In today's guest post, digital nomad and serial entrepreneur Christian Häfner shares how he uses Billbee for his brand, Happy Coffee, and which features he values most. By the way: The Happy Coffee subscription is also used here in the Billbee office and regularly keeps our fully automatic machine running ;-)
Happy Coffee stands for organic, fairly traded coffee and was founded by me—Christian Häfner—and my wife, Heidi. In this guest post, we want to show how we managed to largely automate recurring tasks in our daily online shop operations using Billbee and why that is so important.
Many founders say they need funding to start their business. In reality, however, it is time that they are trying to buy. To avoid wasting this time, it is crucial for a small business to automate or outsource as many tasks as possible that do not directly contribute to the company's growth but are still part of the value chain. For an e-commerce mail-order business like Happy Coffee, these include tasks such as roasting (production), shipping, inventory planning, and invoicing. We now ship between 1,000 and 1,500 packages per month. If we were to pack and ship each of these packages ourselves and create an invoice by hand for each one, that alone would likely be a full-time job. Instead, we have outsourced all these tasks to partners or automated them with Billbee, allowing us to focus entirely on building our brand and our marketing channels.
Happy Coffee is currently available exclusively from us. We have no intermediaries. Customers can currently choose between our Shopify shop, Amazon, and eBay. After trying out and comparing various online shop software tools, we ultimately decided on the Canadian Shopify platform. Shopify is affordable to start with and very flexible thanks to a multitude of apps. Our revenue through Shopify is now greater than that through Amazon, making our own shop our most important channel. But no matter where the customer orders, the package is always delivered the same way. Every coffee is shipped from the same warehouse and now also via a single shipping service provider (DHL). We have also outsourced inventory management and fulfillment to a partner. The idea behind this is to deliver our coffee to our customers as fresh as possible and to ensure a consistent sales experience. No one should be disadvantaged just because they bought the coffee elsewhere. Our coffee is a fresh product that tastes best between about one week and three months after roasting. To make this clear to our customers, we print the roasting date on the packaging in addition to the best-before date. Every coffee generally reaches our customers within 10–15 days of roasting. This allows us to deliver the fresh experience of a roastery directly to their homes. Billbee makes this possible as well.
For our shop, Happy Coffee, we use Billbee to have a central hub for all our orders and to automate most of the recurring tasks in our daily online shop operations. These include:
Customers who make a purchase from us automatically have an invoice generated and emailed to them as soon as the status is set to "Shipped." This process takes place in two steps:
The layout can be customized in just a few steps to generate a professional-looking invoice. The shipping rule is divided into two steps: first, the invoice is created, and then it is sent:
We have set up a special feature for Amazon. To ensure that invoices are sent to Amazon customers, the invoice subject line must contain [WICHTIG]. Therefore, we have created an individual rule for Amazon orders with a modified shipping template that takes this into account.
For us, this is one of the most important features in Billbee, as it allows us to maintain a central inventory across all sales channels. With inventory planning, we have the ability to link identical products across different shops and platforms. For example, a 1kg pack of our Chiapas Espresso can be purchased via eBay, Amazon, or our own shop as a single product or as a subscription product . Each of these is set up as a separate product in its respective shop. However, they can be linked via the product management system so that Billbee recognizes they are all the same item. The result: We have a central inventory planning system that maintains the stock level per product and displays it as "Actual Stock":
In addition, we have defined a "Minimum Stock" level for each product, which alerts us as soon as the stock falls below a certain threshold (the row turns red + we receive an email). For us, this is the signal to fire up the roaster again! As a reminder: Our goal is to get our coffee to our customers as fresh as possible. We roast almost daily and always in very small batches. Billbee helps us immensely with this feature! This is how we ensure that our coffee usually reaches the customer fresh within just a few days of roasting. The feedback from our customers reflects this.
As described above, we use a fulfillment service provider as a partner that packs the correct coffees from our orders every day. Since all orders are in Billbee, it only makes sense to generate the shipping labels here as well. The fulfillment provider has been given access with appropriate permissions via the "Employees" section. Our shipping methods (e.g., standard shipping, international shipping, express shipping, etc.) were also set up once in the settings, along with our DHL contract details, including the EKP and participant number, the correct tracking URL, and address information. To create the shipping labels, an employee filters the order overview at least once a day for the status "paid and not yet shipped" and selects the orders using the bulk function. The labels can then be created and printed for the selected orders with just a few clicks:
The order status changes, which triggers two further actions in our case:
We have been using Billbee for several years now and are glad that so many things can be handled in the background and automated. For us, this means free time that we can invest, for example, in our Happy Coffee online magazine—an important sales channel. Billbee's pricing model, in particular, makes it very attractive to use. You can view the complete pricing model here.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
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