Registration opened this week for Webinar: Digital Storefronts 2020, our December 3 session on building and running an online sales channel for a cheese business. We wouldn't normally spend a fall newsletter talking up a December webinar this early, but this year the usual holiday-planning runway has already shrunk, and a few members told us they'd rather start thinking about it now than in the second week of November.
If your case, counter, or farm stand has spent this year leaning on curbside pickup and mail order to make up for lost foot traffic, you already know the basic shape of the problem the webinar addresses. A storefront you can't physically stand behind still has to answer the questions a customer would normally ask you in person: how ripe is this, will it travel, what do I do with it when it gets there. Doing that well online is a different skill than doing it well at a counter, and a lot of members are building that skill for the first time this year, under time pressure, without much of a runbook.
What the session will actually cover
We're keeping the December 3 webinar practical rather than theoretical. The agenda runs through packaging and shipping for cheese specifically — what travels safely in cold-chain terms and what doesn't, without straying into food-safety guidance that belongs in our HACCP coursework instead — plus product photography on a real budget, writing tasting notes that do the job a countertop sample normally does, and setting expectations on delivery windows during a season when shipping carriers are themselves under strain. We'll also spend time on order volume planning, because more than one member has told us the hardest part of this year wasn't building the storefront, it was being ready for the week it actually worked.
The session is free and virtual, in keeping with how we've run most of this year's programming. If you attended our September webinar on costing a make and found the format useful, this one follows a similar structure: a presentation block, then an open Q&A where we take questions from whatever members show up with, on or off the printed agenda.
Why now, specifically
Retail behavior nationally has been shifting toward earlier holiday shopping this year, with more of it happening online and more of it happening through smaller, local sellers than in a typical season. That's a real opportunity for members who sell direct, but only if the ordering and fulfillment side of the business can keep up once demand actually arrives. Building that infrastructure in early November, after the surge has already started, is a much harder position than building it in October with a few weeks of slack.
If you're not sure whether your current setup can handle a real volume spike, the Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets course is a longer, more hands-on companion to this webinar and worth considering for next year's cohort. For now, registration for the December 3 session is open on the member portal, and space in the Q&A block is easier to get real attention in if the group stays a reasonable size — so register when you know you can attend, rather than holding a spot you might not use.
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.