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Best ways to promote tea retail site?

by teaimport
12 replies
Testing the waters, hoping for some good advice.

We're a tea importer / wholesaler of high end tea. We mainly sell to coffee shops, restaurants, and more recently whole foods type grocery stores. Our primary business is serving businesses in a wholesale capacity, but are also exploring selling retail to consumers directly online.

We have a (pretty good) wholesale Website for our tea, which would also be well suited for consumer retail.

The question is ... any suggestions, experiences, with similar products? Should we do an affiliate program, and if so, any recommendations?

It's one of those things where we're busy and doing well 'doing what we do' on the wholesale end, and I'm a wee bit hesitant getting heavily involved promoting retail without knowing what to expect.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts and guidance!
#promote #retail #site #tea #ways
  • Profile picture of the author Charles Harper
    Hi Tea,

    Can we see the site, please?

    CT
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    • Profile picture of the author teaimport
      Company Site is at Samboya .com

      Wholesale Store is shop . samboya . com

      Sorry, no links, my forums account is too new. :rolleyes:

      No prices are displayed on the wholesale store, it currently requires a wholesaler login for pricing (if we go retail online, we'll just add retail prices for those customers).
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  • Profile picture of the author MandLoys
    I just saw a show on Bloomberg or CNBC for a high-end tea retail shop! LOL, no kidding, it was on air this Saturday, you might want to look it up.

    To answer your question: you promote every way you can. SEO, PPC, media buying, videos, social marketing, etc. There's no short answer for this really broad question, sorry.
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  • Profile picture of the author Richard Tunnah
    My suggestion would be to join linkedin. Fully set up your profile and create connections. After you have done this I'd look for groups you can network in. Don't advertise or spam linkedin groups as you'll get into trouble quickly. With linkedin it won't happen overnight for you but with over 200 million businesses on it now it'll build your network long term.

    Rich
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  • Profile picture of the author teaimport
    Thanks for the suggestions so far!

    Digging through the other sub forums is making me think ... would it make sense to work with somebody, expert on this subject, have some sort of CPS arrangement?
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    • Profile picture of the author fluffythewondercat
      Please forgive me for saying this, but before you spend a lot of time or money on promoting your site as retail, you really need to fix the usability issues.

      Many of your pages load s-l-o-w-l-y. The Darjeeling page took 15 seconds to load in my browser (Firefox for MacOS). And you need more photos to break up the long blocks of text.

      fLufF
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      • Profile picture of the author teaimport
        Yes, we had some issues yesterday, they're being resolved by the host. We do have a dedicated server and usually things are fairly speedy.

        Originally Posted by fluffythewondercat View Post

        Please forgive me for saying this, but before you spend a lot of time or money on promoting your site as retail, you really need to fix the usability issues.

        Many of your pages load s-l-o-w-l-y. The Darjeeling page took 15 seconds to load in my browser (Firefox for MacOS). And you need more photos to break up the long blocks of text.

        fLufF
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  • Profile picture of the author winseosoft
    Go for facebook advertising is very easy after you learn the basics and you can get very good results with it.
    Make a business page then promote it to have fans and post on their walls and there goes viral.
    You should try a course about facebook avertising.
    There are good one around.
    Good luck
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    • Profile picture of the author Bill Farnham
      Hi TI,

      Going from wholesale metrics to retail metrics can be quite a learning curve. The average sale will be substantially smaller meaning more of your resources will be needed albeit for smaller margins and bigger headaches.

      One of the tactics you may want to investigate is along the lines of a "Tea of the Month Club" or some other continuity program whereby your retail customers have a much larger lifetime value.

      It's also imparative that your wholesale customers are not competing with you for your retail sales as that can lead to unsatisfied wholesale customers who generally will be the more profitable group. If you attempt to use the internet for branding purpose make sure you're not cutting your own throat. You will rarely find a successful large company competing with their wholesale accounts for retail sales.

      Along those lines it may be worth the exercise to look into creating a different brand for your retail sales outlet. That is another common practice that works to segragate the market and keep everyone happy.

      Just food for thought...

      ~Bill
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      • Profile picture of the author teaimport
        Yes, definitely concerned about 'getting pecked to death by chickens' doing straight retail. LOVE your tea club of the month idea, that's brilliant. Might make it worth doing, on that premise alone.

        Also like the idea of segregating the market - while I don't see us competing with our channel (they mostly sell the tea in prepared form), it would be a good safe guard.

        Thanks so much Bill, that is some very valuable insight.

        Originally Posted by Bill Farnham View Post

        Hi TI,

        Going from wholesale metrics to retail metrics can be quite a learning curve. The average sale will be substantially smaller meaning more of your resources will be needed albeit for smaller margins and bigger headaches.

        One of the tactics you may want to investigate is along the lines of a "Tea of the Month Club" or some other continuity program whereby your retail customers have a much larger lifetime value.

        It's also imparative that your wholesale customers are not competing with you for your retail sales as that can lead to unsatisfied wholesale customers who generally will be the more profitable group. If you attempt to use the internet for branding purpose make sure you're not cutting your own throat. You will rarely find a successful large company competing with their wholesale accounts for retail sales.

        Along those lines it may be worth the exercise to look into creating a different brand for your retail sales outlet. That is another common practice that works to segragate the market and keep everyone happy.

        Just food for thought...

        ~Bill
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  • Profile picture of the author krnekdo
    You could offer drop shipping to other stores. That will surely boost your sales sky high Contact other online tea shops that you can find on google and give them cheaper rates then they have now if possible.. Or just open up an affiliate program and do the same i suggested before..

    Let them do the work for you
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    • Profile picture of the author teaimport
      Drop shipping to other stores? How do you mean?

      I'm also thinking about the affiliate program. Any pointers on which ones are worth exploring, other resources? Reading a lot, trying to educate myself, but also very happy about any suggestions!


      Originally Posted by krnekdo View Post

      You could offer drop shipping to other stores. That will surely boost your sales sky high Contact other online tea shops that you can find on google and give them cheaper rates then they have now if possible.. Or just open up an affiliate program and do the same i suggested before..

      Let them do the work for you
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