Kiva Logic Blog

Corporate gifting is one of the biggest openings your store has this holiday season, and almost no local food business goes after it. Companies spend real money every December sending gifts to their teams and their clients, and most of it goes to generic gift baskets shipped from a warehouse three states away. You have something those baskets cannot touch: fresh, local produce from a business right in their own community. Now your store can sell exactly that, a whole batch of boxes gifted to a company's entire team in one payment.

Think about the math for a second. One company gifting your boxes to forty employees is forty new households tasting your produce, and a single sale that dwarfs a normal order. If even a handful of those people keep going after the gift ends, you have turned one December phone call into a stack of year-round subscribers. This is the kind of thing worth getting in front of local businesses directly: call the person planning the office holiday gifts, pitch the HR team, pitch the company that wants to thank its clients with something local and real instead of another popcorn tin.

It is also a story local news loves this time of year. A local company feeding its whole team with boxes from a local farm for the holidays is exactly the feel-good segment a morning show or community paper will run. Pitch it. "Local business supports local farm to feed employees for the holidays" writes itself, and it puts your store in front of your whole area for free.

Here is how it works. A company picks a box, pays once for as many as they want, and gets a single link to share. No card from the recipients, and no spreadsheet of addresses for the company to collect.

Your store now gives shoppers an equal, honest choice. And a reject that actually switches the tracking off.

For years the typical cookie banner showed one friendly "Allow" button and tucked the way to decline somewhere quieter. That is no longer just a little rude. It has become a legal problem.

In 2025 the California Privacy Protection Agency fined Honda $632,500, in part for a consent banner that made accepting far easier than rejecting. A one sided banner is now a named enforcement target, not a theoretical risk. Source: California Privacy Protection Agency enforcement action, 2025.

So we rebuilt the banner your store shows. "Reject all" and "Allow all" are now matching buttons, side by side, with neither one dressed up to win.

Your store can now see its gross margin on boxes and add-ons together, in one place, under Reports → Finance → Gross Margin. No more exporting to a spreadsheet or waiting on QuickBooks to catch up.

It breaks down two ways: per box type, and as a weekly total you can run across any range of weeks. The interesting part is the two margin numbers sitting side by side. Ideal margin is what you'd make if you bought exactly what went into the boxes. Real margin is what you actually make once you buy by the case, since you can't buy half a case of anything. The difference between them is your purchasing overage, the real cost of rounding up to whole cases every week.

Every number is valued at the cost that was live that delivery week, so looking back at older weeks stays accurate even after you've changed a price since. The weeks don't drift on you.

Two small things that should cut down on the "was I credited?" and "what's this charge?" emails.

When you apply a credit or adjust a balance, there's now a checkbox to email the customer the amount and the reason from your note, missing item, quality issue, whatever it was. Same on a one-time charge: they get a receipt with your note on it. Instead of a mystery line in their payment history, they get a plain email saying what it was and why.

The email is prefilled from the amount and note, and you can edit it right there before it sends or just leave it. There's a store-wide default behind the default link if you want the box pre-checked (or not) every time.

Your Products page just got a lot faster. Search is instant now, start typing a product name and the matching items show up as you go, no more hitting Search and waiting for the whole page to reload.

The category dropdown sets what you're looking at, and your search and filters narrow things down within it. The grid loads a batch at a time and streams in more as you scroll, so a catalog with hundreds of products opens right up instead of locking up the browser.

You can also tick a box next to any products and change them all at once. Pick a handful, or select everything that matches your current filter, then set or remove a sale, raise or lower prices, adjust stock, mark items featured, or add and remove a tag, all in one shot. There's a tag-only search too, so you can group products however you like (tag your holiday items, then bulk-raise their price once the season's over) and pull them all up in one click.

On October 21, 2026 the PHP project disclosed two critical security flaws, nicknamed PHP2Shell (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619). Both are rated 9.2 out of 10 and, under the right conditions, let an attacker run code on a server without logging in. This affects PHP itself, which powers a large share of the internet, so it's a broad, internet-wide event, not something specific to Kiva Logic. Here's where your store stands.

Your store is protected and there's nothing you need to do. We moved on this the day it was announced and we're watching the situation as it develops.

The exploit works by sending a specially malformed file upload (a "multipart" request) that confuses PHP's memory handling and its upload-progress feature. A patched version of PHP (8.3.36 and the matching releases on other branches) shipped the same day the flaw went public.

We're monitoring our hosting providers' patch rollout and our own traffic for any sign of exploit attempts. Once a server is confirmed running the patched PHP, the temporary upload block is removed from it so everything returns to normal. We'll update this post if anything changes.

Your gift boxes just picked up three new options for the holidays. Buyers have always been able to send one of your boxes as a gift. Now they can choose how many deliveries it runs for, how often they arrive, and add gift wrapping right at checkout.

Turn on multi-week gifts and a buyer can send a whole run of deliveries as one present, a 4-week produce box gift for example, instead of a single box. They pick the schedule, the recipient gets exactly that many boxes, then it ends on its own with nothing to cancel.

The gift-wrap upgrade is a paid add-on at checkout. You set the price and the label, something like "Wrap this gift in holiday twine & burlap + a handwritten card" for $4.99. The surcharge rides along on the order, and a GIFT WRAP note lands on the packing slip so the warehouse knows to dress it up.

It all lives on the new Gift Boxes Settings page under Customers. Flip on multi-week gifts and the packaging add-on, set your prices and delivery options, and launch the conversion emails.

Your products can now carry a video. Shoppers who watch a product video are up to 144% more likely to add the item to their cart (Invesp), so it's one of the easier wins for a product page.

Edit any product and you'll see a new Product Video field right under the description. Paste a YouTube link and save.

On the storefront the video shows up right in the product image gallery, as a thumbnail next to the photos.

Your store now has a privacy and data requests page. Customers can go to yourstore.com/delete and ask for a copy of their data, a correction to it, or full deletion of their account, without emailing you first and waiting around.

This is quickly becoming the law. California now requires covered businesses to offer an online request portal, not just an email address, starting January 1, 2027, and rules like the CCPA, CPRA, and GDPR already give customers the right to see, fix, or delete the data a store holds. Here is the California guidance.

When a customer submits a request, it lands in your store inbox with their account already looked up and linked, plus a reminder that privacy laws ask you to respond within 45 days. If they asked to be deleted, one click scrubs their name, email, phone, address, and payment details while keeping order totals and dates, so your history and reporting stay intact.

If you sell food that fits a specific diet, there is a new way for nearby shoppers to find you on Google.

Google now lets people filter local search and map results by dietary attributes like gluten-free, dairy-free, halal, and kosher. Someone searching for "gluten-free groceries near me" can narrow the results to only businesses that carry it, and your store can turn up there.

These attributes live on your Google Business Profile, the free listing that shows on Google Maps and in the business panel on search. If your store qualifies for any of them, adding them takes a few minutes and is worth doing, since a lot of businesses have not yet.

Google's own writeup has the details: read the full rundown.