Shipping Supplies 2

Question. Who loves cupcakes?! Answer. Pretty much everybody on the planet, and if you don’t you’re either a robot or have never had one. I mean who couldn’t love cupcakes? They are literally a cake that you can hold in your hand. Not to mention they’re delicious and come in every flavor and variety you can possibly think of. They even have a TV show dedicated to them, and I can’t think of too many foods that can make that claim. The best part about cupcakes though is where they’re made. Bakeries. (Well, at least the best ones are.) And our cupcakes are no exception. They’ll pretty much blow your mind. But, one thing that we’ve had trouble with recently is the whole 2020 COVID pandemic. Unfortunately we had to close our doors to our walk in guests and move strictly online for an extended period of time. (Thankfully we can now serve pre order and pickup guests) And for a bakery that specializes in cupcakes, that’s been a challenge to say the least. Because we lost a lot of our upsells. Like coffee and other non baked food items.  

We did however stay in business and that was mostly due in part to our ability to ship our cupcakes to our regular customers. That however was also not without its challenges. First we had to figure out our online ordering system. Before it was more catered to those who wanted to make appointments for tastings or those who had giant orders that we needed time in advance to fill. But, after we got the kinks worked out, we had a good flow of steady customers, some of whom were ordering daily. 

That brought another challenge. Shipping our cupcakes and other baked goods. We never really had to think much about it before, but after a few of our orders not reaching our customers in the same way they left our shop, we had to reevaluate the shipping supplies we were using. And our thin cardboard boxes that we use for normal pickups, did not do the trick. Instead we had to invest in heavy duty boxes that we placed our more flimsy (yet cute) boxes inside of. This took care of the baked goods getting damaged in transit, but it upped our shopping costs. So, that leads to even another problem, how do we handle the shipping charges? Especially when the shipping outweighed the cost of some of the orders. So, what we decided to do was take the hit, initially. We then started a campaign to incentivize our customers to have higher cart sizes and that way we could throw in a shipping charge that made sense for covering our costs and customers didn’t feel as though they were getting cheated. (I mean who really wants to spend more on getting the cupcake to you than what you spend on that actual cupcake?) And thanks to our loyal customer base, we were able to not only stay afloat during the pandemic, but we actually grew in our profit margins. So all in all, we can say win-win. 

However, there is one more slight problem. Now that we have been able to open our doors back up and our customers have come back in waves, our shipping orders have gone down dramatically. Which, actually is a plus for us, but now we have a ton of extra shipping supplies sitting in the back that we have no idea what to use. But, I suppose that’s not such a bad problem to have after all.