á la karte shops

À La Karte Shop supports small food businesses by creating a platform to sell and showcase their products to the community. Vendors will have their own personal digital storefront to manage orders and shipping and their products will be featured and promoted in the Black Restaurant Week and Latin Restaurant Week digital network.

Selling products on marketplaces can be hugely beneficial for brands and online-sellers. Setting up an account is easy and you get instant (theoretical) access to vast numbers of potential customers.

There are two key features that define an online marketplace

• An online store where there are many sellers and buyers trading through one website with cross-sells between Brands helping one another.
• Buyers are able to purchase products directly with multiple brands without leaving the website.

You get instant access to thousands and potentially millions of customers

Once you start selling your products on a marketplace you will automatically have access to all its customers — without having to spend additional money on marketing.

You benefit from the reach of the marketplace

No one might know your brand or your products but in a marketplace setting, you can be discovered. You don’t need to convince people to come to your actual website.

You gain an instant level of trust

By selling on the À La Karte Shop website you benefit from the Black Restaurant Week and all its marketing and partnerships. People trust the quality of the Black Restaurant Week brand, so they will automatically also trust you.

It can be a testing ground

Do you want to know just what people are willing to spend on a specific product? Or do you have a product surplus or want to introduce a brand new item? Why not use a marketplace instead of your own webshop.

You don’t need a separate website if you do not wish one.

By selling on a marketplace you can sample the role of e-commerce without being forced to make advance investments into the set-up, design and marketing of your own website.

Starting is pretty simple and quick

The marketplace will take care of much of the hassle of selling online for you: design, hosting, processing of orders, financial transaction fees — you save a lot of time and money. These days there are even experts on Fiverr who will complete the entire set-up for you if you find that you are time-poor.

It can be an additional marketing channel 

When you already have a strong brand or you just want to get your name out a little more, marketplaces are the perfect place to get people interested in your products and your brand.

You can gain access to new audiences

Thanks to the reach and impressions of marketplaces, you will find a lot of different types of people browsing them. So you can break out of your niche and sell to people who might otherwise never have known you

Set up is easy, and it’s FREE until you make a sale. Design Note: Make this standout, it can be designed as a ribbon or something to pop out.

When you register to sell with À La Karte Shop you will have a login into your very own store. Below provides a brief overview of the process. 

• Create your own store on À La Karte Shop.

• Customers order products through the À La Karte Shop website and pay using Square, PayPal or Afterpay.  

• The order creates a new order email which automatically arrives at your email, informing you that you have an order.

• You prepare and dispatch the order to the customer within 24 hours – 48 hours.

• You change the order status to completed and an email automatically generates to the customer to advise them that their gift is on the way. 

• Your customer receives your items.

• Monthly, we pay you the customer’s order less our % handling fee. 

Our  “we sell, you ship” model means that you can edit and have control over your store, content, selling prices and stock at the touch of your fingertips. The À La Karte Shop provides your business with the following features:

• Your very own ecommerce store which enables you to set up your own products for sale
• Controls to manage staff access
• Review full reporting and analytics such as the visitor numbers to your store
• Set a Vacation Mode so that you can go on vacation knowing that customers are fully informed while you are away. 

À La Karte Shop requests in return that you 

• Receive our order via email, seconds after the customer places the order on the À La Karte Shop website.

• Dispatch the product to our customer within 24-48 hours.

Inform us of the tracking number and change your order status to completed.

If you decide to register to sell with us today, you will never pay a monthly fee and you are not locked into a contract.

If you apply and set up a store on the À La Karte Shop, we will charge you NOTHING, that’s right absolutely nothing to host a store within us.

Why do we charge a commission fee?

If you make a sale, we will retain a 10% of a sale price. From this percentage we will cover the payment gateway merchant fees. Also with these funds we cover:

• The first time shopper discount of $10 off a Min $100 sale
• Return customer discount of 5% with a coupon code which is shared after a purchase has been made.
• Marketing via Instagram, Facebook, Google Ads, Email Marketing, Press mentions, and more.
• Customer Service, Website Development, Graphic Design, Public Relations staff. We also pay for dedicated servers, paid subscriptions

By retaining a commission fee, we can effectively operate À La Karte Shop.

À La Karte Shop is a culinary marketplace. We are seeking to feature products from restaurants, chefs, and small food businesses. We would like to feature the following culinary products:

• Sauces
• Spices
• Baking Mixes
• Cookbooks
• Frozen Foods
• Produce
• Packaged Goods
• Culinary Tools 
• Personalized culinary gifts that you have sourced or designed yourself

Marketing isn’t an option, it’s an investment. For this reason, you will find that Black Restaurant Week invests in marketing our initiatives through Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, You-tube, Google Ads, targeted online and email re-marketing and business collaborations with other partnerships such as Latin Restaurant Weeks.  

With the Black Restaurant Week and Latin Restaurant Week digital network we provide many marketing opportunities for our vendors that they might not be able to do on their own.  

Press Coverage

Black Restaurant Week and Latin Restaurant Week will showcase products to influencers, journalists and food bloggers.  

Sales Strategies

Sale promotions are a great way for organisations to encourage potential customers to buy your product. Done well, they boost short-term sales while also attracting new customers, prompt positive online reviews, and lead to repeat purchases.Little Kids Business has a few Sales strategies

We offer a 5% discount to brand new customers who sign up to our newsletter via our website. Visitors are emailed a unique code which has a minimum $50 spend attached. This is to encourage visitors who are just short, to purchase multiple products on the website so that they can save money. This 5% comes out of the À La Karte Shop Commission Fee. 

We also offer a repeat customer discount, this is included in their paperwork when they make a purchase. This 5% discount is a little thank you and a way to entice them to shop again.This 5% comes out of the À La Karte Shop Commission Fee.  

As a vendor, you can set up your very own Coupon code and offer a sale. If you do this, be sure to let us know so that we can promote it for you. 

On top of these standard discounts. À La Karte Shop also offers the promotions below:

• Flash Sales
• Coupon Discounts
• Birthday Celebrations 
• Featured Sellers 
• Black Friday – Cyber Monday  

There are also paid for Marketing Opportunities which we will share throughout the year.

Competitions 

Running competitions enables you to engage contacts within your database in a way that no other online marketing does. 

When a competition is drawn, we will email those who entered a special deal to purchase the gift or gifts’ within the competition, after all, they entered to win this gift so clearly would like it.

As 80% of online customers’ buying decision is solely based on their photos it is incredibly important that we showcase professional and clear photos, taken in a good light.

Your photos dictate your product’s perceived value and drive brand loyalty and trust.

À La Karte Shop showcases two types of photos.

• Product photos with white backgrounds
• Lifestyle photos, showing the product in use

À La Karte Shop requests your images have one consistent filter applied and your design style stays the same across all platforms. Our mission is to clearly position ourselves as the destination for unique, high quality, innovative and culinary products. 

À La Karte Shop provides our audience Customer Service as needed. We can handle general enquiries however there are times when we touch base with our vendors for further clarification.

At À La Karte Shop, we have the philosophy that a thankful approach is the best way to converse with customers.

You can assist us to reduce the customer service issues by dispatching your orders on time and advising customers of your tracking information in the designated space for tracking numbers.

Reasons we may terminate your shop 

Thank you for understanding that dispatch within 48 hours is important to us (unless a personalized gift). For this reason, the following applies.

• If you sell illegal goods.
• If À La Karte Shop is required to follow up five late orders within the same month, we will automatically place your store on Holiday mode until the first of the following month.
• If we are required to do this three times within a year, unfortunately we will have to terminate your shop as we do not want to create a bad experience for our customers. 
• Due to GDPR Email rules, an immediate Closure of your store will apply if a customer reports you are adding their email address to your own database without their Opt-In on your website. 

Thank you for understanding that negative reviews affect us all.