Tea Class 2-3/13 – How to Sell More Tea
- Salina Hainzl
- Jun 3, 2013
- 5 min read
How to sell more tea?
Are you familiar with the different formats in selling tea?
Why is it important for you to know all these? The answer is simple… If you want to gain more customers then this is something for you to ponder on.
What you will learn is not complicated but quite interesting!
Are you up for it?
In the above video: I want to talk to you about tea selling format.
How you can help sell your tea by having different formats, the pros and cons of tea selling.
Hello, me again, Salina from Empiro.
Of course, when we speak of tea selling, a lot of us have visited tea shops when we are still doing our research in setting up our own tea business.
There are 2 different kinds of tea retail shop setup that are pretty typical:
1. Pre-packs tea 2. Scoop to order tea 3. Drop-shipping
They both have pros and cons.
Pre-packs tea setup
Let me start with the pre-pack tea, well as the name suggests, they pre-pack everything in advance.
If this is a new business to you, you need to make an educated guess as to how much you are going to sell which tea and how many packs are you going to pack.
There is also the trick of stock rotation, so you need to make sure that if you make new packs you put them at the back of your row of tea packs.
That way people will grab the ones in the front, the older ones.
One good thing about this approach is that it can service a lot of people at any time. It is also easy and tidy.
You don’t need to worry about scooping the tea for your customer while handling some other things prior to that.
The hygiene side of it is taken care of.
Some customers will say, “I can’t smell the tea, they are all packed up and I can’t see it properly” – the best solution for you in these instances is to have smelling jars.
Smelling jars are little jars of your tea.
Keep them covered – all you need is a big spoonful of tea for your customers to smell / see.
This gives them that tactile experience of your tea.
I would also suggest you to put these smelling jars on a different table – somewhere people can still move freely while smelling or playing with the different tea samples that you have.
A round table in the middle area of the shop for some free flowing traffic from all directions is our suggestion.
There are more and more people these days who want to try different tea, so this tea table with smelling jars will help them.
Don’t forget to offer some info pamphlets on the table and the jars are well labelled.
All these little effort from you to provide for your target customers will definitely turn into a sale.
Scoop-to-order tea
The next format is the “scoop-to-order”, there is actually a nice yesteryear feeling to that but I personally felt a little twitchy about that looking at the hygiene point of view.
If that tea is the “popular” one and everyone who comes in to your store would want to smell, touch or even shake that tea that is open for everyone to just “scoop-in”.
It’s really not the best way to go if you are opting to keep the freshness of your tea for a customer who will actually buy.
What you can do to do away with this is to have, as mentioned above, smelling jar table to satisfy the need of people needing / wanting to experience the tea.
Moreover, the scooping part of it is very labour extensive and if you have a very busy shop and you additionally serve tea, that is going to be way too busy for you.
You will deal with a lot of people, maybe one who wants for you to scoop them the tea, the other one who want you to serve the tea already, the one who wants to pay for the tea he want to buy and to get going and the other one who just hanging around smelling every tea on the table and not wanting to leave.
These are the things that you need to think about, though it could be a nice format but it entails a lot of work.
You need to think about how you can multi-purpose your space and also if you are opting for the “scoop-to-order” format, you will need more than 1 staff to help you out.
Of course if you have a quieter shop or just allow people to do it during a certain time of the day or even run a workshop.
Allow people to play with the teas or even mix their own tea and at the end of the event, package it and charge them around $49 for their own tea mix or whatever you think is suited,.
You can also give them some information about their favorite tea before they leave.
Of course there is the online tea shop format.
Usually the tea are sold to these tea businesses either already packed or in bulk.
There are also other methods such as the affiliate and drop-shipping.
Drop-shipping
Drop-shipping is something that we experimented last year. What it means that you have a website, you don’t hold stocks and you just generate orders and turn the orders over to your supplier and your supplier will fulfill the same, and deliver the orders to your customer on behalf of you. It is sometimes called blind shipping as well.
The difficulty that we encountered when we tried this last year was how to personalise the orders to reflect your details.
The tea should have recall information and it should be yours because you will deliver it to your customers.
If we put our brand in it, it is not going to be fair to you.
If you really want to pump-up your tea sales, you need to think outside of the box.
If you really want to pump-up your tea sales, you need to think outside of the box.
The problem with a lot of tea sellers is that they are thinking, “ehhh, tea is just tea”, which is wrong! Tea is a well-being product, a food and can be a conversation piece (I have customers who is into knitting products but they sell tea).
The truth is, there are a lot of ways for you to multi-purpose tea and when you think about the different format in selling tea, do think about what are the tribes you want to engage.
Like if you have a lot of moms coming in to your café and you have a retail space, you probably want to sell some kiddie teas, the “pink tea” such as the Hibiscus.
Just think of the format wherein you can maximise the presentation of your tea according to the message you want to convey to your customers.
So, give it a thought and see if you can pump-up your tea sales by engaging the people who walks in to your shop and you want to serve.
Create a format that is going to make it convenient for them.
That is definitely going to help you!
If you have any feedback, comments or suggestions, feel free to connect with us using the contact us form on our website, Teas.com.au or Empiroteas.com.au.
You can also comment under this video blog.
Thank you and see you on the next video series.
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