Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.
Issue link: https://specialtyfoodmagazine.epubxp.com/i/691740
RETAILERS: TIPS FROM THE TRENCHES Specialty food retailers share their experiences and best practices for running their own e-commerce site. Tim Bucciarelli, Formaggio Kitchen, Cambridge, MA We have three retail shops that have their own unique characteristics, staff, and populations they serve, but they're all under the same brand and same website. E-commerce is just one element of the site. It's a good fit, but we're not trying to be the next Amazon. It's very much in balance with our focus on being a retail shop. It's a challenge to replicate online that personal connection you get in the stores. In a store, you can talk to a monger and select the cheese you love by [actually] tasting it. To help mitigate that, online we offer cheese samplers—cheesemonger selections, basically. The e-commerce customer can trust the monger to choose cheeses that are beautiful at that moment. Start slow and start small. Don't feel as if you have to sell everything online. Don't fall into the trap of always needing to be on the cutting edge of tech. It's easy to be seduced by being on this new platform or that new social media. Just do what you do, focus on the product and the customer, and gradually build your e-commerce. Specialty food e-commerce opens a new way to communicate and share with your customers. That's what online is to me: It's an extension of what we do in the brick-and–mortar store. It's sharing the love in a different medium with different customers. Sara M. Feinberg, Market Hall Foods, Oakland, CA Markethallfoods.com launched in 2006 to bring to a national audience a highly curated selection of the best products we sell in our brick-and-mortar stores. We've heavily edited the volume we sell online, and choose to focus on certain product categories. There are huge differences in how you merchandise your e-store versus a physical store. In a brick-and-mortar you can create themed displays and offer live or passive sampling. Online you create landing pages, robust content pages, and add value by including links to recipes, blog posts, etc. Selling food can be challenging when it's viewed two-dimensionally. Just like our philosophy for the customer service experience we present in our stores, we wanted to provide customers with quality and compelling information about the stories behind our products: what they taste like, and how to use them. One challenge behind that has been generating the content on a consistent basis. We've dedicated a team to getting this done. Be clear on what value you'd like to provide and be ready to deliver. Be authentic with your brand and voice, and strive to provide a consistent experience. On the management side, be realistic about the commitment it takes to run an e-commerce site and strategize about which bells and whistles are your priorities. Mo Frechette, Zingerman's Mail Order, Ann Arbor, MI We started a mail-order catalog in 1992 and went online in 1998. The site seemed like another way to place an order. Amazon was already a phenomenon. People were already comfortable. It wasn't an option to have e-commerce; it was a necessity. It was a new way of taking orders. What sells on your site can be different from what sells in store. Experiment a lot. It is also important to know that e-commerce is primarily gifts. Putting combinations of food to ship as a gift can be a good idea. When you ship food, a lot can go wrong. Learn how to pack boxes. The day you ship isn't important; it's the day that it arrives to the customer. They're using it for an event. It's perishable. Be sure it's safe and secure when it goes out the door. Inventory management is a challenge online. If it says "in stock", it needs to be in stock. And when the last item is sold, you have to say "out of stock." That's hard to do when you have a blended business model between brick- and-mortar and online. Separate the two and treat them as separate businesses. Separate the inventory, the cost, the business profit-and-loss statements—D.T. 44 ❘ SPECIALTY FOOD MAGAZINE specialtyfood.com