Building a website for your bakery business is easy with Castiron. Create an online order form, accept payments, keep track of customer details, run your email marketing, and more with our food business management tools.
Try it for freeNo matter what you are selling at your home bakery business, you can make life easier for yourself and sales more enjoyable for your customers with a nice home bakery order form. This tends to be one of the last things home bakery business owners usually think of when setting up their businesses, and that is understandable. After all, setting up even a very small online business is a challenge for first-time entrepreneurs.
If you have been following our cottage food business blog posts, you know that branding is a critically important part of making your home bakery business work. That is why a home bakery order form is so important. When your customers make purchases, the ease of their order is a key part of how they will feel about your brand, and that will make or break your chances of success.
For a start, you will want to make it as simple as possible. An editable cake order form will give you the ability to make changes quickly and easily as you progress. Be sure to politely ask for feedback from each buying customer so that you can optimize your home bakery order form, making it feel more friendly and easier to use with each purchase.
If you are just starting out, there are tools available that will make your life much easier. A cake order form app, for example, offers a long list of ready-made, customizable order forms. These make getting started simple and quick. You will also find resources that will help you learn how to create a cake order form, bakery order book, and even offer you bakery order form templates for free. These apps also make it easy to create bespoke, custom order forms that ask only the questions you need to provide your customers with a quote or invoice.
Selecting the right tools will enable you to get started quickly, add lots of attractive style to your online shop, and that is easy to customize as you see fit. Setting up a snazzy-looking online home bakery business has never been easier!
Castiron's cake, cookie, cupcake, and other order form templates make it easy as pie to collect the information you need from customers. Start using our custom order form templates today!
When your customers visit your site with the intention of making a purchase, chances are they are almost always going to be excited — after all, they're ordering cookies or cake! What's not to be excited about? Surely this is not always the case, but you will find that it is the norm. When people seek out these special treats, it's probably because they're celebrating something — a birthday, a wedding, an anniversary, or just because. Maybe they have been stressed at work. What this means for you is that they are also going to be less tolerant of anything that feels inconvenient, demanding, or stressful. Keep it simple, make it fun, and appeal to their emotions and senses.
This is why you need to keep your online order form as simple as possible. Let them get as close to completion as reasonable while requiring the least amount of information and the least amount of input as you can get by with. You want the experience to be as convenient as possible, and this is how you should focus your cookie or cake order form online optimization efforts.
Possibly the best way to do this is to keep your selection as simple as possible, limiting the options on your online bakery order form as simple a list as it can offer. This, admittedly, will take time. You will need experience and sales data before you can reduce your offerings to the most popular and create a simple cake order form that feels like a breeze for your customers to complete.
What you want is for someone shopping online on a whim to be able to roll out of bed, fall on their phone, and order in a click or two. Yes, that is a slight exaggeration, but you see where we are going with this.
Suppose someone is planning a wedding and reception and wants to buy a cake. This is a prime example of what we are talking about. Putting together a traditional wedding is expensive and stressful. So, once again, you are dealing with someone with a low tolerance for irritation. That is why you need to select and optimize your wedding cake order form template for ease of use, simplicity, and an on-brand customer experience.
An important part of the way to achieve this is to make the cake selection process as visual as possible. By the way, it is also very important that your site, portal, or sales page work seamlessly, and be smooth and nice looking. This is another good reason to work with an online bakery sales app. These will be designed using lean coding (or no coding, like Castiron) and simple designs that look good and run well, especially on smaller mobile devices. Since you are looking to sell baked goods online, chances are you aren't a web developer. That is why these online tools are so great. They free you from having to do all your own HTML or having to hire a web developer who will charge you an arm and a leg.
You will create your free wedding cake order form template, your custom cupcake order form, or another form with the goal of picking one that works well with your brand image, one that lets you offer a strategically limited list of products, and that offers the necessary selections that the customer wants. For wedding cakes, the first thing they need to see is a complete cake. Then they need to see a basic design type for the cake they want with the available options for customization.
If they want something classic and beautiful, there's no problem. But they may want some kind of special custom features. You should make that available too. One method we recommend is to offer a simple, classic wedding cake design and leave a text box for them to include a description of some personalization choices. You might also want to make it possible for them to include images, because some people are not good at describing what they want, but they know it when they see it.
Create a free custom order form for your home-based bakery today.
If you are looking for a cheap and easy way to get started, Google Forms might have some answers for you. There are a number of bakers out there that use Google Forms to make bakery order forms online. You can make a bakery order form on Google Forms, a cookie order form on Google Docs, or just use a free Excel template for your online bakery.
There are a limited number of aesthetic options available, making it difficult for you to achieve the look and feel your brand or company image demands. Google doesn't seem to have had home bakeries in mind when they created Google Forms. That being the case, you may still find that using this service gives you the chance to get some valuable experience in creating these kinds of forms. So for that reason alone, you might consider using it before moving on to an app that will give you something more visually appealing right off the bat.
When you work with a bakery website builder, you might feel satisfied too quickly and spend less time developing a feel for making online ordering forms. So, take your time making an order form template with Google Forms. It's a good way to come up with the list of questions you actually need to be asking your customers in order to provide them with an accurate quote and a beautiful end product.
The nice thing about these Google-powered services is that you can use them for free and you can share them with other people so as to get their feedback and accelerate the optimization process.
One major drawback of using Google Forms or Excel to generate order forms is that they can't process payments. You'll still have to jump back and forth between invoicing tools, communication tools, and your order forms in order to run your bakery business.
Finally, you can also make a cake order form template using Word. Once again, the style and form options are going to be fairly limited. But you can probably find more than you need to get the hang of the process.
Finally, if you do come up with something you like using these cheap, free, and somewhat stock form generation services, then consider yourself lucky. You might end up saving time and money by using them. However, when your business takes off, consider investing in something slicker and more professional.
Of course, you are likely to participate in real-world events like bake sales. Or maybe you just prefer a more analog approach. That means you are really going to want to have some free printable bakery order forms on hand to give to eager buyers. The services discussed above give you access to free printable bakery order form templates just for that purpose. Once again, these are a great way to start your business up and put the rubber to the road with some simple, customizable forms that you can use and leverage real-world data to make more suitable forms for your needs. As you progress, many of the best online app services will also let you print your customers' completed order forms.
Because of the palpable and sensory nature of food service, some of the best opportunities for growing your business are going to be in your community, in the real world. That is why it is so important to have a printable cake order form template ready to go when you need it. Alternatively, you could use QR codes to share a link to your online bakery order form. You know your customer base best, so make a call on which method is best for them.
Remember, if you don't have a reliable printer, there are still some small businesses out there who will print up things you send to them in an email at very affordable rates. So take the time to find them in your town. If your area has one, you can save a ton of time and money producing copies of your printable bakery order form template.
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.
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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.