E-Commerce the Coffee Company Is an Australian-Based

E-Commerce

The Coffee Company is an Australian-based coffee retailer and wholesaler that offer fresh hand roasted coffee, Carlisle teas, confections and related products for brewing and storing coffee and tea (The Coffee Store). The company's owners developed the website for the company because it was inexpensive and the owners felt there was nothing to lose by making the investment (State, 2004). Without knowing it upfront, the coffee company was meeting the underserved needs of Australian consumers for fine coffee and related products throughout the country.

The target customers of the coffee company are people who are unable to visit the store, because they live too far away for instance, and customers that use the website to research the company online and then come into the store (State, 2004). The company has decided to pursue more online customers by adding more content about coffee and tea to its website and using search engine optimization techniques to increase the traffic to the website (State, 2004).

The Coffee Company differentiates itself from the competition by offering hand roasted coffee, which is brewed in small batches allowing more control in the roasting process for the best taste (The Coffee Store). Coffee is also roasted daily, and not warehoused and the company's niche is offering the freshest coffee with the best flavor (The Coffee Store). The Coffee Store caters to the discerning coffee drinker by offering freshly roasted coffee and varieties of tea for both retail and wholesale customers (The Coffee Store).

As of 2004 the Coffee Company employed seven workers in its store, but did not have the online capacity to dedicate an employee to fulfilling online orders full time (State, 2004). The current website offers shipping throughout Australia for coffee, tea and related products with international shipping available (The Coffee Store). The company has 50 different coffees and 100 varieties of tea and the company has been in business since 1969 (The Coffee Store). This shows the experience of the owners at their craft. Although international shipping is available, it doesn't appear that the Coffee Company is pursuing exports and it focuses instead on serving the local Australian market.

In 2001 the Coffee Company launched its website and it has addressed concerns about online security by utilizing a secure payment gateway for online credit card payments (State, 2004). The company has also acknowledged that the use of new technology, like search engine optimization, is valuable to bring in more customers from the internet (State, 2004). The company's web developers, Gee Multimedia, won three awards at the 2010 Australian Web Awards for the design and development of The Coffee Company's website (The Coffee Company). The team won awards in the categories of Online Retail Website (East Coast), Online Retail Website (National) and the big one, the overall Most Outstanding Website (National) (The Coffee Company). Technology is important to the Coffee Company to increase its overall sales.

The investment in the website was relatively small, around 3,600 Australian dollars, and the gains have been huge as the estimated gross benefit from ecommerce was 150,000 Australian dollars in 2003. Those are concrete results of an excellent return on investment.