Tips for Selling Perishable Products Online

In the wake of COVID-19, food eCommerce has been growing rapidly, increasing 42% in revenue year over year this September as millions of consumers turn to online sources for their favorite snacks, drinks, and kitchen staples. Selling any product online can be difficult, but selling food online comes with its own unique challenges, which brands need to manage in order to take advantage of the growing trend.

Like all eCommerce ventures, food and beverage sellers need to start with a strong, branded online presence, and a great shopping experience. Considering many of their wares are perishable, managing inventory and shipping quickly are crucial to ensure foods reach customers well before their expiration dates. The software and tools you use have a big impact on how quickly you can fulfill orders to customers and retail partners. Here are a few things to think about when learning how to sell food online.

Find the Right eCommerce Platform

One of the most important pieces of the food eCommerce puzzle is finding the right eCommerce platform. Some eCommerce platforms are great for running clubs and managing subscriptions, while others offer enhanced SEO capabilities or customizable designs. Some excel at B2B but aren’t meant for direct-to-consumer fulfillment, while others are strictly B2C. The best platforms do all the above and connect to your other business systems so you can take advantage of different opportunities and grow in any direction.

For example, let’s say you had hired a web developer to create an eCommerce website at the beginning of your journey. It worked for a while, but now you’re scaling up and need to handle more volume in less time. The old site might not be dependable anymore, and a lack of software integration means you must spend time manually plugging information in and fixing errors between systems.

This is exactly what happened to Caffe Ladro. After reaching a plateau in their online efforts, the Seattle-based coffee roaster was able to quadruple its sales by using TrueCommerce’s eCommerce integration combined with QuickBooks Enterprise. With TrueCommerce’s platform, each recurring subscription generated a corresponding order in QuickBooks, which eliminated hours of manual work each week. The new platform enhanced the website to make sales simpler and integrated Caffe Ladro’s wholesale business so the company could manage everything from one place.

Enhance the Online Shopping Experience

Another challenge of selling food online is providing a great shopping experience for customers. Many of your customers frequent eCommerce giants like Amazon or Walmart, and they expect the same type of experience on your own site. You’re competing against the best players in the digital space.

Informative and compelling product information is key. Your product descriptions should define the item’s ingredients and nutrition as well as encourage shoppers to buy with effective content. At the same time, you need to think about how search algorithms will rank your content—a SEO-friendly listing will use the right keywords for the product and its category and features so shoppers on the web can find it.

If you’re selling specialty food and gifts online B2C on your own website, you should make use of powerful features like suggested items, coupons, loyalty rewards, clubs, dynamic upsell messaging, and single-click reordering. Instead of requiring multiple add-ons to do all that, the right eCommerce shopping cart will already have these features and more, plus plug-and-play controls.

The right shopping cart matters to the customer, too. Have you ever noticed how Amazon’s shopping cart pops up and stays on screen after you add an item? It’s almost like walking around a store with a real cart right there in front of you. An always on-screen cart can let customers review their list, calculate shipping and tax, and check out with fewer clicks and without having to leave the online store. When customers’ online experience is streamlined, you can make the most of your online traffic.

Control Your Inventory and Fulfillment

Unless you sell freeze-dried astronaut food, your products’ expiration dates are always on your mind. You must get products out to customers while they’re fresh, so they have the best experience possible. Nature doesn’t negotiate. If you don’t have optimized control of your inventory and fulfillment, food can expire and take your investment with it. Here, multi-carrier shipping software can help keep orders moving fast no matter what carrier the customer selects.

With more people relying on safety of the internet to shop for food and beverage products, integrating eCommerce with fulfillment is crucial. A connected EDI system can automatically import order data, print shipping labels, and verify package contents before shipment. This means you can ship products more accurately in less time, which reduces shrinkage.

Whether you sell B2C, B2B, or both, your fulfillment needs to be fast and traceable. If your customers encounter an issue with a food or beverage item, you need to know exactly which batch it was a part of and how it got shipped. Furthermore, fulfillment requirements can vary between partners, so an EDI solution is essential for fast, accurate supply chain traceability.

Conchita Foods uses TrueCommerce EDI to fulfill orders for retail partners like Walmart and Target. The platform satisfied Walmart’s requirement for formatted advance ship notices (ASNs), and it enabled Conchita Foods to handle 80 invoices per day on average with accuracy.

Ship Wisely

If you have a small, local business, you might be able to ship products yourself with a company van or truck. But you’ll likely have to rely on third-party carriers as you scale. To keep costs low, you’ll need to find the right carrier, at the right price and in the right location, for each order.

With B2C shipping especially, you might rely on carriers like USPS, UPS, or FedEx. The price of shipping an order can vary significantly between these and other carriers, but you may not have time to look at the costs one by one. With the right platform, you can compare rates from multiple carriers on one screen and use historical spend analysis to negotiate better rates. You can tag favorite carriers to use for specific customers or order types. Shipping solutions can also help you understand which carriers can deliver most quickly to the destination, so your products arrive fresh.

The foundation makes all the difference

Using the right eCommerce platform sets your business up for success. With TrueCommerce’s eCommerce integrations, you can use the power of automation to manage orders, customer communication, shipping, accounting, and more. That makes handling unique challenges like food traceability a breeze.

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About the Author: Shauna Pannone has a background in information technology and is currently a Pre-Sales Engineer for the eCommerce division of TrueCommerce. She has been creating and cultivating client relationships with brands since 2007, offering her clients both eCommerce and online marketing insight. Shauna lives in San Diego, CA and enjoys paddle boarding, traveling to new places and live music.