Surely the question of needing to build or design a website for a coffee shop is something Café owners are asking themselves more and more.
These days, the question is probably being asked as coffee business owners look to sell coffee online, but in truth there's other reasons to need a coffee website, even if you don't actually sell / ship the coffee online.
Yes, as a Café owner you do need a website. Not only to (potentially) sell coffee online but to help drive actual foot traffic to your Café / Coffee Shop.
This article will discuss why a coffee website can help and is in fact quite essential to a promoting a coffee business.
Promoting the Coffee Shop
The first benefit of having a website for your coffee shop is it helps establish your brand and communicates some degree of credibility.
Consumers have been conditioned to assume that successful and legitimate businesses will *of course* have their own website, simply because just about everybody does. Being an outlier in this respect casts doubt on the authority and reliability of your business.
A website also allows you to communicate something about your coffee shop and coffee "brand" to potential consumers before they set foot in the Café. It answers the following questions:
1. What kind of ambiance does your Café provide?
2. What kind of Coffee does your place serve?
3. What kind of customers does your Café attract?
Finally, there's also the more practical information a website will allow you to get across. Most obviously it allows you to showcase your full menu, pricing, and any directions and contact information consumers might find helpful. Do you offer Vegan alternatives to sweets? Is there something special and unique about your Café offerings? The website allwos you to get across all this information in front of a captive audience who came to the website specifically to get all those questions answered.
Attracting Local Clientele
A huge benefit of a website is it also clearly communicates to customers where they can find you. Proximity and convenience, while not the only deciding factor, obviously have a huge impact on the choices people make before going to a coffee shop.
Much of that research happens online. In face according to a 2017 Google Study:
Over the last two years, searches for local places without the qualifier "near me" have grown 150%, faster than comparable searches that do not include "near me."
So consumers looking to find a local business by whipping out their phones is obviously the new normal, and as social distancing restrictions loosen we have every reason to believe that mindset will return.
A properly built and optimized website will call out your coffee shop's physical location (and even nearby attractions) to make it crystal clear how customers can find you.
As an adjunct to your website, you'll likely want to setup a Google My Business (GMB) profile. Note: a GMB profile is not a replacement for a website nor is a website a replacement for a GMB profile. The two elements work hand in hand to ensure your coffee shop appears for online searches from customers in your area.
Selling Coffee Online
Another benefit of having an online presence for your coffee shop is the ability to leverage your website to sell coffee you roast or retail online.
Even if you're not currently in the business and shipping and selling coffee through an online channel, the advantage of building a coffee website now is that as you establish a loyal set of customers for your Café and familiarize them with your website you begin to build a base of customers who know where to turn to when you are ready to sell coffee online.
The website over time establishes a foothold, not only in customers minds but in the indexes of search engines who begin to understand that people looking for coffee where you operate your business should be aware of your coffee shop.
If and when the time comes to expand and sell coffee directly to people outside of just your coffee shop, the brand and website will already be top of mind and ready to leverage as a new sales channel.
