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Selling it

Selling online

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5

Heavy, breakable, temperature-sensitive and sometimes pressurized. Online is the hardest channel in the estate for this product.

The channel that fights this product hardest

Everything about a drink is wrong for a parcel, and the things that make a craft beverage good, live, unpasteurized, unfiltered, are the things that make it worst.

Freight

A case of glass is twenty kilos and worth perhaps fifty, so shipping is a large fraction of the order.

Which pushes everything to multi-buys and subscriptions, and makes single-bottle sales uneconomic.

Cans help substantially. Concentrates and syrups help most, because they remove the water.

Temperature

A refrigerated product in an ordinary parcel is refrigerated for about two hours.

Insulated packaging with coolant and a next-day service works and costs real money per order.

Dispatch early in the week so nothing sits over a weekend.

And for a live product there is a second reason: warmth means fermentation, which means pressure and alcohol, so a warm parcel is not only a quality risk.

Say plainly on the product page what you can and cannot guarantee. Customers forgive a stated limitation and not a surprise.

What actually works

Shelf-stable versions: pasteurized, canned, or concentrated.

Syrups and concentrates, which ship dry weight and let the customer add their own water.

Subscriptions, which smooth the freight across repeat orders and let you plan the cold chain.

And local delivery, which is not really online but is how most small beverage makers actually reach customers at home.

References

No published source. This page is written from practice rather than from published guidance. No extension service or agency publishes on this question for beverages, so nothing here is cited, and it should be weighed as experience and not as a standard.
Written from the federal regulation and agency guidance named on each page, not from a laboratory. Whether a particular product meets a pathogen reduction requirement, and what its alcohol content actually is, are measurements about your product, and this is not those measurements.