Interview with Lisa Blackard, Executive Chef at Taste of Texas Restaurant
How did you get started with your business? What products do you sell?
The Taste of Texas restaurant has been in business for 35 years. And we would often get requests from customers all over the US to ship our items to them. Seeing how our brand had organically grown with so many customers in all 50 states, Edd Hendee (the owner’s son) who was in business school circa 2005, started exploring the idea of launching an online store.
So, in 2005, we launched the Taste Of Texas webstore (built onBigcommerce). Through our webstore we sell the same Certified Angus beef perfectly aged and trimmed steaks we offer in our restaurant, as well as merchandise and side items popular with our restaurant customers. From us, you can always expect a mouth watering, perfect steak on your backyard grill!
We launched the webstore right before Christmas gift season, and we were thrilled to do over $100K in sales our first month of online operation.
What is the secret behind your marketing strategy? How do you get your customers?
We work hard to maintain a great brand and customer base with the restaurant. We first target our existing restaurant customers to market our online store to. During the Christmas gift season, we occasionally run national radio ads. We spend a good effort on search engine optimization. We also have a set of videos on our website where our chefs demonstrate our own grilling instructions for your next cook out!
What online channels do you sell your products through?
We only sell through our own webstore (TasteofTexas.com). We do not sell on Amazon or eBay. We’ve found that it’s not cost effective for us.
While choosing a shopping cart platform to build our webstore on, we spent a lot of time on trial and error. We went through four previous shopping cart platforms before landing on Big Commerce. From our experience with all the different systems we’ve tried, Big Commerce is the most intuitive and easy to use for our customers.
How has Ordoro benefited you?
Having a really great shopping cart software and fulfillment system is key for both your customers’ ability to place an order and your ability to fulfill it. We’ve learned this the hard way with complicated shopping cart software and cumbersome fulfillment processes. We’re very happy with what we’ve found in Big Commerce and Ordoro.
We do about 65% of our sales for the year in the month of December, which means that automation is really key during that month. Ordoro has made processing and shipping much simpler for our staff.