Ordering software for a yard that sells soil by the load

An order, start to finish

What it takes off you

1. 1

   The delivery is priced off their address

   They put in where it is going and the page works the fee out from your yard by road distance, against the bands you set once. They see a real number before they have called anybody, and so do you.

2. 2

   Twenty five yards is three loads, and three fees

   This is the bit a delivery price by distance alone gets wrong. You tell it how much of a thing fits on a truck, and it charges per load rather than per trip. 25 yards of black mulch out to Truro, 85.5 km by road, is 3 loads: $1,250 of material, $570 of delivery, $1,995 in total with the tax in.

3. 3

   Road distance, because the other way undercharges you

   The fee used to be worked out on the straight line between two points, which is shorter than the drive every single time and worst where it costs you most, around water and up a valley. It asks for the driving distance now, and only falls back to the straight line if the map cannot answer at all.

4. 4

   Your prices, the way your board has them

   If the number on your sign includes the tax, the page can show it that way too, on the material and on the delivery, so nothing jumps between the board and the checkout.

5. 5

   Paid at the checkout, straight onto your schedule

   With Stripe connected, a delivery order is paid when they place it and lands on your schedule, because your delivery days already decided whether it fits. Nobody is waiting on you to confirm a bag of mulch. Without Stripe it comes in as a request, the same way a machine rental does, and you say yes to it.

6. 6

   Nobody gets dead-ended

   If you have not set delivery bands on a yard, its products are sold for collection instead, with your address and your open days on them. A customer never reaches a page that wants a delivery price that does not exist.

Asked before

Straight answers

I price delivery by drive time, not by distance. Can it do that?

Not directly, and it is worth being straight about it. The bands are kilometres by road, so a table built on minutes has to be read across into distance once, when your page is set up, which I do with you. That holds for almost everybody. A yard that genuinely runs two separate fee tables needs two yards, and two yards is the Unlimited plan at $497 a month.

What stops somebody ordering more than a truck can carry?

Nothing needs to. You set how much fits on a load and the smallest order you will take, and the page works out how many loads an order really is and charges for each of them. A big order is a bigger fee, not a problem to sort out on the phone afterwards.

Do different materials get different delivery rates?

The fee table belongs to the yard, and the load size belongs to the product, which is where the real difference is: four yards of soil and five of mulch on the same truck is two different numbers of loads out of one table.

Half of what I sell is collected anyway.

That is fine, and it is the normal case. A customer picks up or has it delivered on the same page, and the ones you never deliver are sold for collection with your address and your hours on them.

Do I have to take cards?

No. Cash and e-transfer work the same as they always have and you mark those paid yourself. A card is only needed if you want the order paid before the truck loads.

What does it cost?

Free to start, no card. The platform fee is 10% of what a customer pays online through your page, and only when you actually get paid. Stripe charges you card processing at your own rate, separately, the same as anywhere you take a card. Growth at $147 a month drops it to 2.5% and adds texting.

Who sets it up?

I do, from your own site and your own price list, before you have agreed to anything. Nothing goes live until you have looked at it and said so.