How To Start an Online Coffee Business

Starting an online coffee business can be fun, rewarding, and profitable.

With an ever growing demand for locally roasted coffee in the U.S. and elsewhere, there has never been a better time to sell coffee online.

This is especially true, because of the coronavirus pandemic. People still want amazing coffee and are experimenting brewing gourmet coffee at home now more than ever!

With nearly 7 out of 10 adults drinking coffee every day, having an online coffee business can be an incredible opportunity to enter the retail coffee industry with only the fraction of the cost.

Like other online businesses, you can leverage the world-wide access to customers everywhere who are looking for great tasting, high-quality gourmet coffee – conveniently.

As a result, a variety of successful online coffee startups have achieved tremendous success, such as Bean Box, Death Wish Coffee, and others.

Like many online coffee businesses, they started small.

But small isn't a bad thing! In fact, like other online businesses – it's easy to scale up as you develop your online coffee shop. This makes starting an online coffee business one of the best ways to start a low-cost ideas to enter into retail coffee.

Benefits of Starting an Online Coffee Business

The primary benefit of starting an online coffee business is that you can start with relatively little money. As you can imagine, this is a huge benefit, especially if you don't have enough to start a traditional brick-and-mortar coffee shop or a drive-thru coffee stand.

After all, what better way than to build your coffee brand online first?

Another benefit of starting an online coffee business is that you can simply “pay-as-you-go” for things that you need to invest in when starting an online coffee business.

This is especially important if you are concerned about the upfront costs that comes with starting a coffee shop.

In this article we will cover the steps and tools you'll need to start your online coffee business so that you can launch your own successful online coffee business.

Let's get started!

About this article: Some of the tools and recommendation we offer point to our affiliate resources, from which we receive a small commission with no additional cost to you.

Resources mentioned in this article:

What You'll Need To Start Your Online Coffee Business

There are few essential things you'll need when you start your online coffee business. Like any other business, you will need to think about each of these as you move forward with launching your online business venture.

To start an online coffee business, you'll need to:

Choose your product

Know your target market

Register your website domain and get hosting

Select your coffee shop checkout system

Be Creative, take action and promote your site

Step #1: Decide on Your Coffee Inventory

To start an online coffee business, you will need coffee to sell.

This seems obvious, right?

However, what is not obvious is how to choose your coffee.

Let us assume that you will have a variety of products that you would like to sell online – these may include green coffee beans, freshly roasted beans, coffee t-shirts, or anything in between.

However, at this point, if you haven’t already decided on which coffee products you are going to sell online – and that’s okay too!

Keep in mind, however, that much of your online business success will depend on the proper sourcing of your product. In this case, it's probably coffee!

For obvious reasons, it's best to determine how to get your coffee inventory ahead of time or at a wholesale rate before you actually start selling online.

Using Wholesale Coffee Roasters

Start by researching wholesale coffee roasters, or other product manufacturers, such as T-shirts and mugs. In addition to exploring local or regional coffee roasters, you might consider developing relationships with existing wholesale coffee sellers.

For example, you may also be able to develop a drop shipping relationship with coffee wholesalers or related-product manufacturers.

Drop shipping is where you get the customer to order from you (through your website) and then the manufacturer ships the product directly to the customer). After the sale is complete and depending how the purchase was made, the drop shipper will pay you – or you will pay the drop shipper after you collect the money from your customer.

Whichever way you decide to organize your online coffee business, you will need a product that sells and resonates with your particular target market.

So, identifying who your target market is, will be essential to your online business success.

Let's continue.

Roasted Coffee Beans

Why not sell your own roasted coffee? Order your green coffee beans from websites like Sweet Maria's, roast the coffee yourself, package it, and sell it under your own brand.

For larger coffee orders, you should look for a green coffee broker or importer in your area, state, or region. However, if you just want to experiment for now, consider ordering green coffee beans from Sweet Maria's or even a local coffee roaster.

Curated Coffee Beans

Curating your own coffee from local roasters is a great way to sell coffee online. Offer coffee gift baskets of small batch coffee packages that are locally roasted by your region's best coffee roasters.

How do you this? You can approach small local coffee roasting companies in your area and see if they would sell their coffee to you at a wholesale cost.

Of course, you might consider having your online sales website up first so that they know you are serious about your venture. An example of this type of business model is BeanBox, who curates local beans from Seattle's most talented coffee roasters.

Coffee Equipment

Sell new and/or refurbished coffee equipment or rare coffee brewing devices, espresso machines, pour over socks, etc.

This may require you to know a little bit about the brewing devices you are selling, but people are always looking to buy novel brewing devices. Often times, you can sell coffee equipment online as an affiliate partner, through Amazon, Ebay, Etsy or your own online coffee website.

Artsy Coffee Stuff

You may want to sell coffee art, T-shirts, posters, greeting cards, coffee signs, coffee mugs, travel cups, holders, Thermos containers, coffee pour-over holders, etc. Either you can make your own products or you can become an affiliate with companies like Zazzle.

Teas & Health Related Products

In addition to green or roasted coffee, you can sell a variety of local teas from your area. For example, you can curate your own teas that are good for health reasons, particular tastes, or have unique properties, etc. Aside from coffee, tea is the most highly consumed beverage in the world. Take advantage of this high demand product and sell the best local teas.

Chocolate

Who doesn't love chocolate and coffee? Like great locally roasted coffee, you can also find small local chocolate wholesalers and sell them in gift boxes.

Coffee and Personalized Coffee Mugs

Coffee goes with plenty of other items, but especially coffee mugs!

Choosing What to Sell to Your Customers

What's HOT Right Now

Advocacy Selling

Selling roasted coffee online to a specific advocacy group is an excellent way to get started with your online coffee business.

For example, if you love pets, maybe you would like to sell coffee to cat lovers. You can set up a non-profit or pledge to give $1 or $2 to a local cat rescue for every bag of coffee you sell online. You can also call each coffee blend or profile a special name after your favorite cat or pet.

People are willing to buy – and buy at a higher price! – if they know that their money and purchasing decisions are going to a good cause that they support.

Make sure that you price out your items to cover ALL the costs, including your inventory, packaging, website maintenance, shipping, and your time!

What's Your Online Competition Doing?

You want to understand who your competition is because you want to understand what customers are already paying for.

For example, you want to know what products are already being offered and what products people are searching for.

Most importantly, you want to know what people are buying online.

When it comes to your competition, you also want to find out what is motivating their customers to buy their products. Are they buying coffee for themselves or as gifts for their friends and loved ones?

When it comes to your competition, will your customers be the same as theirs? Will a segment of their target market overlap with yours? If so, how?

Take a moment, and reflect on what your competition is doing.

How can you position yourself differently? Offering something different and developing your own competitive advantage within a healthy marketplace will be important to understand before you decide on:

1) What product(s) to offer and;

2) How to reach and market to your target audience.

In other words, decide on your product and determine who your customer will be. Then determine how you will position yourself to attract those customers.

Step #2: Register Your Domain Name

Please note: The following steps #2 & #3 can be done at the same time! Yay!

There's no way around it: You are going to need your own website.

To get started, I recommend that you register your website domain name and get website hosting at BlueHost.

If you already have a domain name, congratulations! You already know that it's an important first step to getting your website up. Now if you don’t yet have one yet, you will need to buy one through a domain registrar company such as BlueHost.

I have tried a bunch of different hosting providers and can say that BlueHost makes it pretty darn easy to get your website up and running fast. (Read our step-by-step tutorial in our article, How To Set Up Your Coffee Shop Website.)

Domain names with privacy are purchased for about $24 a year. Hosting cost vary, but it's about $5 a month or about $70 a year.

Step #3: Setup Your Online Store

Setting up your website and online store is the next important step to launching your online coffee business.

There are two general ways you can launch your online coffee store that we would like to discuss next. The first is to setup a WordPress website or use a website e-commerce platform.

Both options offer great benefits and are relatively easy to set up.

Website Option #1: Using WordPress

The first option is to build and host your own website using “WordPress” software.

This is one of the most affordable ways to get online (Probably the most affordable). As a result, millions and millions of websites are run on WordPress software, which is a free and open-source code. It's easy and affordable.

To have a WordPress website, you will need to get a website hosting package through services like BlueHost. After getting your domain address and hosting package, all you need to do is connect the WordPress software with your hosting provider and start creating your website.

Once you order your hosting package, Bluehost walks you through it on your dashboard. It is so much easier than it sounds!

To collect money from you customers and process your transactions, you can link to a third-party shopping cart like Shopify or Selz, or… use a free WordPress shopping cart plugin.

Website Option #2: Use an E-commerce Platform

You can launch your online coffee business with an e-commerce platform that is fully-hosted and offers a secure shopping cart with Shopify or Selz. These e-commerce options are great if you want to jump right into selling online.

Companies like Shopify, Selz, or Weebly basically allow you to build your own website and add a shopping cart on their website servers.

Each of these have their own “ready-to-go” shopping cart system with shipping and tax features that you can tailor to your online business. This means you never have to worry about web hosting or website plugins to sell your products.

All you will have to do is sign up, pick a plan, and build out your website. When a customer does buy from your online coffee store, these companies will notify you instantly so you can ship out your coffee right away to your customers!

Easy-Peasy.

We just mentioned two roads you can take. So, let's consider one option at a time…

Creating Your Online Coffee Store

Shopify

Over 700,000+ online businesses use Shopify to sell products online. It's growing every day.

Even coffee roasters and coffee shops use Shopify for their own brick-and-mortar coffee shop.

From a convenience factor, it is certainly easier to have everything “put together” for you in one website theme, one hosting service, and one secure shopping cart – all accessible under one dashboard that you can control.

This “convenience factor” is especially true if you are not sure if your online coffee business will be viable in the long run and you don't want to hassle with learning about the back-end administration and HTML coding that is necessary with WordPress.

In other words, if you just want to sell (or even test your products), you just might want to go with a company like Shopify – though it may cost a little more upfront.

What's also great about using Shopify or Selz is that you never have to hassle with customer's credit card or debit card information! They do it for you.

Shopify takes care of securing payment transactions for you, which can be a big concern for customers as well as sellers. Of course, they charge a fee per purchase, but in my opinion, this is totally worth the pain of dealing with securing customer payment information and processing the transaction.

We like it this way.

Here at Coffee Shop Startups, we never deal with our customer's credit card information. Zero. Nada. In our opinion, avoiding this hassle is one of the best ways to hassle-free and safest ways to sell online. It's one of the great reasons why we like using Selz.com for selling online. Shopify does the same thing.

Are there any drawbacks to Shopify's Online Store Platform?

It's hard to find any drawbacks to Shopify's online store. It's easy to use, easy to set up, and easy to get going fast.

Of course, this comes at a fair price. I really don't believe paying a fair price is a drawback – especially for a high quality and reliable service. However, you should be aware, that you do have to pay every month for the convenience of hosting your website and your shopping cart.

While it's not too expensive, you still have to pay if you aren't completely setup yet. So, you want to make sure that you allow yourself a couple of months to gain traction.

The great news, however, is that there are no annual contracts. You simply pay month-to-month.

In light of that, one drawback may be saving your hard work. For example, once you opt-out of Shopify, you can lose all your content if you don't save it or export it.

Nevertheless, Shopify offers pure convenience and hassle-free website development, hosting, and smooth, easy, and safe financial transactions.

Creating Your Online Coffee Store

with

BlueHost & WordPress

Having your own WordPress site can provide you with ultimate control and independence.

I really love working with BlueHost and having my own website through WordPress. The ability to control my own content is important for me.

Additionally, I don't have the pressure to pay every month. It's a huge relief!

There are some great reasons to use BlueHost along with WordPress to create your coffee shop website. (WordPress is the free software that allows you to build out the structure of your website).

It's cheaper

Google likes WordPress sites (may help with ranking)

Gives you complete control over your website content

Here's what you're going to need to get started:

Domain Name ($22-$25 per year with privacy add-on)

Website Hosting Account ( Approximately $70-80 per year)

WordPress Theme (Costs range from $0 to $60)

An E -commerce Sales Platform, such as PayPal or Selz (Low-cost but there is monthly charge or a percentage taken from each sale)

As I mentioned above, once you get your hosting package with BlueHost you can easily add install the WordPress Software to your website from your BlueHost account dashboard.

Check out our previously written a step-by-step article on how to set up your website using BlueHost and WordPress.

If you're still want to explore your options or you're not interested in the learning the back end administration stuff, you should consider Shopify. We'll talk about that next in greater detail.

Using The Shopify ‘All-in-One' Package

Sometimes having everything done for you is worth the cost of paying a little extra. Shopify makes everything very convenient in setting up your website.

Easy-to-setup

Convenient

There's no hassle with learning computer code

Here's what you're going to need to get started:

Shopify Package: ( From $29.00 a month) – Start Your Free Trial

Website Theme: (From $0 to $150)

Various Add-on Plugins: (The c ost depends on the plugins you may need or want)

Learn More About Shopify's Features, Costs & Options Here

Step #4: Marketing & Promotion

Now that your website is set up, your products are available, next comes the fun part – promotion!

Other websites, books, and online resources can go into much more detail than I can do here, but it is important for me to mention that your online marketing will be important. And it will take up a majority of your post-launch time.

Your marketing campaign can begin at any time, even long before you spend your first dime on your website. And the sooner you start, the better off you will be.

The important thing to remember is that your online store will take time to build traction – so start your website business with this understanding.

Anticipate that you will launch your store and it might take awhile for you to get regular online visitors. If you anticipate this well enough, you can start to develop your promotional efforts long before your open for business.

Branding will also play an important role in developing your online business.

Therefore you will want to develop your website logo and utilize your website's blog to entice readers. Your logo will be essential for your website, your business cards, and your packaging.

Consider the following ways to promote your online coffee store:

Use Social media

Write a blog post on your website regularly

Have lots of pictures of your products on your website

Develop your email list and send regular emails

Meet new people in person and promote face-to-face (yes, this still works!)

Create business cards and hand them out

Paid internet ads

Reach out to coffee bloggers

Promoting your online store needs to be given your highest priority.

Take some time to develop your marketing plan with each of the above points. Writing a regular blog post and promoting via social media will be important. Sharing pictures on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest can create an international following and customers.

Be patient. It's going to take some time (and a lot of work) to gain some traction with growing a following, so be be patient and deliberate with your actions. Keep working even if you don't think no one is watching. You might want to consider saving money upfront by not ordering too much inventory until you get regular orders coming in.

Your Website Content is Hugely Important

When your website visitors arrive at your website, you will need to provide them with content.

Your content can include your welcome message, your product descriptions, your pictures, your videos, etc. Consequently, before you launch your online coffee business, you should start developing your web content, social media content, and bio.

Step #5: Happy Selling!

Sometimes you just gotta do it.

Keep in mind that you will be making adjustments as you go. Don’t let being “perfect” stop you from starting.

Generate value for your customers wherever you can. Use your passion, coffee expertise, marketing, or niche ideas along the way to generate additional value for your customers. Get help, seek the opinions of your friends and family (they can be your biggest marketers!).

Additionally, keep in mind that at first, you should consider having minimal inventory. It doesn't make sense to buy a boat load of coffee to just sit there while you figure out your new online business.

Start small and then grow out.

Remember, there will be a learning curve but if you move forward in a steady fashion and work on something everyday, you'll be in a better position your online coffee store to make a profit. As a result, as an online business owner, your work really never stops.

You have to continuously be vigilant about your customer service, your online reputation, your marketing, your inventory. Without a doubt, it can be a very profitable venture if you plan it right.

Additional recommendation: You want to sell the freshest coffee possible. This will help develop your reputation, positive reviews, and repeat customers. Coffee does have a shelf life. So, consider your inventory. Don't buy too much roasted coffee and have it sit there for six months. Your coffee will become rancid. Our recommendation is to reduce waste by smartly managing your inventory.

Starting Your Online Coffee Business:

Summing Things Up

Start Small & Take Your First Step Forward

We've covered a lot here, so I wanted to summarize our recommendations that we've discussed throughout the article.

If you want more information on “how to setup your coffee shop website” with BlueHost, read our latest article, How to Start a Coffee Shop Website.

Remember, that to make money selling coffee online, you are going to need to start. Be smart and methodical about it and you will have a better chance for success. Do something every day, and you quickly see how fast you develop over just a couple of weeks.

Start small, then grow out from there. You can start with getting your website going.

Choose a website platform and build your online business. To get started, work with good website e-commerce platforms like BlueHost and Shopify.

Resources mentioned in this article:

Got Any Questions?

Finally, if you have any questions about starting an online coffee business, send me an email.

Certainly, I will try to answer any specific questions and detail further why I recommend these options for your online coffee business.

Starting any business online can be both profitable and necessary depending on which part of the coffee business you are coming from. Full disclosure, some of the links may be affiliate links that cost you nothing – but support this website through a small commission.