Top Tools We Rely on for Our Wholesale, Retail, and E-commerce Businesses (cont.)

To continue with my list of top resources...


3. A solid Point of Sale system. I have spoken about this at the World Tea Expo on numerous occasions. There are many vendors out there that can walk you through all the features and functions of their systems. Before you go shopping, you should carefully write out what your requirements are. If you don't know what you'll need, try to speak with someone who has configured a similar system for a parallel business.

In the tea industry, we typically have types two types of transactions: food service and retail. The food service component will rely heavily on ease, speed and accuracy of the transaction. The retail component will need to track inventory and price changes so at the end of the day, month, quarter, so you will have an accurate picture of profitability. If you are in a high traffic area such as our retail store, Infusions of Tea, you may need to store and return to multiple in-progress transactions throughout the day.

On the food service side, customizable touch screen with programmable menus is a big plus, as is the ability to print a food order on a secondary printer in the food prep area.

On the retail side, it is easier to generate purchase orders in pounds yet sell in ounces. Also, the system should automatically generate price tags for you based on purchased quantities. Do you intend to build gift baskets or tea gift sets? You don't really want to be entering individual component prices during the holiday rush, do you? It's more likely these prebuilt sets will be sold at a discount so it is best if they are assigned their own product numbers.

Whether you choose to implement a true Point of Sale system or a simple cash register, all your data should flow into Quickbooks or whatever accounting system you are using. 

Piece of cake, right? I'll just conclude by repeating what I said at the beginning. Make a list of your requirements based upon your business. This will keep you focused as you compare various POS systems.

Top Tools We Rely on for Our Wholesale, Retail, and E-commerce Businesses

As many of you may know, we manage a series of wholesale, retail and e-commerce stores all focused on tea. We would not be up to do this effectively (with minimal payroll expenses) without the use of computers and related technologies. It is odd to find myself drawn to technology when in actuality my main motivation to move into the tea sector was to escape high technology.

But my affinity for technological solutions is really geared at finding practical solutions for the problem at hand. I know this to be the case because one need only look at my cell phone, which by the way does not have any smartphone features, to know that I don't just buy technology for the sake of having it. Even my MP3 player still uses a standard rechargeable AA battery.

Having said that, here a list of essential tools that I would consider now to be indispensable.

1. Volusion. Volusion (www.volusion.com)  is our core e-commerce platform which includes web hosting, website design, and shopping cart functions. Volusion represents our third cycle of e-commerce platforms. The first was Microsoft bCentral, which was promptly dropped by Microsoft several years ago. The second was eBay's ProStore, which was more or less a template design nightmare. Volusion's  interface, customization capabilities, and total breath of functions has really been a blessing for our small business. Add on top of that true 24/7 customer support and you have a solution that is really built for around-the-clock maintenance and upgrades.

I know if you read some of the forums within Volusion, you will find a series of disgruntled clients. But overall I believe if you are truly focused on business and not a software developer at heart, you will quickly come to realize how this one tool can open up your imagination for marketing new products on the Internet.

Another subset of technologies we've come to rely on through our use of Volusion is SQL. I'm definitely not a computer programmer by any means, but learning a few stored queries (SELECT queries) has really helped harness the power of this system. By stored queries, I mean a routine way of pulling relevant data from a relational database. For example, we have stored queries we use to transfer data between the e-commerce system and our Sales/MRP system. This might include customer shipping address, item codes, prices, quantities, etc. We also use stored queries to view purchasing data and manage product pricing and descriptions. We can pull customer data automatically for creation of our product sample labels. We even have stored queries to grab data related to customer returns and feed it directly into excel and word.

Lastly, we use Volusion's implementation of Intuit's web connections to link this system with Quickbooks. In short, it automatically creates an itemized sales receipt for every transaction. By some standards, this is low tech. For us, it's just cool. Who wants to enter all this data manually?

I will continue with this list in future postings shortly.

Thinking about a Web Based, Tea Business?

We speak with people every day who want to get into the business of tea. Most are interested in starting a web business. Certainly, we experience the full range of "I need it now" to "I'm just looking", but whether your are well versed in aged pu-erh or the finest high mountain Tie Kwan Yin, to me, the greatest indicator of web success is your ability to translate your passion for tea into an indexed language that the search engines will find and rank highly. Those in the know just refer to this as SEO.

As much a building a knowledge of tea, I strongly encourage nearly all the new web-based, tea entrepreneurs to have a clear strategy for how they intend to build traffic. A pretty website and unique products isn't enough. It's like a small emerging fern in a vast forest of giant redwood trees - you just won't get noticed.

Having said that, I hope those of you who've built a successful web presence will share your ideas. The tea industry has always been very supportive and encouraging, with the exception of one large tea retail franchise beginning with the letter, "T".

Kopius Teas on Twitter

Today we are officially launching timely communications through Twitter. There is a link from our website, www.kopiusteas.com or you can find us on twitter under "kopiusteas"