Next Tuesday, September 17, the Events Committee is running Webinar: Digital Storefronts 2024 — an hour built for members who've been selling online for a while and members who are still deciding whether it's worth the trouble. It's free, it's virtual, and you don't need a shipping department to get something out of it.
We scheduled this one for the fall on purpose. This is the stretch when a lot of smaller producers start thinking seriously about holiday gift boxes and mail-order, often for the first time, and the questions we hear every year are close to identical: what actually ships well without arriving as a puddle, how do you price for cold-chain packaging without quietly eating your own margin, and is it worth building your own storefront versus listing through an existing specialty retailer that already has the logistics figured out.
What's actually on the agenda
The session walks through three things members have asked us about most this year. First, packaging that survives two or three days in a truck without your rind suffering for it — insulated boxes and ice packs sound simple until you are the one paying for a box that failed. Second, how to write a product listing that sets accurate expectations about a cheese that is genuinely handmade and therefore genuinely variable from batch to batch. Third, a plain look at fulfillment costs so you are not pricing a wheel as though shipping were free, when refrigerated carriers rarely are. None of it is theoretical — it is built from what members already running online storefronts have actually run into this year.
Specialty cheese has had a strong run by most trade reporting this year, with premium and artisanal categories pulling ahead of the broader grocery case. That is good news for members thinking about a bigger online push, but growth in interest does not automatically become a good experience for your customer — someone still has to get a hand-cut wedge to a doorstep in one piece, on time, and at a temperature that does not embarrass the cheese.
If you can't make it live
We record every webinar and post it to the member portal within a few days, so a Tuesday afternoon conflict is not a reason to skip it entirely. But live sessions get a question-and-answer window the recording does not, and this is a topic where the specific question — what do I do about a cheese that needs to breathe versus one that needs to stay cold — is exactly the kind of thing worth asking in real time, to someone who has actually shipped one.
Registration is open through the member portal now. If online sales are becoming a bigger part of your plan this year, this is a low-cost way to skip a few of the mistakes other members already made for you, on their own dime.
Bring a question if you have one. Past sessions have run long on the Q&A precisely because someone in the audience had a shipping problem nobody on the panel had thought to cover in the prepared material, and that's usually the most useful ten minutes of the hour.
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.