Selling your chocolate online

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Langdon Stevenson on December 22, 2008 at 7:34pm

Hi Susie. Foodzie is an interesting site. I agree that online selling is a great way build a small business. Foodzie certainly makes things easy to get up and running and has the advantage of aggregating traffic. Online sales have been the backbone of our business Tava since day one.

Whether in the long run you stick with a site like Foodzie to provide merchant facilities, or set up your own shop I think that it is well worth having your own website to generate traffic for that shop. What we have learned about driving sales to our online shop is that a high ranking site in Google translates into sales.

The very best way to do this (you could call it "Search Engine Optimisation" - SEO) is lots of high value accurate content (articles, stories, history etc) that speaks to the people who are interested in your products. There isn't an SEO company in the world that has more passion and knowledge about your industry and products than you have. So save your money and build the content in your site. Then watch the sales roll in.

Permalink Reply by eileen h. on March 31, 2012 at 6:35pm

Hi Langdon,

Thanks for your advice on SEO. I'm in the process of setting up an online store for our company. We also plan to sell to retail customers but want to push our online sales as much as possible. 

What percentage of revenue of total revenue can one expect from online customers? I'm just trying to get a sense of what's realistic especially as we start up.  

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Eileen

Permalink Reply by Clay Gordon on April 1, 2012 at 2:32pm

Eileen -

The percentage of revenue you can expect is entirely dependent on how aggressively you market and promote it. If you don't market and promote (or do so poorly) then you won't get much in the way of sales.

There is no "expect" here.

It's also interesting to keep in mind that when you are in the on-line sales business you are really in the shipping business, too. So, you also need to think about the infrastructure requirements and costs of shipping. One of the reasons I stopped selling chocolate off of chocophile.com is that I didn't like being in the shipping business and what it meant on all levels.

Permalink Reply by Ricardo Trillos on June 9, 2011 at 10:51pm

wow great link...very helpful.

thanks Susie