Harley Rensing, a customer success manager at CommoditAg, joins The Scoop podcast to talk about supply chain constraints and how focusing on the customer experience is growing e-commerce and some ag retailers’ businesses.
“I manage all of our order fulfillment, our ERP system upkeep and I advocate for the voice of the customer. My team really helps the customer during any part of the ordering process. Since we are an e-commerce business, it is still something new to some of our customers.”
She says this year has seen an increase in the number of farmers visiting their online marketplace, particularly in the most popular product categories of herbicides, fungicides and insecticides.
You can hear more from Rensing on The Scoop podcast.
With four years of experience at CommoditAg, Rensing has seen first-hand how the business has grown.
“I think the biggest trend that I’ve seen is that our customers are shopping more online, but not 100%, she says. “Originally we thought our customer base would be a lot of self-sufficient, progressive growers, and we do have a lot of those come to our site, however, we’ve noticed that we have growers that may have never shopped online before. I don’t think that we have many growers that do 100% of their business online–maybe one day–but right now we’re still moving towards getting comfortable with the e-commerce.”
In mid-2021, Farmers Edge acquired CommoditAg as part of its overall digital strategy, and as Rensing summarizes “to give farmers a better buying journey.”
It’s the trust CommoditAg is working to build between their marketplace, the local ag retailer and the farmer that can help build online shopping she says.
“They’re still shopping with their traditional ag retailer which is great. We just want to make sure that we’re giving them another option for sourcing their ag inputs. I think it’s just going to take time for farmers to get comfortable shopping across all those categories. Our goal is to just have a lot of products out there and be able to source those to our growers,” she says.
Having more options and building trust are also paramount in difficult years such as 2022.
“The biggest challenge that I see for an ag retailer this year is constraints throughout the supply chain,” Rensing says. “So it’s not one specific area: we’ve seen an increase in price over high demand products, and a decrease in availability in those same products. Our goal this year is to sell to our grower customers at a fair price. And we know that this year has been tough on them and we really want to help any way that we can. It’s really hard this year to navigate through the volatility in the market.”
