Coffee Selling Companies: 8 Business Models to Make Money from your own Coffee Brand
Every successful company starts with a good idea, but does it really always have to be a super novelty? Most founders see this as a hurdle and feel compelled to create something new, groundbreaking and innovative. I think it’s a mistake. Because where could an entry work faster than in an established market with a product like coffee (or tea or jam or muesli or …) that the potential customer already knows? Isn’t it easier to convince in an existing market only with better service or marketing that has been around for a long time? I think so.
The example of coffee should therefore only serve as an example and source of inspiration in this article and show that even a standard product in everyday life offers many opportunities for new entrepreneurs. Because everyone knows coffee and almost every household has a coffee machine. Perhaps this post inspires you to turn your own idea into money — perhaps not necessarily with coffee.
Online or offline business model?
I don’t want to commit myself here, but my own experiences in this post are based exclusively on online business models. The online business is flourishing and generating billions in sales. Whether affiliate, advertising and or trade in products (e-commerce), the future looks good. There are many ways to earn money online, and I have already successfully implemented a few of them myself.
That was always important to me because I never wanted to be a service provider myself who was paid by the hour. My step into self-employment should therefore be made through a product, as with my wholesale Coffee Company. It’s not my first online business, but it’s a good example to show the different ways you can make money with a product as simple as coffee.
A note in advance: Everything you read here may sound easier than it is. I founded wholesale Coffee business for the first time in 2012 and it took me almost 8 years as a part-time worker to make a living from it. With the right focus, this is certainly much faster. I just want to take away the hope that an online business will secure an income overnight. If you don’t want to start as a service provider, you should plan at least 2 or 3 years in advance.
What we do?
My coffee business is an online luxury coffee brand in which we only sell organic coffee from fair direct trade. This sets us apart from the supermarket segment in terms of both product quality and target group. Coffee is not just coffee.
1. Open a coffee online shop
The classic and almost obvious way is to sell coffee through your own online shop. It sounds easy, but it isn’t. Because every online shop has to gain trust and comply with the law.
Our shop runs with ecommerce platforms, I simply had a service provider make the adjustments for the required basic price information, for example. I bought the theme from the same ecommerce marketplace
Once the setup is in place, potential customers have to find their way into the shop. Since we didn’t have a large advertising budget, we concentrated on what costs time but little money: blogging. So, long before my wholesale Coffee business became a shop, it was first a blog. If I were to start a new project today, I would do it all over again. There are simple solutions for blog to get started with.
Warning: readers are not the same as customers. It is….
1. Important that the blog fits thematically to the shop and the products
2. That one builds further trust measures.
Reviews in any form are always important and good. When customers send a picture with the purchased product, put it on the website (after approval) and show potential new customers that there are other people who trust you and your shop.
If everything goes well and your shop works, you can assume that on average around 2.5% of all readers who visit a product page will also buy something there. With 1000 readers in the blog, depending on the design, maybe 15% make it to a product page (= 150), of which maybe 2–5% buy something (depending on optimization).
As I said, these are average numbers and does not mean that it has to be the same for you. 2.5% of 150 product page visitors could mean just 3.75 orders (with 1000 visitors!).
So the path to success is a long-term path. A way to a strong brand and a high customer lifetime value. The aim must be to make the customer a regular customer and to gain their trust so that — once they have been won — they buy regularly.
At wholesale online Coffee shop, the rate of repeat buyers is well over 70% (!!) in almost all months. Now (after more than 3 years in which we have been selling our current products) we are sending around 1.5 tons of coffee every month via the shop. It took quite a while, but this channel is growing very stable for us. This is also due to the…
3. Affiliate Marketing
Another model that we successfully implement at wholesale online Coffee brand is affiliate marketing. Who blogs (well and SEO optimized) has traffic. And if you have traffic, you can usually turn it into money.
At some point we understood that not every reader can be a wholesale coffee buyer. Many come across an article via Google and, in case of doubt, don’t even really perceive the brand. This is why it is super important to anticipate what a reader might expect in a particular blog post. Each contribution has its own task and must be designed differently accordingly.
In our case, for example, we also write a lot about coffee accessories. Someone who is currently looking for a coffee machine with milk frother that has such a device and not necessarily coffee at the moment.
That is why we have structured such items in such a way that they explain the products and we give a clear purchase recommendation. In the milk frother example it looks like this:
Milk frother
Since not only milk frother are exciting for coffee drinkers, we do this procedure, for example, with, coffee cans, coffee grinders, fully automatic, French press or Aero Press formulators, and many more. With more than 120,000 monthly readers in our coffee magazine, this alone means a solid additional income. And should we ever decide to sell accessories ourselves, we already know which specific products our readers would like to buy.
Of course, we also use other items like this to lead customers directly to our products or at least to get them into our e-mail funnel. As I said, each contribution has a different task that is implemented separately.
5. Advertising
Another online business model, which we don’t really like to implement, is advertising. The same applies here: if you have traffic, you can also sell the range. Either you look for a suitable partner who would like to participate in our case it could be an accessory manufacturer in USA or you use marketing networks such as Google AdSense or the B2B marketplaces also offer a really helpful advertising and marketing packages With Google AdSense you can roughly earn around € 500 per month with around 100,000 page views. With direct marketers that should be significantly more.
In our case, however, I decided against it for the time being, because it distracts the focus too much from our actual business model (selling coffee).
6. Open a café
At number 6 there is finally a business model that doesn’t only work online. If you want to start your own business with coffee, you could simply open a café. The idea is often associated with a lot of preparatory work and due to the rental and investment costs with effort and risk — but if you plan well and have weighed all the risks, you should be able to gain a foothold with a café.
Attention: A restaurant business is something completely different from an online business. There’s a reason few companies are good at both. The focus should therefore be clear, especially at the beginning.
7. Become a barista
Not in the mood for your own café? Then get hired as a barista in a café and learn the craft from A to Z.
8. Become a Wholesale coffee importer or roaster
Or coffee growers. Everything is possible. I’ll summarize these points because the idea is similar. Instead of going to end customers (online or offline) with the product coffee, you could also start much earlier in the coffee chain in USA. This not only applies to coffee, but actually to every product.
With coffee in particular, these steps are all extremely important and a science in themselves. The farmer or the cooperative takes care of the farm, employs pickers and sells the coffee. This is shipped by an exporter / importer to the port of destination and stored there until it is called off by the roasting plants. A roaster owns a roasting and filling machine, buys packaging, roasts the coffee and fills it.
Conclusion: Everything is possible, nothing has to be done
These 8 examples are only intended to be an inspiration for what is possible to make money with a simple product like coffee. It doesn’t always have to be the one obvious way. Usually there are mixed forms of business models that can be easily combined.
I would also like to point out again that I could replace the word “coffee” in this article with almost any other product. Think about where you want to get into the value chain and then build your empire from there. I myself opted for the online shop via the blog. That does not mean that we cannot open a café or a roaster at some point, but only that our focus is currently on the online area and that we use all business models there sensibly.
