Step 1: Design Your Product Offerings

Free 5-Day Course: Start Selling Online & Shipping Your Product Step 1: Design Your Product Offerings

Welcome to Day 2 of our “Shipping in 5 Days” Course!

So far you’ve made some really good progress getting your online shipping business set up! You’ve:

Purchased your shipping packaging
Purchased your domain name
Launched your online storefront and started setting it up

Today we’ll continue to make more progress! If you haven’t finished the tasks above, go back to day one now and do those things. If you don’t, a lot of today’s stuff won’t make sense!

So, on to Day 2! Your tasks today are designing your product offerings and setting up & designing your new storefront. So let’s get started right away on building those product offerings!

#1 Take-Home on Building Your Products: Keep it Simple!

You can always make things more complicated down the line, but keep your product offerings as simple as possible at first. We recommend doing pre-designed packs at first. This helps you avoid a lot of complications, including:

Issues with a la carte. Yes, we do offer a la carte, but it requires more freezer storage space, several different sizes of boxes, more work on the fulfillment side, and more organization and systems.
Varying product weights issues. For example, you might have a beef chuck roast that weighs 2.5 lbs, but another one that weighs 2.7 lbs. This is another thing you have to deal with if you do a la carte. However, if you do packages, it’s less of a problem. You just specify a weight range when listing the product. For example, tell the customer they’ll be getting a “2.4-2.8 lb chuck roast,” but that you’ll make sure the total weight of all the cuts in the package will be at or above, say, 20 lbs, or whatever you’ve decided the package weight will be. This will ensure the customer gets the total weight they paid for but you don’t have to deal with variable weights as much.

So, build bulk package options at first, and only offer like 4-6 of them. You can always expand later into a la carte! But if you’re trying to launch in 5 days, simple is best.

Here’s what to consider when designing your packages:

01.

Use All Cuts

You don’t want to make a bunch of steak packs only to leave ground beef slowly piling up in your freezer. So try and balance your packs to include the actual percentages you have of each cut. Consider how you’re going to get rid of less popular cuts, like oxtail or heart.

02.

Weights

Remember that you selected a box based on what your average package weight was going to be. Try and keep all of your packs within the weight range that will fit your box. (18-25 for a 14″ cube, 25-38 for a 16″).

03.

Your Customers’ Preferences

What do your customers usually buy? How much do they usually buy? Create packages based on what you see them ordering the most.

04.

Bulky, Weird-Shaped Cuts

You’re going to have a hard time fitting 25 lbs of large roasts in a 14″ box. So as well as considering the weight that can fit a box, don’t include too many bulky cuts.

Some Package Design Ideas

Below we’ve listed some package design suggestions. These are just suggestions, though! You know your customer best and what they want! And of course you can make adjustments later if you notice one package doesn’t sell as well as others, or one sells really well.

A Just-Ground Pack

Ground beef (or for you, maybe ground pork or ground lamb), only, in the best weight for your box (14″ cube fits about 22 lbs of ground beef well with extra room for ice, and a 16″ cube fits about 35 lbs, with extra room for ice.

“Whole Animal” Package

Cuts like kidney, liver, and bone-in cuts tend to be less popular, but some of our Keto and Carnivore Diet customers love these. Call it the “Whole Animal Package” or “Nose to Tail Pack” and include some of these variety meats and organs, as well as some regular cuts like roasts, ground, and steaks.

Nice Cuts Package

Include your nice steaks in this pack. It’s going to be more expensive, but some people prefer this option despite the price tag. Some good cuts to put in: ribeyes, New Yorks, filet mignons/tenderloins, sirloins, and flatirons. You could also add a couple pounds of ground.

Assorted Package

This includes lower-end steaks, maybe one or two nice ones, and then assorted other roasts and easy-to-cook bone-in cuts. You could also do an eighth or sixteenth beef instead of this pack or in addition to this pack. Remember though that an 1/8th is going to be hard to fit into one box, and you’ll have to ship it in 2. It can be kind of messy to ship 2 boxes in Shopify–there’s a workaround, but it’s a pain.

So here’s a checklist to go through when you’re ready to build packages:

List all cuts you get out of a whole animal (whether you sell lamb, beef, pork, etc). If you sell some of those cuts elsewhere, don’t add them to the list.
List all the types of packages you want to create (a ground bulk option, for instance, a steak pack, etc.)
List the cuts you want to include in each package
Start moving cuts over from your whole animal into the packages. Remember you can create multiples of each package (so, for example, make three 30 lb ground beef packages and move 90 lbs out of “Whole Animal” and into “Ground Beef Packs”).
Divide up the entire animal into packages. Remember to keep all your packages within the weight range to fit in your shipping box!

If you want the free printout to help you through the above checklist and packaging design but you forgot to subscribe yesterday, you can sign up below here and we’ll send you the Day 2 printout:

Next Step: Pricing

The next thing to do is to price your packages.

Now, we’re assuming in this course that you already have cuts you sell, and you already had pricing on those cuts. But when you’re shipping, you do need to account for your box price and your shipping rates (if you’re offering free shipping).

And that gets to another decision point. You’ve got three ways to deal with these costs:

Charge shipping and a flate rate to pay for your box at checkout
Offer free shipping and don’t charge a box flat rate, and pad the price of the actual product
Don’t charge a box flat rate and pad the price of the product, but do charge for shipping at checkout

Remember that your packaging costs per box were about $13.50 per box (including thermal inserts, the box itself, and a little more for wrap/tape/paper/etc costs). Shipping won’t be too expensive because you’re going to be only shipping UPS ground to areas within 1-2 days of you (for us, a 30 lb box ships for about $19.00 to close areas).

We’d recommend charging a flat rate shipping at checkout of about $15, then padding the packaging and about $4 more in shipping into your product price. A customer doesn’t mind paying $15 in shipping, but any more than that and you have price resistance. This is actually something we run into, especially shipping nationwide, since shipping to the East coast is a little painful for a customer at checkout. You avoid this by shipping ground only to areas near you.

so, time to price your product

Add up the prices of the cuts/weights included in the package to get total price for the package.
Then add about $17.00 on top to cover your packaging costs and some of the shipping.
At checkout, you’ll charge an additional flat rate to cover remaining shipping. We’ll show you how to set that up later!

If down the road you notice your shipping is actually cheaper or more expensive than $19.00, you can adjust pricing accordingly.

Now on to step 2 for today!

Now you know what your products are going to be, you’re ready to move on to actually adding them to your store, finding images, and writing some product descriptions. Linnaea will walk you through this via video and you’ll get to explore the back office of your online store a little more!

Got Questions?

Direct Message us on Instagram here! Either Linnaea or Melanie (another of our daughters) will get back to you!

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