Moving Beans
Online marketplaces give regional roasters national exposure
BY KAREN L. WAGNER offee roasters looking to boost sales have for a long time used their websites as a convenient way to sell to retail customers. Over the past few years, centralized e-marketplaces that offer more than one brand have emerged as a way for roasters to reach beyond their local markets to offer coffee from coast to coast. While some of these sites sell everyday store-brand coffee, a few more recent start-ups have focused exclusively on offering specialty coffee directly from micro roasters. These online specialty retailers tout the e-marketplace as the perfect meeting spot for roasters seeking new business and consumers seeking better-tasting coffee. But what do roasters, themselves, have to say? Are these sites moving more beans or simply cannibalizing existing business? And is one site just like another?
WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE?
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The common denominator among these specialty coffee e-marketplace sites is that they offer one-stop shopping from top-notch roasters who are probably unfamiliar to most consumers. Only roasters with the highest quality standards make it onto their sites, retailers say. “We want to know that they’re trying to coax the best taste out of each of the coffees,” says Scott Lush, who founded Boston-based ROASTe.com about a year and a half ago. “That’s what we’re looking for — a roaster who’s passionate, rather than a roaster who’s just trying to throw more coffee out there.” The founders of GoCoffeeGo.com, based in San Francisco, tasted each coffee and personally met with each roaster before going live with their site last October. The retailers say they want to make sure the roasters they feature meet certain standards, such as roasting daily and separating organic from non-organic products. “We want to be very careful who we bring on because we want to have the ultimate site for the best coffee on the Web,”
32 | July 2010 • www.specialty-coffee.com
says GoCoffeeGo.com co-founder Scott Pritikin. Not all e-marketplace retailers operate in the same way. With both ROASTe.com and GoCoffeeGo.com, customers purchase the coffee through the e-marketplace retailer, which then takes a cut of each sale. The roasters ship the coffee. Other sites, such as Greatcoffee.com and Roatersclub.com, offer a combination — customers can buy specially featured coffee on the site or link to a roaster’s site directly from the e-marketplace. Roasters themselves seem to like being in good company. “The roasters that are on this are terrific,” says Tony Dreyfuss, co-owner of Metropolis Coffee, Chicago, whose coffee has been offered on GoCofeeGo.com since the site’s inception. Dreyfuss says giving customers one place to find coffee from all over the country is a real service. “It gives choice,” he says. “I like being part of something like that.” One of the greatest advantages of such sites, these retailers say, is that they give national exposure to roasters who would find it difficult to capture that non-local dollar. GoCoffeeGo.com has received plenty of press, having been mentioned in everything from The New York Times Style Magazine to Organic Spa Magazine. The site is also advertised on various consumer Websites, like Realtor.com. Lush says his marketing reaches across the Web, including social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. He also uses affiliate marketing, so when an Internet user conducts a search for Krups coffee makers, for example, ROASTe.com will be included in the search results; the e-marketplace retailer will also appear on searches from specific sites like shopping.com and others that offer online comparison shopping. Lush says this is the type of national marketing a roaster wouldn’t be able to afford on his own.
HOW’S BUSINESS?
For the most part, the handful of roasters represented here is not exactly inundated with extra sales from e-marketplace