Taking Holiday Preorders for Turkeys, Hams, and Beef Boxes

For a lot of farms, November and December are the biggest weeks of the year. Turkeys, hams, roasts, gift boxes. It's also when the text messages and Facebook DMs pile up, and someone always ends up missing from the spreadsheet. A simple preorder setup on your website fixes most of that. Here's how I'd set it up.

Decide what you're selling before you open orders

Write down every product, how many you can actually fill, and the price. For birds sold by weight, pick a few size ranges (say, 12–15 lb, 16–19 lb, 20+ lb) and price each range, or take a deposit now and charge the balance at pickup once you know the weight. Customers are used to both. What they don't like is a surprise at pickup, so say plainly how the final price works.

Take a deposit

A deposit cuts down on no-shows and tells you how many birds or boxes are really spoken for. A flat amount works fine. Make it clear whether it's refundable and up to what date, and put that in the product description and in the confirmation email.

Set limits so you don't oversell

Turn on inventory tracking for each product and set it to the number you can fill. When it hits zero, the product shows as sold out instead of taking orders you can't keep. Shopify, Square, Barn2Door, and GrazeCart can all do this. If one size range sells out, people can still pick another.

Give people pickup days, not a free-for-all

Pick two or three pickup windows and have customers choose one at checkout. Your day goes a lot smoother when you know 40 people are coming Tuesday between 3 and 6 instead of whenever they feel like it. If you ship or deliver, say which areas and the cutoff date for shipping in time.

Close orders on a set date

Pick a cutoff a week or two before the holiday and put it everywhere: the product page, your emails, your social posts. A deadline gets people to order now instead of "next week," and it gives you time to plan with your processor.

Send three emails

You don't need a big campaign. Three emails cover it:

1. Orders are open. What's available, prices, pickup days, and the cutoff.
2. Last call. A few days before the cutoff, mention what's close to selling out.
3. Pickup reminder. The day before, with the time, place, what to bring, and whether they owe a balance.

Most store platforms can send the pickup reminder for you if pickup times are set up as part of checkout.

After the holidays

Look at what sold out first and what was left over. Note how many orders came in during the last three days before the cutoff. That tells you how many birds to raise and how early to open orders next year.

Need help setting it up?

I've built preorder setups for farms selling produce, plants, and meat, including the one on the Mad Farmers Collective site in Indianapolis. If you want holiday orders running online this year, book a free call and we'll sort out what's realistic before your cutoff.