Tandem Coffee is a third-wave coffee roaster based in Portland, Maine. With two locations, award-winning coffees, and a vibe CN Traveler described as "your cool older sibling's city apartment," Tandem is not only a local favorite but also maintains a thriving ecommerce business.
Tandem has been selling their coffee online for almost their entire 10+ year history. However, times and expectations have changed, especially in the coffee world, and their shipping rates had become both a cost center and an opportunity.
We undertook an exhaustive audit of competitive rates across the specialty coffee industry, identified where Tandem was an outlier, and developed paths forward that would reduce their shipping costs. Along with the data and strategy recommendations, we implemented clearer shipping messaging for customers.
Based on our review, Tandem increased their free shipping threshold, updated rates, and improved on-site messaging. This resulted in an almost immediate 5% increase in AOV without any downturns in conversion rate.
We come up with lots of ideas that we would never be able to pull off ourselves. We pitch those ideas to First Pier and they figure out how to do it.
Will Pratt, Owner — Tandem Coffee
Shipping is a pricing decision that most stores treat as a logistics decision.
Tandem's rates had drifted out of line with the specialty coffee market — not because anyone chose badly, but because rates get set once and then quietly stop being reviewed while the market moves around them. The audit was the entire product: find where a roaster is an outlier against the people they actually compete with, and say so with numbers.
What made it work was raising the free shipping threshold at the same time as adjusting rates, and telling customers about both clearly. Most stores do one or the other. A threshold change alone reads as a price rise; a rate change alone leaves money on the table. Done together, with the messaging fixed, the average order went up and conversion did not move.
That is a rare shape of result — more revenue per order with no offsetting loss — and it came from a review rather than a build. Some of the highest-return work on an ecommerce site is deciding that a number set years ago is no longer the right number.
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