How to open a tea shop online

If you are passionate about tea, opening a tea shop online may be a great idea. It can help you make money by selling tea and at the same time allow you to enjoy various kinds of tea around the world. As a small tea shop owner, you may begin your tea-selling company with only a computer. It seems easy but making your online tea shop successful is still much challenging. Since four years, we began our oversea door-to-door tea wholesale service, we have gotten to know and cooperate with quite a large number of owners of online tea shops. Some of them now have already had a prosperous business but some of them shut down their tea shops just one or two years after they launched them. Why? Here, we just listed several steps of opening an online tea shop with some pieces of advice for you.

At first, if you have already had a physical tea shop, you can miss a few following steps but we still suggest you should hurry up if you still haven't had a tea shop online. You really shouldn't miss the web to cost-effectively reach your countless potential customers and if you are a novice and know little about tea, you should be cautious. Tea is a niche involving a great deal of expertise and you can't expect to earn a lot in a short time.
 
1. Learn about tea

There are six major types of tea--white, black, oolong, green, dark and yellow tea--and thousands of blends, brews and names within those groups. Tea has significance in various cultures and is touted for health benefits. If you are running a tea shop, you would be expected to be asked questions about tea. You'll need to be knowledgeable about the regions tea comes from, the processing methods for tea, health benefits of tea and importantly how to store different kinds of teas. 

Unlike other businesses you can choose, there is a lot to learn besides just how to open a tea shop. Read about tea books, join groups and go to seminars and presentations to get a good understanding of all. Some free online resources are also highly recommended such as Tea Guardian, Chinese Teas 101, TeaUSA and Vicony Tea Encyclopedia. (More resources can be found here). It would take a lot of time for you to learn. If you would get bored of it, you should consider whether you should give it up as early as possible.

2. Register your business

Register your business with the Internal Revenue Service. Fill out an application providing applicable details about your online tea shop. Once you're registered, an employer identification number, or EIN, is submitted for tax purposes.

3. Build an online presence

Build an online presence. You can sell tea through established websites such as Amazon and eBay but we recommend you create you own website. Choose a decent company to help you build an attracting online tea shop. Each tea in it should have photos, descriptions and prices. Choose a reliable Web-hosting company to host the online tea shop. Its service need to be stable.

4. Purchase tea

Purchase tea by wholesale. Carefully select teas that are proven to be popular, along with rare specialties that can attract individual customers. Try to cover more kinds of teas from China, India, Japan and Sri Lanka. Try to include green, black, white, oolong, Puerh and unique blends.

If you're running a business at home, you may not have a big space to store stock (important: different kinds of teas should be kept in the different ways). You can opt for a drop-shipping arrangement but we don't think it is a good idea because you can't keep your customers information confidential and it is also difficult for you to make your products privately labeled and sometimes easily cause a delay in shipment so it is great to cooperate with the companies that can wholesale bulk tea in small quantities. For example, Vicony Teas Company have a wide range of Chinese teas and you can wholesale from 1KG per kind. 

It is a good idea to use packages with your private labels. During the early stage, we recommend you choose common packages such as blank aluminum foil bags or paper bags pasted with your own labels. It is economical and at the same time can show your identity.

Take the storage requirements of different kinds of teas into consideration when you purchase tea. For example, green tea should be put in cold storage so don't purchase too much if your ice chest have already no space to store it. Black teas can be kept well for more than two years at room temperature only when they are sealed properly so you can make a relatively large purchase if you are satisfied with the batch of it.

Remember the proper time to purchase different teas. For example, you can start purchasing the best Chinese green teas of the current year such as Dragon Well or Biluochun in April while you need to wait and buy such as Jasmine tea and Wuyi Rock Oolong of the current year until Mid-September.

5. Promote your online tea shop.

Promote your tea shop in various ways such as social networking, creating a tea blog, tweeting daily tea-related posts and creating a Facebook page for your tea shop. Signing up through an affiliate network to create online ads for your tea store is also recommended. Consult with a SEO & SEM specialist to make out a promotion plan and you can also find several books to learn SEO & SEM knowledge and apply them to your online tea shop.

Five Common Misconceptions about Chinese Tea Purchasing

The first flush tea of 2012 will come to the market soon in early April. More and more people will begin to source the teas to replenish the stock. Here, we listed five common misconceptions we concluded when people buying Chinese teas in recent years. Read them, you may become more experienced and better prepared in tea purchasing in 2012.

Misconception #1 Expensive teas are definitely better than the cheaper ones.

Here, we don't just mean it for the teas sold by different vendors because it is obvious that it is not so under the circumstances. Even it is not right when we study the relations of the prices and the quality of the teas dealt with by the same vendor. As a commodity, tea price is mainly decided by the supply-demand relations. That is to say, in fact, people's preference which is sometimes irrational has great influence to tea prices.

For example, Dragon Well and Biluochun are almost the most expensive green teas in China. Do you know why they are so expensive?  Of course, they are wonderful indeed, but is it the only reason for the high price? No, another main reason is that they are produced in Suzhou and Hangzhou, the two wealthiest places in China dubbed as paradise by Chinese intellectuals and poets. That is why Dragon Well and Biluochun are easily known and become so popular. Some others kinds of teas such as Huoshan Huangya, Dinggu Da Fang, Huangshan Mao Feng are also wonderful in quality, however, they are not so fortunate as Dragon Well and Biluochun because they are produced in the remote areas and are difficult to be transported to towns and cities especially in ancient times. Therefore, if you want to buy Chinese teas, don't just focus on Dragon Well and Biluochun, some other teas good in quality but low in price are also good options. As a matter of fact, China is so big and there are so many famous teas.

Another example, nowadays, Chinese crave for the Mingqian tea (tea harvested before Qingming around 5th April), driving the price of the Mingqian tea such as Mingqian Dragon Well Tea to the sky high. Is the Mingqian Dragon Well Tea really so good? Is it worthwhile? Not necessarily. Tea quality is determined by many factors such as the tea cultivar, growing area, and harvest time and production method. Harvest time is only one of the factors. Now a great deal of Mingqian Dragon Well Tea we found in the market was made of tealeaves from one tea cultivar named as Wuniuzao. The Dragon Well Tea made from Wuniuzao cultivar is much worse in taste and flavor compared with the ones from the traditional cultivar Longjing Qunti while Cultivar Wuniuzao is more than 10 days earlier than the Qunti cultivar in tea buds sprouting, and more and more tea farmers join in growing Wuniuzao so that they can produce more Mingqian tea and earn more money. During recent years, the Wuniuzao Dragon Well Tea is growing fast in quantity year by year.

Misconception #2 Teas harvested earlier such as Mingqian tea is definitely better than those harvested later

Not necessarily, you can see it from what we’ve talked above in Misconception #1. In fact tea cultivar plays a bigger role in tea quality than the harvest time. And here is another example. You know the temperature becomes lower when the altitude increases in the same area and we all know teas growing at high mountains are much better than those at the lower altitude of the same area, however, they are much later in sprouting, sometimes later more than 15 to 20 days. And we find teas made of leaves harvested from high mountains of 1000 meters above the sea level around Mid April are always better than Mingqian tea at the foot of the mountain.

Misconception #3 I can buy the authentic famous teas so long as I go to the producing areas of its origin.

Every year, when tea farmers start harvesting and producing teas, huge crowds pour into the producing area, especially in Mejiawu, Hangzhou, the core producing area of Dragon Well and Dongshan, Xishan, the two core producing area of Biluochun. Can they really get the authentic Dragon Well or Biluochun by doing so? Not necessarily.

Thanks to the celebrity status of Dragon Well and Biluochun, the local Chaqing (plucked fresh tealeaves but not processed) is several times higher in price than those in other areas, and the local Chaqing which is quite limited can't meet the high demand. The huge profit drives people to find lucrative ways. More than 20 years ago, Chaqing from the Huangshan, Anhui province and Wuyuan, Jiangxi province were brought to Hangzhou for production. Both areas are close to Hangzhou and have a great deal of quality Chaqing. However, in recent years, to meet the high demand of Mingqian Dragon Well and Biluochun, Chaqing from Sichuan and Guizhou are brought by air to Hangzhou. By dong so, it can not only solve the shortage of the local Chaqing but also produce much more Mingqian tea because the tea trees sprout almost one month earlier than the ones in Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

Misconception #4 Pay too much attention to the grade of the tea.

The grading of tea is much sophisticated and confusing. For example, there are commonly six grades of Dragon Well tea but some tea manufactures have their own unique grading system and there are always the grade emerging that you may have never heard of in the market such as Supreme, Special AAA, and Jipin. You will be confused by the grades even as a professional. We suggest you care about it but don't pay too much attention to it. The best way is to make a sample comparison between teas of similar prices without caring too much about the grades.

Misconception #5 Green tea should be green in color and the greener the better

Totally false, nowadays, more and more people even young Chinese assume dried green tea should be green in color and the tea in yellowish color is not the tea of the current year. To take people's fancy, more and more tea makers make the tea light roasted, resulting in greener tea with bad taste. In fact, authentic Dragon Well tea made in the traditional ways is yellowish in color instead of green, the same as Huangshan Maofeng.