STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 55 Your trusted partner for: Enjoy the advantages of using an all-in-one supplier with a selection of more than 300 high quality orthodox and blended tea varieties and a wide range of exclusive and innovative accessories. Dethlefsen & Balk Inc. 525 W Monroe St. Suite #2360 Chicago, IL 60661 USA Phone: +1(312)-628-8917 info@dethlefsen-balk.us www.dethlefsen-balk.us Check out our NEW CATALOG 2021/2022 Accessories Tea INTERNATIONAL NORTH AMERICA Dethlefsen & Balk GmbH Hermann-Wüsthof-Ring 16 21035 Hamburg Germany Phone: ++49(0)40-731073-0 office@db-hh.de www.dethlefsen-balk.de Tea | Coffee Confiserie | Accessories Tea | Accessories Fine Taste since 1836 needs. Catalogs may be broad and focused on the items with an extensive customer familiarity and appeal or they limit them to categories, such as herbal and flavored teas. The larger and longest-established firms have their own gardens, inspection centers, and processing factories, together with relationships with producers, brokers, and even smaller wholesalers who they buy tea from on a special case basis. The quality ranges widely, too. The best are very good indeed in products, services, and contracting. A challenge for retailers is to find the ones that can help them dif- ferentiate themselves in attracting and retaining customers. Some treat their use of one or multiple wholesalers as transactional, a simple way to stock the shop. The current trend in the full service wholesalers and dropshipping market is to proclaim the ease of using their services and imply they remove the need for customer effort. Here are two typical instances: "It takes minutes to launch a store" and "Anyone, anywhere can start a business." The many reports and recommendations on tea warehousing stress the importance of a relationship with both parties putting in the effort to go beyond order taking. The minute to launch claim minimizes the downside: new competitors can use their minute and many of the same wholesalers offer very much the same inventory and loss of identity to an online search for lowest price. New platforms are emerging that extend the business-building opportunities. For instance, Shopify is a widely used e-commerce development site with close to 1,500 apps for e-commerce, half of them free. The site-building software is complemented by Oberlo, a comprehensive search capability for locating products and wholesale sup- pliers. Shopify links to AliExpress, part of Alibaba, the giant China firm that is larger in sales than Amazon and taking it on in the effort to expand international markets. Similarly, leading tea brands and retailers are using their scale and buying power in sourcing teas in bulk to enter the wholesaling business. A problem here is that they often compete with their own customers and offer lower prices. The strength of wholesaling is that it is proven and reliable and the core of most industries' supply chains. Over the past ten years, the excessive chain of intermediaries and their added cost, delays and complexities that marked the tea industry for centu- ries have been reduced: auctions, brokers, distributors, grower associations, blenders, distributors, shippers, and financers. The best are state-of-good-practice in just-in-time streamlining of logistics. Today, careful planning can ensure the retailer is partnered or supported by reliable wholesalers. "Today" should perhaps be replaced by "Yesterday" and certainly is not likely to be applicable to tomorrow. Just-in-time processes have had to move to just-in-case: just in case there's more drought in Yunnan, j-i-c the shipping shortage and cost escalation continues, j-i-c the business failures of large firms owning – and now selling off – gardens, and j-i-c Covid is not a concen- trated or isolated short-term event. It's unclear how well most wholesal- ers will handle these uncertainties. Re- tailers clearly need to keep track of their capabilities and adaptation. It's back to basics: getting the right products to the buyer reliably and efficiently. When even Walmart, which built its dominance on supply chain basics, is experiencing wide- spread supply chain disruptions, most of the tea industry is not well-positioned. If the basics are not impeccable handled by suppliers, then the extra services, apps and features are of peripheral impact. Dropshipping Wholesalers have no contact with their clients' customers. Dropshipping takes over many functions that directly affect customers. It offers retailers an invento- ry-free option: no cost of working capital investment, risk of out of stock or unsold goods. In effect they become an online storefront where as one dropshipper claims "We handle everything in our full service production facility." The "everything" is built on a simple core process: a customer places an order and the shipping cycle is immediately be- gun, eliminating the substantial complex- ity of fulfilment. The retailer purchases the goods from a manufacturer or whole- saler that is part of the dropshipper's eco- complex and it is delivered directly to the customer. The retailer is paid by the cus- tomer without having to tie up working

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