Dear roaster,
Every morning, some of your best customers stand at a counter you don’t own and drink your coffee. Then they go to the supermarket and buy someone else’s beans for home. The cafe built the habit. You roasted the coffee. Neither of you sells them the bag.
Other trades solved this a while ago. Independent bookstores have Bookshop.org and Libro.fm: a reader picks their store, the platform handles the sale, and the store is paid a share. Vet clinics have Vetsource: a store under the clinic’s own name that sends refills to the client’s door. As far as I can find, cafes have nothing like it, and they see their regulars more often than any bookstore does.
So I’m building Standing Order, and I’d like to build it with one roaster first. Here is how it would work.
A page for every cafe. Each of your wholesale cafes gets its own subscription page under your brand, listing the coffees that cafe pours, with a QR card for the register.
The bag rides your van. A regular subscribes to a 12 oz bag every two weeks; it goes out with that cafe’s usual wholesale delivery, labelled with their name, and they collect it with their morning coffee. Home shipping is an option, paid by the subscriber.
Everyone is paid without a spreadsheet. Subscribers pay your retail price on your own Stripe account; you get a pickup list before every delivery run, and each cafe gets a monthly statement of the share it earned.
Illustration only. Wren & Kettle Roasters and Alder Street Cafe are made up; the coffees and prices are examples.
One bag, worked out
A $19 bag picked up at the counter, with the cafe’s share set at 15%:
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Subscriber pays | $19.00 |
| Cafe’s share (15%) | |
| Standing Order (8%) | −$1.52 |
| Card processing (about 2.9% + 30¢) | −$0.85 |
| You keep, before coffee and roasting | about $13.78 |
No postage: the bag rides a delivery you were already making. At a 20% share you keep about $12.83. You set the share: 10%, 15%, 20%, or none. These figures are arithmetic on an example price, not results from a live roaster.
The share is paid for the life of each subscription, so the card at the register keeps earning. Pickup brings the regular in twice a month. And there is no stock to buy and nothing to go stale: every bag is roasted for a named person.
It’s direct-to-consumer volume you don’t have to ship, at about what you earn on a wholesale bag or better. And it gives every cafe one more reason to keep pouring your coffee, because its subscription income comes from your beans.
The pilot
90 days No platform fee. 8% of subscription revenue processed. After the pilot: $99 a month + 8%. Cafes never pay. Subscribers pay your retail price.
If it isn’t working after 90 days, we stop, and you keep your subscribers and their details.
What the pilot includes
- A subscription page for each participating cafe, built from your catalog
- Checkout on your own Stripe account, under your name
- Skip, pause, swap and cancel for subscribers, without emailing you
- A pickup list and name labels before every delivery run
- QR counter cards for each cafe, printed and sent to you for your driver
- A monthly statement for each cafe of the share it earned (during the pilot you credit it on the cafe’s next wholesale invoice)
- Me, by email, for the whole 90 days
I’m looking for one roaster to build this with first: 20 to 60 wholesale cafes, an online store on Shopify or WooCommerce, and a van or a rep that visits your accounts most weeks. If that’s you, or close, the reply card below takes about two minutes.
The question that matters most is whether you’d share subscription revenue with your cafes at all. Please answer it honestly. A “no” helps me as much as a “yes”.
Thanks for reading,
Alek, building Standing Order
P.S. Applying costs nothing and commits you to nothing. I read every reply myself and answer within two business days.
Notes in the margin
- Do my cafes need Square, Toast or anything else?
No. The cafe page and the QR card work for any cafe. If a cafe uses Square Loyalty, it will be able to see which of its regulars have subscribed, once each subscriber has agreed to that.
- Who is the seller?
You are. Subscribers pay on your own Stripe account, at your prices, under your name. You handle sales tax where it applies, as you do for your web store. Standing Order is the software and takes its 8% as a fee on each payment.
- Does this replace my Shopify or WooCommerce subscriptions?
No. It’s a separate tier for cafe pickup. Standing Order reads your catalog so each cafe page stays current; it doesn’t change your store or add orders to it.
- What if a regular doesn’t collect their bag?
They get a reminder. A bag still uncollected after 14 days goes to the cafe, and the next one is skipped automatically. Subscribers can switch to home shipping at any time.
- How do cafes get paid?
Each month you get a statement for each cafe. During the pilot you credit the share on the cafe’s next wholesale invoice. Automatic payouts to cafes come after the pilot.
- What if a cafe stops buying from me?
The subscriptions are sold on your account, so they stay yours. The cafe’s share stops when it stops pouring your coffee, and its subscribers can pick another of your cafes or home shipping.
- Who owns the customer list?
You do. Subscriber details sit in your own Stripe account and you can export them at any time. Each cafe sees the people who subscribed through it.
- Is this live?
Not yet. I’m building it with the first pilot roaster, which is why this is an application and not a sign-up.
Reply card
Apply for the 90-day pilot. About two minutes. Nothing is charged, and nothing is built for you until we’ve talked.
Reply received.
Thank you. I’ll read it myself and email you within two business days, usually with a couple of questions about your delivery route and your cafes. Nothing has been charged, and you haven’t committed to anything.
Alek