We opened registration this week for our December webinar on selling cheese online, and the sign-up list filled a third of its seats in the first two days. That tells us something we half-suspected already: a lot of members still don't have a real way to sell cheese online, and they know they need one before the holidays are over.
"Real" is doing some work in that sentence. Plenty of members have a website with a phone number on it, or a social media page where people comment "is this available." Fewer have something a customer can actually click through, pay on, and get a confirmation email from. The gap between those two things is most of what this webinar covers, and it matters more this year than most: farmers' markets held up surprisingly well through this pandemic year, and members who built a following there are now trying to carry that same customer online for the holiday season, rather than losing them once the outdoor market season ends.
What the session actually walks through
This isn't a build-it-yourself coding session. It's a plain look at the handful of order-and-payment platforms members are already using successfully, what each one costs monthly, how each handles shipping a perishable item, and the ordering questions that trip people up the first time — minimum order sizes, how far in advance to cut off holiday orders, what happens when a box arrives late. A couple of members who ran their first online holiday season last year have agreed to talk through what they'd do differently this time, which is usually the most useful twenty minutes of any session like this.
We're running it as a webinar rather than a workshop on purpose. The whole point is that a small operation can watch it from the cheese room, take three notes, and have a working checkout page live before the first week of December — not disappear for a two-day workshop during the busiest selling stretch of the year. Members who took the Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets course this fall will recognize some of the same ground; this session goes narrower, specifically into the mechanics of an online storefront rather than the broader question of building a direct customer list.
If you're deciding whether to register
If you already have a working online order system and you're happy with it, this one probably isn't for you. If you're still taking holiday cheese orders over the phone or through a comment thread, or if last year's attempt at shipping felt like it cost more in returns than it made in sales, this is built for exactly that problem. A few members have also asked whether it covers interstate shipping rules for raw-milk product — it doesn't, and members with that question should talk to the Food Safety Committee separately, since shipping mechanics and labeling law are two different conversations.
Seats are limited and the December date is close enough to the holidays to be useful without being a scramble. Register through the Events Committee before the list closes, and bring your current order volume so the session can speak to your actual scale rather than a hypothetical one.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.