TRANSCRIPT
I’m Jordo from Jordoschopshop.com, we’re an online business selling meat all over Canberra and Queanbeyan. We started as a retail shop and I had the vision to turn it into an online shop eventually. I knew what I wanted to do. I knew that there was a market for it and no-one was doing it and I knew all the butcher shops were being run by old boys and I’m pretty young.
We built a basic website, I did that myself and just used all of the photos from the menu that we made to turn that into a basic website to display all our products so that people could just have a look and see what we are selling and come into the shop. From there, we bought a cart and then developed that into a proper online butcher shop where you can order any meat you want, cut anyway you like, in any quantity rather than just packs which a couple of other butcher shops around the place already do.
I wanted to develop a full butcher shop online rather than just an ad for the butcher shop; I wanted the butcher shop to be online. The customer goes through the online store, they add all the products to their cart and they can put notes in as to how they want everything. We try to take in as much information from the customer as possible so that they are happy with what they get. We don’t keep it closed off and [say] “this is how we do it and that’s the only way”. We try to do it exactly how the customer wants it. We encourage them to give us as much info as they want about their order.
Then, once they go through the checkout, all the information is stored for each customer so all of their previous orders are there, all their info is there so we have set it up so that it’s as quick as possible for the customer to get through checkout and basically they can drop in an order within a couple of minutes after they have done the initial setup.
Once that happens, once the order goes through, we get an email sent to us with the full order. The customer gets the exact same copy. Then, once it’s cut and packed, we send it off in the van.
Well the local customers, seeing how we have had the shop going for a few years now online , more and more local customers have been switching over to the online store because in any retail shop you can only fit about 100 products in the front at the most whereas the online shop has got like 750 products. They have got much more variety online and the whole idea of setting up the online store was to utilise everything that we know because as a butcher you learn so many things and you can only display so many of them at a time in the shop so this lets us do everything that we can do every day and give the customer a massive variety of meats to choose from.
Our preparation time and our waste is minimised, our overheads are minimised we don’t have a heap of fridge motors running out the front all the time. We’re not marking down products, we’re not putting products into cabinets hoping that they are going to sell and they don’t and that kind of stuff. What goes out of this shop has been sold and there is no waste there. Our margins are better and our prices can go down.
As far as promoting those, we use Facebook and Twitter and we use Google AdWords and then we also use The RiotACT in Canberra, which is a local online forum, which pretty much everyone goes to and has a look at. So with that we can advertise specials live, we can move products at the drop of a hat where most people would have to put a little sign out the front of their shop and try to push it. I can say righto we have too many beef ribs, I can do a tweet and Facebook, they are linked together, and all my customers see that straight away, they jump on, they order it and its gone within 10 minutes, [that] kind of thing. I’ve got massive control over my stock and freshness and all that kind of stuff. There is never any waste now.
I haven’t really made too many mistakes with the online store, I don’t think or I don’t know about them yet. It’s been in full swing for probably four years out of the six years but we’ve thought out every single thing that we have done really carefully before we have done anything because whenever you do anything to the online store it means weeks of programming and weeks of reformatting the whole site and how all the products look and stuff like that. So we make sure that it’s going to do what we want it to do and it’s going to work before we do it. We can’t really afford to make many mistakes because we are still not a huge company with a lot of money so we have to make sure it works first time, every time.
The industry is always changing and we’re at the forefront of the online stuff because there is no-one else doing it. There are a few other butcher shops in Australia that have a couple of meat packs or whatever but this is a proper online shop. Everything in any quantity, cut any way you like so we don’t really have anyone to tell us what to do or what the rules are because we are sort of making them.