Selling A Home Made Physical Product - Questions

Is it a food or some other sort of product?

If it is not a food, then perhaps sell it on Craigslist, EBay or Etsy.

Hi Dan,

Couple of thoughts...

One of the drawbacks to having an automated ordering system for a product that has intermittent supply is the very real possibility of overselling.

I know on the surface that doesn't sound too ominous, but if you experience it you'll probably agree it's not a situation you'll want to repeat.

What we did for our online store was use the good old telephone to take orders. All the other 'big guys' in our niche who had automated ordering systems for the products were faced with simply putting an "out of stock" banner below the item in their catalogs.

We didn't use a shopping cart for that very reason, and folks would call to place their orders and if we could get the products we got the sale.

We found it far easier to simply use the "phone in your order" or "email us your order" versus the using the phone or email to contact the person and explain the product is not availaible to be shipped that day, and do they want to wait, and do they want their money back, and no we're not running a scam, and yes we know you already paid but so did other customers, and host of other customer service issues that are avoided altogether by doing things the old fashion way.

You also build a better relationship with your customers and that helps not only with customer retention, but also with larger orders when they call.

So yes, I'm advocating you take orders via email or telephone. This could be Skype, as well.

About shipping...

If your product needs cold shipping you are going to run into serious issues. In fact, online sales of chocolate products, as an example, are almost non-existant between the months of May thru Oct here in the US. It's not only that the online retailers won't ship the product, many of the distributors for specialty chocolates like the kind we sold won't even entertain the idea of shipping the product via UPS or Fed EX. Their distribution reverts back to where their refridgerated trucks can deliver to air conditioned wharehouse/store environments.

You can, however, use styrofoam shipping containers along with dry ice packs that are generally good for two days, sometimes three days, if the weather permits.

Always remember that your merchandise can sit in a truck and bake even though you imagine it's going to go straight from your hands to your customer without any delays. But if you get an order from a customer in Las Vegas in August, as an example, there are going to be massive heat issues. The inside of those truck cargo boxes can reach 140 degrees.

Now having said that, anything can be overcome if you throw enough dollars at it. The question is one of affordability.

Best of luck to your son,

~Bill

You can use a free shopping cart like Virtuemart and enable inventory management. So create a product and set the inventory to 5 or whatever, then when they're sold you can manually replenish the product in the cart.

You can buy cold packaging from uline.com and ship it next or 2-day air.

Your biggest issue is that you can't just bake things in your home kitchen and sell them legally. You need to make food product in a licensed commercial kitchen. I have a lot of info on that, if you want to pursue it just shoot me a PM and I'll share what I have.

One of my earlier internet marketing attempts was Evil Fortune Cookies, now I just sell the evil fortunes on shirts instead.

A few other people mentioned the potential problems with selling food. I didn't even physically handle the cookies. I bought them wholesale prepackaged in plastic wrappers. I still had endless problems selling them legally, there was always another license I needed, or inspection and I didn't even make them.

Make sure you look into the insurance you are going to need also. I had a potential problem with one of the batches of cookies I ordered and it scared me out of the business. I tried getting them on QVC and local store shelves and the insurance requirements (to protect the other companies) that I would have had to pay for was ridiculous.

Somebody else mentioned using a shopping cart with inventory control and I think that is the best way to control the order flow. I use wpEstore. It's very low priced and very powerful. You can also get their affiliate plug-in to go with it if you want to go that route.

I'm not adding any of this to discourage you. Just make sure you look at everything before you get started.

Best of luck,

Dennis

lots of rules and regulations about making food products,if it is a food product the area you use will have to be certified for cooking also you will need some sort of insurance,what would happen if someone got food poisoning and blamed it on your product,Hope everything goes well for you and your son.
regards
vivi62

I sell my own brand of hot sauce online and it's a real pain. Hot sauce is relatively easy as it comes under high acidity food packaging, so the legalities are a little less strict than with what you're doing.
The place to start is with your local State health department. They'll have everything you need on their website. It won't be easy to find but you'll get to it with google.

I can tell you this much, you'll need a licensed commercial kitchen and the State won't issue a license for a home kitchen. (if your enterprise comes under certain types of 'canning' like jams and jellies, you can sometimes get dispensation, but never with fresh food goods that I've heard of).
Also, depending on some factors including sales volume, territory etc, you may have to submit your recipe to the FDA for approval. You may also have to get a lab review of the nutritional content and get a special label made.

And then liability insurance and so forth.

What most people do when they're starting out is to rent a licensed commercial kitchen. Any restaurant or bar will have such a thing and you can sometimes make an arrangement with them to use their facility off-hours. Some churches and of course bakeries, cafes etc have licensed kitchens, and some places are operated solely for renting to small private enterprises like yourself.

But you will still probably need some of the other things I mentioned, you can't just turn up and bake something then sell it (anywhere, not just online).

It sounds like this would be a great 'project' for your son, a real induction into the world of commerce.

Good luck.