Selling online

Online looks like the channel with no overheads and is the one with the most constraints.

What you are allowed to do first

Shipping across a state line brings you under federal requirements fully, and many state exemptions are limited to in-state, in-person sales.

So the question is not whether to build a shop, it is what your licensing permits. Settle it before the site, because rebuilding around a restriction found later is wasted work.

Shipping glass

A five ounce glass bottle is small and the packaging around it is not. Double box or use a molded insert, and treat the closure as the failure point rather than the glass: a bottle that survives the drop and weeps at the thread arrives as a sticky box, and to the customer that is broken.

Plastic solves breakage and costs the premium presentation, which for a buyer paying for craft is a real trade.

What it costs to get there intact

Freight on a single bottle is frequently a large fraction of its price and sometimes exceeds it. That arithmetic kills the obvious model of selling one bottle to a stranger across the country.

What works is multi-bottle orders, gift sets where the buyer has accepted shipping as part of the purchase, and local pickup or delivery, which removes the problem entirely and keeps you inside most in-state restrictions.

Build packaging and freight into the price before setting it. Producers routinely take a market price online and find the margin went to corrugate.

What actually sells

Specificity. An online buyer cannot taste it, so they are buying your peppers, your county, your harvest and your photographs. The pepper by name beats any heat claim.

Repeat customers, overwhelmingly. Someone who met you at a market and reorders online is the online business; a stranger finding you cold is rare and expensive to acquire.

References