James Ferraro, vice president at Agrellus, reports that the second two weeks of March 2020 saw a 225% increase in farmer buying requests compared to the same period last year. He says for the first quarter of 2020 the company doubled its product sales compared to 2019.
This recent accelerated growth of the ag inputs ecommerce marketplace is being attributed to the social distancing measures put in place to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
Agrellus, an ecommerce marketplace and mobile app that allows retailers to respond to farmer purchase requests on all crop inputs, was already off to a strong start in 2020. It had tripled its farmer members in the last year with members in 25 states. Also, the company had a 50% annual increase in dealers, now totaling about 110 companies with 400+ locations across the country. For the first quarter of 2020, retailers joined at a 300% faster pace than the first quarter of 2019.
“We’re channel friendly for retailers,” Ferraro says. “And once a farmer is used to using the platform, it converts their behavior. We are not seeing that the online purchase behavior is skewed larger-scale or younger in age… it’s across the board.”
The Agrellus platform is built so farmers can make a product request in less than two minutes with the ability to build in request parameters (brand, quantities, delivery type, packaging, payment method, etc). Most requests are placed via its mobile app, but many farmers also use the desktop version during off hours. Ferraro reports that it saves the farmers the time and effort of making multiple emails and phone calls or talking to sales people about every product they need.
For retailers, they can see the farmer’s name and location who is requesting a quote on product, and likewise, the farmer sees which retailers submitted quotes. If they don’t get the sale, the retailer can see anonymous pricing details of the winning quote. Ferraro explains this process frees the retail team from “just order taking” and spend more time on higher value services like agronomy.
“That helps retailers build up price data in different geographies, different sizes of farms, and insight into market pricing,” Ferraro says.
This past fall, Heartland Co-op signed on with Agrellus. “Our goal in this first year was to walk before we ran,” says Dave Coppess head of sales and marketing at Heartland Co-Op. “At first we only opened bids outside our traditional trade area, and then we added training for our sales team so they could also help promote it with all patrons.”
Coppess says their management team calculated 70% of their customer base is more traditional and values a relationship with a sales agronomist. Heartland has positioned Agrellus to work with the more transactional based patrons. They are offering seed, crop protection and fertilizer on the Agrellus platform.
Overall, the most transactions on the platform are crop chemicals; seed is second; fertilizer is third.
Shae Cunningham, an independent crop protection retailer, is located in the Texas panhandle, and has been on Agrellus for over two years.
“I have two or three suppliers, so knowing the prices of the bids I don’t win is helpful to see how much product is going for by area,” Cunningham says. “If someone else beats me on price, they beat me. But I get to see at what price they are beating me at.”
Cunningham says he’s had different success with winning offers on products every season—sometimes it’s glyphosate, sometimes atrazine, and sometimes dicamba.
