How To Start an Online Coffee Business
Are you ready to make money selling coffee online?
No doubt, starting an online coffee business can be fun, rewarding, and profitable – if you have a plan.
With nearly 70% of American adults drinking coffee daily, having an online coffee business can be an incredible opportunity to enter the retail coffee industry at only a fraction of the cost.
As a result, various successful online coffee startups, such as Bean Box and Death Wish Coffee, have achieved tremendous financial success.
Like many online coffee businesses, they started small.
In fact, like other online businesses – it's easy to scale up as you develop your online coffee shop. This makes starting an online coffee business one of the best ways to start low-cost ideas to enter retail coffee.
Okay, let's focus on the exciting possibility of starting your online coffee business from your home below!
Benefits of Starting an Online Coffee Business
Here are some of the benefits of selling coffee online:
1. Lower Overhead Costs:
Operating from home significantly reduces rent, utilities, and staffing expenses.
2. Flexibility:
You can operate on your own schedule, balancing work and personal life more effectively.
3. Niche Market Potential:
Online platforms allow you to cater to specific tastes and preferences, such as organic, fair trade, or single-origin coffees.
4. Specific Target Market:
Your coffee branding and product offerings can resonate with a specific niche target market that feels a connection to your product, brand, and lifestyle. This creates a community that develops repeat customers.
5. Sustainability:
Direct shipping allows you to adopt eco-friendly packaging and practices, appealing to environmentally conscious consumers. If you choose to send your coffee yourself, you can have them order in bulk too!
What You Need to Start an Online Coffee Business
Here's what you need to start your online coffee business operation:
1. Online Coffee Shop Business Plan:
It will be important to outline your online coffee business model, target market, product range, pricing strategy, marketing plan, and financial projections. Your business plan describes how you intend to be successful at selling coffee online.
2. Supplier Relationships:
If you choose not to roast your own beans, you will want to source high-quality coffee beans from reliable suppliers. As you get started consider local coffee roasters, green coffee brokers or even direct trade with coffee farms for a unique product line.
3. Coffee Branding and Design:
Selling coffee online successfully requires the development of a compelling brand identity, including a business name, logo, and packaging design that resonates with your target audience.
4. E-commerce Platform:
To sell coffee online, you need a reliable and safe method. You might consider choosing an e-commerce platform like Payhip, Shopify, or Etsy to set up your online store. Consider platform fees, ease of use, and customization options.
5. Digital Marketing Strategy:
Plan how to attract coffee-loving customers to your online store through SEO, social media marketing, email campaigns, and content marketing. Targeted advertising may work to get your brand and product in from the right customer. Yet, advertising can get expensive quickly, so plan before you start spending money.
6. Shipping and Fulfillment:
Selling coffee online requires the use of a postal service – unless you plan on physical home delivery. Decide on your shipping strategy, including packaging, carriers, and whether to offer local delivery or nationwide shipping.
7. Legal and Regulatory Compliance:
Register your business, obtain necessary permits, and understand your jurisdiction's regulations for selling food products online.
How to Sell Coffee Online From Home
Who Are You Going to Sell To?
Begin by researching the coffee market, identifying your niche, and understanding your competition. Look for gaps in the market that your products can fill.
Where Will You Get Your Coffee That You Plan to Sell?
Establish relationships with coffee bean suppliers or farmers. Depending on your location, one or several local coffee roasters would be a great place to start. Consider the quality, origin, and sustainability practices of the coffee you intend to sell. If you want to roast your own beans, consider green coffee brokers.
Develop Your Coffee Brand.
Create a strong brand identity that reflects your business values and appeals to your target market. Design a memorable logo and packaging that stands out.
Set Up Your Online Coffee Store:
Choose an e-commerce platform that suits your needs and set up your online store. Upload high-quality product images, write compelling product descriptions, and ensure your website is user-friendly.
Today, there are many options, including Shopify and Payhip.
Price Your Coffee Products:
Determine your pricing strategy by considering your costs, market demand, and competitive pricing. Ensure your prices cover your costs and allow for a healthy profit margin. Likely, your profits will be based on your volume of sales and ability to keep margins very low.
Start Creating Content for Your Website
Having high-quality pictures of your coffee or operation will be key to selling coffee online. Most newer phones these days have excellent quality options and filters that can make your products look great.
Implement a Marketing Strategy
Use digital marketing tactics to promote your online coffee store. Leverage social media, email marketing, content marketing, and SEO to drive traffic to your site.
Launch Your Store:
Once everything is in place, launch your online coffee business. Monitor your sales and website traffic and gather customer feedback to make necessary adjustments.
Scale Your Business:
As your online coffee business grows, explore expansion opportunities. Consider introducing new products, expanding your market reach, or enhancing your marketing efforts.
Plan for Growth:
Selling online may lead to offline or in-person selling, too. For example, you may decide to sell coffee at farmer’s markets. This would promote your product and branding and develop trust with your online customers. Additionally, you may want to expand and open a mobile coffee business, such as starting a coffee truck. Many online coffee brands go on to start their own coffee roasteries or coffee shops.
Not Sure What to Sell Online?
Here are Some Online Coffee Items to Consider:
Roasted Coffee Beans
Why not sell your own roasted coffee? Order your green coffee beans from websites like Sweet Maria's, roast the coffee yourself, package it, and sell it under your own brand.
Additionally, you should look for a green coffee broker or importer in your area, state, or region for larger coffee orders. However, if you want to experiment, consider ordering green coffee beans from Sweet Maria's or a local coffee roaster.
Curated Coffee Beans
Curating your own coffee from local roasters is a great way to sell coffee online. You can offer coffee gift baskets of small-batch coffee packages that are locally roasted by your region's best coffee roasters.
How do you do this? You can approach small local coffee roasting companies in your area and see if they would sell their coffee to you at a wholesale cost.
Of course, you might consider having your online coffee website up first so that they know you are serious about your venture. An example of this type of business model is BeanBox, which curates local beans from Seattle's most talented coffee roasters.
Artsy Coffee Stuff
You may want to sell coffee art, T-shirts, posters, greeting cards, coffee signs, coffee mugs, travel cups, holders, Thermos containers, coffee pour-over holders, etc. You can either make your own products or become an affiliate with companies like Zazzle or Amazon.'
Teas & Health-Related Products
In addition to green or roasted coffee, you can sell teas online. For example, you can curate your own teas that are good for people's health. Aside from coffee, tea is the most highly consumed beverage in the world and will complement your website offerings.
Don't Forget the Chocolate
Who doesn't love chocolate and coffee? Like great locally roasted coffee, you can also find small local chocolate wholesalers and sell them in gift boxes along with your online coffee sales.
What's HOT Right Now
Advocacy Online Coffee Selling
Advocacy selling is hot right now.
Selling roasted coffee online to a specific advocacy group is an excellent way to start your online coffee business.
For example, if you love pets, you might like to sell coffee to cat lovers. You can set up a non-profit or pledge to give $1 or $2 to a local cat rescue for every bag of coffee you sell online. You can also call each coffee blend or profile a special name after your favorite cat or pet.
People are willing to buy at a higher price if they know their money and purchasing decisions will be a good cause they love and support.
Ensure you price out your items to cover ALL the costs, including your inventory, packaging, website maintenance, shipping, and time! Embed a percentage of profit in each sale, too!
Setup Your Online Store
Setting up your website and online store is the next important step to launching your online coffee business.
We would like to discuss two general ways you can launch your online coffee store next. The first is to set up a self-hosted website using WordPress. Or you can use the total website e-commerce platform service, like Shopify.
Use an E-commerce Platform
You can launch your online coffee business with an e-commerce platform that is fully hosted and offers a secure shopping cart with Payhip or Shopify.
These e-commerce options are great if you want to start selling online without much hassle. The added convenience means you'll pay more, but a few extra dollars might be worth it!
Companies like Payhip and Shopify allow you to build your website and add a shopping cart service.
Shopify has a “ready-to-go” shopping cart system with shipping and tax features that you can tailor to your online coffee business. This means you never have to worry about web hosting or website plugins to sell your products.
All you must do is sign up, pick a plan, and build your website!
When a customer does buy from your online coffee store, these companies will notify you instantly so you can ship out your coffee right away to your customers!
Easy-Peasy.
Using Shopify: It's Easy & Looks Professional
Sometimes, having everything done for you is worth the cost of paying a little extra. Shopify makes everything very convenient when setting up your website. From your hosting to your checkout system, it's all done.
With Shopify:
- An easy-to-setup website
- Super convenient shopping cart and payment system
- There's no hassle with learning computer code
- Shopify's online storefront looks professional
Learn More About Shopify's Features, Costs & Options Here
Using Payhip: It's Affordable & Easy to Setup
When starting out and you aren't sure how things will pan out, sometimes, it's good to jump into an affordable options. Payhip is a great way to get started because they offer free to very affordable options. This means that you can develop your
Sometimes, having everything done for you is worth the cost of paying a little extra. Shopify makes everything very convenient when setting up your website. From your hosting to your checkout system, it's all done.
With Payhip:
- An easy-to-use
- Free to affordable options
- Great for getting started
- Can be used to sell on Instagram and other social media
Marketing & Promotion
Now that your website is set up, your products are available. Next comes the fun part:
Promoting your website!
Other websites, books, and online resources can go into much more detail than I can do here, but I need to mention that your online marketing will be important.
Promoting your website will take up the majority of your post-launch time.
Your marketing campaign can begin any time, even long before spending your first dime on your website. And the sooner you start, the better off you will be.
The important thing to remember is that your online store will take time to build traction – so start your website business with this understanding.
Anticipate that you will launch your store, and you might take a while to get regular online visitors. If you anticipate this well enough, you can start to develop your promotional efforts long before you open for business.
Branding will also play an important role in developing your online coffee business.
Therefore, you will want to develop your website logo and utilize your website's blog to entice readers. Your logo will be essential for your website, your business cards, and your packaging.
Consider the following ways to promote your online coffee store:
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Use Social media
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Write a blog post on your website regularly.
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Have lots of pictures of your products on your website
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Develop your email list and send regular emails
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Meet new people in person and promote face-to-face (yes, this still works!)
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Create business cards and hand them out
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Paid internet ads
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Reach out to coffee bloggers
Take some time to develop your marketing plan with each of the above points. Writing and promoting a regular blog post via social media will be important. Sharing pictures on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest can create an international following and customers.
Be patient. It will take some time (and a lot of work) to gain traction with growing a following, so be patient and deliberate with your actions. Keep working even if you don't think no one is watching. You might want to consider saving money upfront by not ordering too much inventory until you get regular orders coming in.
Happy Selling!
Sometimes, you gotta do it.
Keep in mind that you will be making adjustments as you go. Don’t let being “perfect” stop you from starting.
Generate value for your customers wherever you can. Use your passion, coffee expertise, marketing, or niche ideas along the way to generate additional value for your customers. Get help from your friends and family (they can be your biggest marketers!).
Start small and then grow out from there.
Remember, there will be a learning curve. However, if you move forward steadily and work on the online coffee business every day, you'll move towards a better position for your online coffee store to make a profit.
As an online business owner, your work really never stops. You have to continuously be vigilant about your customer service, online reputation, marketing, inventory, and website content. Without a doubt, it can be a very profitable venture if you plan it right.
Additional recommendation: You want to sell the freshest coffee possible. This will help develop your reputation, positive reviews, and repeat customers. Coffee does have a shelf life. So, consider your inventory. Don't buy too much roasted coffee and have it sit in your closet for six months. Your coffee will become rancid. Our recommendation is to reduce waste by smartly managing your inventory.
Start Your Online Coffee Business:
Summing Things Up
Start Small & Take Your First Step Forward
Remember that to make money selling coffee online, you will need to start. Be smart and methodical about it, and you will have a better chance of success. Do something every day, and you quickly see how fast you develop over just a couple of weeks.
Start small, then grow out from there. You can start by getting your website going.
Choose a website platform and build your online business. Work with good website e-commerce platforms like a hosting provider and Shopify to get started.
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Got Any Questions?
Finally, email me with any questions about starting an online coffee business.
Certainly, I will try to answer any specific questions and detail further why I recommend these options for your online coffee business.
Starting any business online can be profitable and necessary, depending on which part of the coffee business you are coming from. Full disclosure: some of the links may be affiliate links that cost you nothing – but support this website through a small commission at no additional charge to you.
Coffee Shop Startups
Based in Seattle, Washington, USA, Coffee Shop Startups is dedicated to providing you with the most relevant information on how to start a coffee shop business successfully. Over the last 11 years, we've helped thousands of aspiring coffee business owners worldwide. We harness the experience, wisdom, and knowledge of many successful coffee shop owners to help you increase your chances of success and profits. We support business owners who want to start a coffee business by providing them with valuable information on starting their coffee business successfully.
