Many people are reluctant to ask how much something costs, particularly at an unattended stand. If they cannot quickly determine the price, some will simply put the item down and leave.
Make prices obvious and specific. Instead of simply writing “Tomatoes $3,” say “Tomatoes – $3 per basket.” Mark bread by the loaf, cookies by the package and preserves by the jar. At an honor stand, clear pricing becomes even more important because there may be nobody available to answer questions.
The same principle applies to payment instructions. Customers shouldn’t have to hunt for the cash box or wonder which QR code they are supposed to scan. Make buying easy.
Give the Experiment Enough Time
One slow Saturday doesn’t necessarily mean your roadside stand is a failure, just as one unusually busy morning doesn’t guarantee that you’ve discovered a gold mine. Weather, traffic, school schedules, church activities, local events, football games, tourism and even payday can affect who passes your stand and who decides to stop.
Try several selling days and, when practical, different times before drawing major conclusions. Keep simple notes about the date, weather, what you stocked, what sold, what remained and what customers requested. After several weeks, those notes can reveal patterns that weren’t obvious while you were standing behind the table.
You don’t need complicated accounting software to answer the first questions. A notebook, clipboard or simple worksheet can tell you quite a bit.
Compliments Are Wonderful, but They Aren’t Sales
People may tell you that your stand is adorable, your bread looks wonderful or your idea is fantastic. Enjoy the compliments. They are encouraging, and an attractive stand can certainly help bring customers back.
Just don’t confuse attention with demand.
The information you need for business decisions comes from what people actually purchase, how much they purchase, what they request and whether they return. If everyone loves looking at a particular product but nobody buys it, there is something else to learn. Perhaps the price is wrong, perhaps the package is too large, or perhaps it is simply something people enjoy seeing more than owning.
Look for the Products That Bring People Back
Your most valuable product may not always be the one with the highest profit on a single sale. A customer who begins stopping every Friday for a loaf of bread may eventually add tomatoes, jam or eggs to the purchase. Someone who discovers your stand during tomato season may remember you when pumpkins appear in October.
Over time, consistency helps turn a roadside stand from something people happen to notice into a place they intentionally visit. If customers learn that fresh bread is normally available on Friday afternoon or eggs are restocked on Wednesday morning, stopping at your stand can become part of their routine.
That kind of repeat business is worth watching closely because it tells you something more important than whether a particular product sold once. It tells you that the stand is beginning to develop customers.
Let Your Customers Help Build the Business
Your first season does not need to produce the perfect assortment of products. What it needs to produce is information. You want to learn what brings cars into the driveway, what sells together, which prices work, which days are worthwhile, what customers repeatedly request and which products require far more work than the money they bring in.
Start small enough that mistakes are affordable. Keep track of what happens, listen to your customers without allowing every opinion to send you in a new direction, and make changes gradually.
The stand doesn’t have to become bigger every time the business improves. Sometimes improvement means selling fewer things, wasting less product, working fewer hours and becoming better at providing exactly what your customers came to buy.
And when your customers finally show you that it is time to grow, you’ll be making that investment based on evidence rather than hope.
