Since returning from the Summer holidays Sandy Lane Farm have enjoyed 6 ‘best ever’ sales weeks (outside of ‘Christmas week’).
They were the first users of Growing Good software on a very early version of our platform, going live a little more than 3yrs ago. To mark that milestone we’re taking a detailed look at their weekly retail activity to understand how George and team have enjoyed such a positive period of online growth, while spending close to £0 on traditional marketing activity. This despite facing significant retail headwinds - namely a post-covid cooling of demand in the veg box market, compounded by the more widely-felt impacts of high inflation and a cost of living crisis.
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We looked back at the 4 weeks from week 37 in both 2024 and 2025 to compare like for like performance of all box schemes using our platform for a minimum of 13 months.
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We’re delighted to say that performance is up (almost) across the board;
Sales - up 9.27% on average (only 3 box schemes were flat or slightly down)
Average basket spend - up 3.74% (high of +25.69% LFL gain, biggest average spend of £38.02)
Orders per week - up 5.33% (82% of box schemes made gains)
Average items per basket - up 2.87% (moved marginally from 2.40 to 2.47 per basket average)
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2024 saw significant growth for us as a platform and we’re likely to have grown again by at least ~50% in 2025, however adding to the overall size of our community alone is a somewhat flawed measure of success. We’re on a mission to help make small-scale really work, so it’s the like-for-like performance of our community that matters to us most - if our software isn’t generating productivity gains for you then we’re not doing our job properly.
Customers can search by product name, search keys and filter results by category
As more customers discover search capability on your store we’re seeing significant utilisation. This is likely to be driven by new customers shopping for the first time, and box schemes that encourage weekly shopping activity - more on that to follow.