I'm actually going to cover those 10 reasons as why you should be selling your food products online. And these 10 reasons may be quite surprising. But one thing that's really not surprising is the fact that Amazon Walmart and numerous platforms have reported record online sales of food products in general, since the second quarter of this year. And I'll show you some statistics right there. Amazon has skyrocketed their online business.
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As far as food sales are concerned, and it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon, there are tons of consumers that are now buying even more food products, but they got a couple of clicks of the button and having it delivered to their doorsteps. And you need to hop on that and I'm going to give you those 10 reasons right now. So number one, your online store, which is one of the most amazing things about being online is open 24 hours a day.
Our business, which is completely online, all seven seven of our stores now sell products while we are sleeping. So every day that we get up, we have a bunch of new products and new orders to be fulfilling. And those are orders that can come in while we are asleep. Now, just think about that for a moment, you spend a lot of time trying to get into a retail store. And while you're doing that, it takes a lot of time for you to get your product into the stores and potentially not even get them in there. You have to go through a corporate buyer or maybe even a food broker. You're allowing someone else to make decisions about you selling a product that you've worked really hard on and created, but you are kind of on a waiting list to get in their stores. Okay? But being online, you have the ability to be up 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
That's number one, number two, you get to set your shipping preferences. This is actually a fantastic thing. What does that mean? Well, that means that if you are a person who actually makes the product to order, or if you're a person who actually makes your product in small batches, you can designate the time of the week when you can actually ship your product out. Why is that important? Well, that actually could free up your schedule because maybe you don't want to be in the kitchen, producing a product all the time. So when you create a listing, you can actually designate a certain time of the week or certain days of shipping. And that is a huge plus, because if you don't want to be in the kitchen constantly and creating your food product, that frees up your schedule to do anything that you want and you call the shots.
Now, number three, you get to control how much you actually sell. So this is really interesting because if you create small batches of a certain product, a lot of times stores, if you're getting into retail stores, they're going to a certain amount of the product. If you only make so much, or you want to only sell so much, you can control how much you actually sell. Number four, you actually get to control when you sell it as well. What does that mean? Well, here's the thing with retail. If you're looking to get into retail from the experience that I had getting into retail stores, when we first started, I got excited about it, but then I learned the power of being online. When you get into those stores, a lot of times buyers will ask for a certain amount, up to a certain point, and they are the ones controlling the amount of inventory.
And when you could sell to them, as well as how much to sell to them. And that limited us as far as our income, because only so many physical stores would carry so much product. So online, you could literally be in front of millions of people and selling however much you want. And when do you want to sell it? Because again, you are in control of creating that listing, fulfilling the orders, promoting it on social media, everything else on the, on the back end of it. So that gives you the opportunity to sell. When you want, you don't have to get a thumbs up or a thumbs down from a buyer or a grocery store manager or anyone in the retail realm to try to bring in more product. And when you can sell it, the number five, you get to go on vacation anytime you want.
Yes. This is actually a question that I have. You had recently got from a subscriber who asked about the vacation period. Like, if are you able to stop your store or pause it? That's one of the most amazing things about being online. We are on Amazon, eBay and Etsy, and they all have a feature that allows you to literally pause your store and allow you to go and do whatever it is that you want it to do and reopen it when you want to reopen it. That is an amazing thing. Why is that so amazing Damien? Well, let me give you a scenario. If a retail store buyer says, you know what, I need to have an X amount of products in our stores. I need you to get into full production again and making more product. So in that timeframe, you're actually trying to fulfill an order that a retail store or a buyers asking you to do, unless you have a co-packer or a private label company producing for you, that's totally different.
But the beautiful thing is, is that at any point in time, when you wanted to schedule it out, it will allow you to pause your store online and not have to fulfill any orders until you come back. Now, just imagine that retail buyer or their corporate buyer, or a food broker, somebody asking for a certain amount of product, and you have plans to, obviously you have a life that you want to live outside of your work and your business that may conflict with it, causing you to put a situation where you're not going to be able to go and do what you want to do. When you want to do it. Being online allows you to pretty much press a single button and pause your store while you do what you have to do. That's another great thing. So number six, millions of millions of customers are at the, your fingertips of these platforms.
These platforms already have a built-in amount of customers. Obviously Amazon, Walmart, even eBay and Etsy, by the way, you can even sell on Walmart. If you didn't know that you could sell your product on their platform. The great thing is, is that you already have millions of customers that are on those platforms looking for food products. So if you happen to be selling the barbecue sauce, believe it or not, there are millions of people who go on to eBay, go on to Amazon, shop on walmart.com, looking for barbecue, sauces you another, another example you sell at a retail store, that store they're going to say, we love your product and that's great. Can you give us about two or three cases worth that product's going to go on a shelf and it's going to rely on foot traffic coming to that actual store. And when those customers come into the physical store, that location, they're going to be looking for barbecue sauces.
And that shelf is going to be full of all kinds of brands and different name brands of different barbecue sauces that customer may or may not actually end up buying your product, but you're limited to that actual store's location and the amount of traffic it gets. So if it's not a very busy store, the odds of you selling that barbecue sauce are going to be a lot less than they are. If they're on Amazon in front of hundreds of millions of potential customers, that's another great thing. So number seven, these platforms also have built in features such as, uh, the ability for you to check out that you could attach your store to PayPal or Stripe or different payment services you could promote. They have promotional, um, features within these platforms. Everything you would need to succeed are already built online and almost every single one of these platforms.
You have the ability to grow that business without having to have seven or 800 people or hundreds of people behind the scenes, trying to promote a, try to market it and trying to do this and do that. You can do much of it on your own. That is extremely powerful. Number eight, even within these platforms, you can literally run ads yourself. It gives you the ability to do promotional ads within Amazon, on eBay and on Etsy. So you can tap into those existing customers that are already coming to those platforms. This is a very powerful way to get eyes on your product within those platforms itself, without having to run Facebook ads or Google ads or anything of that sort, all of these platforms have the ability while you're online to promote to their customers who are already coming to their websites. It's a no brainer.
Number nine, when it comes to branding and the look of your, of the feel of your store, the look of your product, and look of every aspect of your new food product, business, being online gives you a tremendous amount of control as well over how it looks, how you want to relay your fruit product to your consumer and your customers. Amazon has a great feature that you can actually, when you're brand registered, there's an actual way that you can add a ton of photos. You can add additional information. You can even add video now on there as well, and that encourages people to even buy more. So those are another feature that allows you to expand your reach with your brand. And you have, again, a lot of control over that. Number 10, the high percentage of success online nowadays for selling food is much, much better than it is for you to actually get a food product in a retail store.
What does that mean to him? Well, let me explain that to you. The reason why I say this is that you're going to be in front of millions of customers. As I mentioned in the earlier part of the video, that's going to be a huge benefit. Whenever you come down to try to sell a multitude of products or try to sell it to the masses, you're going to have an opportunity to be in front of millions of people. The scenario goes all the way back to comparing the retail to online retail stores are reliant upon every single customer who walks in the door. So it's just because you may be in 50 or 60, a Kroger's or maybe 50 or 60 public stores. And it doesn't mean that you're going to get millions of people looking at your product or the potential of having millions of people looking at it.
So the probability of success of your food business is much higher. And I can only attest this from my own experience for 12 years, we've been online. We've had a great amount of success. Did it start off that way? No, it took time to build it. I'm not going to lie, but now being in front of millions and millions of customers, we have control over the product. We have control over the brand. We can reach more people on social media. We control everything on our end of it. So having less people between you and your actual customer, the better off you are, and not having to go through a buyer, having to go through a corporate buyer or a food broker or a store manager who brings in product at a retail location. There's so many benefits to being online and it's only going to increase over the next five to 10 years and so on.
There's going to be even more food. Now that's being purchased online and being delivered to people's stores. So these are the 10 most important things that I have learned over the 12 years of being online. That e-commerce is the way to go. As long as you understand how it works and change the idea, change your mindset about being in retail stores or being online. There are much more of a probability for success by being online and getting to know your store on Walmart, on Amazon and eBay Etsy. These platforms can bring you customers very quick and very fast, but there's definitely a better route to go in my opinion than it is to try to get your product into a food retail store. So would that be a that I'll wrap up the video. If you have questions about getting online or anything of that sort, please do let me know down below. Thanks for watching marketing food online. And if you are looking to create your own food truck, start a home-based food business under the cottage food law franchise, a food operation start a packaged food business, private label, your own food product, sell on Amazon, get your own online store or sell food online. Remember to subscribe and check out these videos for more resources, take care.
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