Are you a home-based baker, cottage food operator, or another type of food entrepreneur? If so, then a free home bakery software app can add ease, efficiency, and profit to your business. A bakery inventory app can track your online bakery orders, track bakery accounting transactions, and simplify various other tasks that you have to manage repetitively.
As the cottage food industry continues to surge in 2022, it's more important than ever for food artisans to keep up with the latest technology. Well-designed home bakery software enables you to provide entertaining, informative, and efficient customer interactions. These bakery apps streamline the process of shopping, making it fast, accurate, and hugely convenient!
A home bakery app, like Castiron, makes managing your business easier – from creating a professional website to order fulfillment – for FREE! This bakery inventory management system empowers food business owners, operators, and managers to automate and modernize their operations while simultaneously enhancing customer experiences.
The best apps for bakery business owners:
The Castiron app is thoughtfully built for today’s innovative kitchen creators. Its flexible fulfillment options accommodate pickup, shipping, delivery, or all three. It enables cottage cooks and home bakers to get the correct orders to the correct customers on time, without any problems.
Customize your ordering process
It's easy to create and manage every small detail of custom orders with the Castiron app. Do your products contain allergens like nuts, dairy products, or eggs? Castiron helps you ensure your customers’ safety by tracking all common allergens and diet types, like keto, vegan, low-carb, and paleo.
If you take even more custom orders — like wedding cakes or themed birthday cookies — you can collect all of the information that you need to provide a custom quote to your customers directly from your store. Your customers won't have to pay until you've decided on a price, and you'll have the details you need to provide an accurate cost, as well as the information you need to follow up with them.
Selling without stress
Free home bakery software makes light work of creating estimates, invoices, and payments. Setting up a Castiron website and bakery order tracker is fast and easy - and it's a powerful vehicle for growing your food business. It allows you to focus on what you do best, making delicious baked goods!
Managing your inventory
You never have to worry about selling more products than you have available with a free bakery app. You set the quantity and the app takes care of the rest for you. It will track when a product sells, when a product sells out, and it will stay in touch with your customers, for you, automatically, letting them know if something is sold out.
Here are some of the other benefits associated with the Castiron free cake business apps:
Getting paid
With Castiron's free home bakery app, you no longer need to worry about chasing payments down, or wondering when your payments will come through. You'll be able to accept payments online, through the app, and you will be paid securely and promptly.
You will always be able to quickly stay in touch with your current sales, any taxes due on those sales, and the complete breakdown of all fees associated with your operation. Additionally, the app will alert you when you make new sales, and then track the revenue data in real time.
To put it simply, Castiron incorporates all of the tools you will need to launch, grow, and sustain your home food business in one beautifully-designed platform – and it’s free!
Let's jump in a little deeper into the features that home bakers and cottage food chefs should look for in a home bakery software app. It's important to think about these things ahead of time so that you don't find yourself having to solve problems when you should be creating delightful food items. The goal is to automate as much as you can so that you can focus on being a creative food artisan!
Some of the basic things you should look for in home bakery software include:
Castiron lets you launch a professional online food store within minutes, and then supports you as your business grows over the years!
Maintaining your home bakery inventory can be time-consuming and detract from the enjoyment you get from your work. Everything needs to be included in your inventory – ingredients, mixers, pots and pans, kitchen equipment, cleaning supplies, cutlery, packaging, labels, and office equipment and supplies.
With so much to account for, a professional bakery management system is a necessity, not an option. It helps you manage your inventory in real-time and informs you which products in your store have run out.
While every customer is beautiful, your repeat loyal customers deserve some special love from you. Castiron, the best software for small bakery uses, can automatically send out fun and creative loyalty rewards to your best patrons. This is an amazing tool for developing even more loyalty by showing your customers how much you appreciate them!
With Castiron, you can set up an automated newsletter to keep your bakery's products top-of-mind for customers. Decide if you want your newsletter to go out monthly, biweekly, or weekly, and Castiron will handle the rest! You can also reward customers for shopping at your store or for subscribing to your newsletter with custom coupon codes.
Customer relationship management matters a lot. Efficient bakery management software, like Castiron, allows you to gather useful customer-specific information, and then use it to customize text messages and email promotions. Further, you can divide customers into groups based on factors like age, order frequency, and loads of other customizable parameters.
A feature-loaded bakery software free download like Castiron tracks your sales and sales tax owed for you. If you have to collect sales tax, simply enter in the percentage you need to add onto purchases and we'll add it to your customers' totals for you.
You’ll always have instant access to your historical sales, and you'll have access to a list of your top customers. That means you can send them special offers, and keep track of their order history. You'll be able to see your average order value, your last 30, 60, and 90 days worth of sales, and more.
What are some things that people might not think about when evaluating software tools? Well, in our experience, it’s smart to consider:
Let’s examine each of these closer.
A lot of “free home bakery software” isn’t really free at all, with the designers holding back all the features you really want or need for those who upgrade to paid memberships. Not Castiron. It’s 100% Free Forever! There are no listing fees, no seller fees, and absolutely no limits. You pay Castiron nothing, ever! We charge your customers a small convenience fee, and that’s it! If you'd prefer to pay the fee yourself, though, you have the flexibility to do so.
The best apps for home bakers are easy to use. After all, home food entrepreneurs aren’t supposed to be computer scientists; they’re supposed to be cooking! Castiron small bakery software is very intuitive and easy-to-understand. It costs $0 to design your website on Castiron and incorporate feature-rich e-commerce and marketing tools.
The Castiron home bakers app is perfect for use on all modern mobile devices, laptops, and stationary computers alike. Of course, most people use cell phones to surf and shop today, and the Castiron app for selling homemade food is all about that! Your website will display fluently across all devices with no effort needed from you. Once you set your website up, it will automatically convert as needed to match the customer’s device.
Some bakery app options lock users in a realm of loneliness with no support system of community to learn from and share with. Life as a food entrepreneur can be desolate, and sometimes you have questions. The Kitchen is an online community where Castiron food creators meet, talk, swap recipes, share ideas, and learn about the nuances of running a home food business from one another.
Castiron is happy to be one of the absolute best home bakery software tools available to home bakers! This free app for home bakers is feature-loaded and custom-designed not only for bakers, but also for cottage food operators and other types of home-based food entrepreneurs. Visit us online today, have a look around, and contact our friendly and helpful team with any questions. We are here to grow with you!
The Cake Whisperer
My business would not be the same without my Castiron website! It is an easy setup with lots of customization and tons of support! I am so glad I set up my shop last year before the holidays — it really helped increase my sales!
The Whimsical Cookie
Castiron provides me a professional site to my customers increasing my credibility and value while giving me the tools to effectively market and manage my business in an easy, user-friendly manner.
Wesley's Treats Hallie's Sweets
Castiron has made my cottage bakery shine, and my business easy to manage. As a platform they care about my business as much as I do.
Explore our tools for free during a 14-day free trial. Start building your website, create your custom order forms, even start taking orders and payments... then decide if it’s for you.
Easy to start, created specifically for local, handmade food: Castiron’s website builder was created to help you grow. Create a website in minutes with our templates, sell where and how your customers want to buy, and look professional without being technical. Keep customers coming back with email marketing tools, customer records, and more.
Food entrepreneurs, this is your moment. Your community is more and more conscious about what they buy and where it is from. They want food made with love. With ingredients they can pronounce. And they want to support their community while doing it.
Castiron is the best fit for your food business because we're not a one-size-fits-all tool. Selling local food is different from pre-packaged warehouse products. Whether you sell cooking classes, need local pick up, utilize pre-sales to plan inventory, or need a fully custom order form — we got you.
No code required. Add pages, sell your products, build order forms, and show off your beautiful work. We'll handle the tech so you can focus on growing your food business.
Never track down a payment or oversell products again. Real-time inventory tracking and secure payment processing make life easier for you and your customers, and our order form builder makes managing custom requests a breeze.
With our marketing tools, your email marketing can go on autopilot. We make it easy to promote your latest products, announce custom order availability, and stay connected with customers.