Free Website Builder for Cottage Cooks

So you’ve taken your talent for baking, completed any food safety courses required by your state, and created a cottage food business out of your home.

You love your work and you’re motivated, even at crunch time when getting it all done and keeping track of the details seems insurmountable.

You can still be your own boss without having to do everything yourself if you take advantage of a quality website builder. Cast a much wider net for potential customers with a great ecommerce website, and make it easy for people to order your cottage foods online.

Even if you value meeting your customers face-to-face at farmers markets and festivals, your business and your profits will grow exponentially by inviting more people to try your delectable goods with a vivid website. Today’s website builders make it easy for you to upload crisp, high definition pictures and build a catalog, showcasing an online store for bakery that might actually tempt people to lean in and smell their screens.

Here’s how to start online food business from home: choose a free website builder for cottage cooks. Potential customers will settle in and search keywords like ‘bakery near me’ and be greeted with your sumptuous-looking fare, an option they might never have known about. Castiron, a website-building software program for cottage cooks, takes you through every step of managing your business in one place.

Tools You’ll Love On Castiron:

• For food production: keep up with inventory and keep your customers safe with allergy warnings
• For marketing: draw in more customers and show off professionalism and creativity with a polished, engaging website and automate your email marketing
• For ordering: offer a streamlined process for customers to quickly and conveniently place orders, and accept credit card payments, Apple Pay, and Google Pay
• For your own quality of life: keep it all in one place and organize order fulfillment, invoices, and deposits within your site

Even after bringing a visually appealing site to life, website builders help in myriad ways such as presenting each individual product in a way that will make it easy to add them to a blog post, newsletter, or advertising campaign. Squarespace gives you options for embedded images and videos to make the sale, and functions like showing related products to score add-ons to orders. With building sites like Shopify you can peruse templates of online boutiques and decide what features will work best for your own site. Of course, these tools come with an added layer of complexity that may be more than a cottage cook wants to deal with.

Using software like Castiron website builder, launching your store is free and you only pay when you make a sale. Automation tools help you easily import items in your catalog and sync your inventory.

Whether people are introduced to your baked goods by seeing them in person at a festival, by word of mouth, or by seeing your site pop up in an online search, giving them a website to visit and a way to learn more will increase your chances of a sale. You will still be able to keep the personal, neighborly feel of your small business by the way you reflect your cottage food store’s ambiance on your site, even while you expand your business and increase your profits by selling homemade food online. You’ll reach a demographic of people you might never have the pleasure of meeting, but who appreciate home-baked goodness from the kitchen of a talented chef all the same.

A few details your site could include are graphics of your food labels with your name, address, and ingredient lists, the area in which you typically operate, upcoming events where your customers can sample your goods in person, and any certificates you have earned from food safety courses. Place special emphasis on the presence of nuts and other potential allergens to make it easy for customers to see and let them know you prioritize their well-being. Decide what promotions and sales could best entice people to try pastries, granola, seasoning blends, and homemade breads you have to offer, and draw attention to these on your site.

Letting customers browse your home-baked products from the comfort of their homes makes your goods available to them anytime, not just when they come across your booth at a farmers market or local fair. You’ll be able to introduce yourself using a different media and reach a much larger customer base. Best of all, there are website builders out there that perfectly understand the needs of a small business like cottage foods, and some are even free.

Dive in and launch your own online store!