How to Sell Loose Tea by Weight on Shopify

Loose tea is bought by the kilo and sold by the pouch. A 1 kg bag of oolong becomes 25 g samples, 50 g pouches and 100 g tins. Shopify sells all of that from one product page, but it counts each size as its own stock, and tea shops feel it the first time a size shows sold out with half a sack on the shelf.

Here is how to set it up so the page is clear, the stock holds and the prices make sense per gram.

One product per tea, sizes as variants

Make one product per tea with one option, Size, and a value per pouch: 25 g, 50 g, 100 g, 250 g. One product keeps reviews, photos and search traffic in one place, and customers compare sizes side by side.

• Put the number and the unit in the name. 50 g tells the customer more than Small, and a number with a unit is something you, a spreadsheet or an app can do arithmetic with.
• Set the shipping weight separately. Shopify's variant weight is for shipping rates, so it should be the tea plus the pouch and label. Weigh one packed pouch of each size once and use that.
• Keep the ladder short. Three or four sizes cover most buyers. Each extra size is another pouch to stock and another number to keep right.
• Give samples their own variant. A 10 g variant on each tea lets people try before they buy a tin, and it comes out of the same sack.

Grams or ounces?

Tea is traded in grams and kilos, and keen tea buyers tend to think in grams. Plenty of US shoppers still think in ounces. Pick one unit to stock and price in, and show the other as a label if you need it.

Don't round quietly. A pouch labeled 2 oz must hold 56.7 g; filling it to 50 g shorts the customer by about 12%. If you want metric sizes, call them 50 g. If you show both, 2 oz (57 g) is fine as long as the pouch really holds 57 g. The ounces here are weight, not fluid ounces, which measure volume.

Samplers and tasting sets

Samplers come in two shapes, and they track differently.

• A sample size of one tea. A 10 g variant on the tea's own product. It draws from the same sack as the 50 g and 100 g, so it belongs in the same count.
• A mixed set. Five teas, 10 g each, sold as one product. That set draws from five sacks at once. The simplest way to keep it honest: pack sets in batches, say 20 at a time, give the set product its own stock of 20, and take 200 g out of each of the five sacks' counts when you pack them.

Batches also keep the bench sane. Weighing out five 10 g portions per order, one order at a time, is slow work.

Keeping stock right from one sack

Every size of a tea comes from one sack, so track the sack in grams and work out each size from it: sellable = (grams left − reserve) ÷ pouch size, rounded down. A sack with 2,340 g and 100 g held back has 2,240 g to sell: 89 × 25 g, 44 × 50 g, 22 × 100 g or 8 × 250 g. After a 250 g order every one of those numbers changes, not only the 250 g.

Then watch the grams Shopify never sees:

• Overfill. A scale that lands on 51.5 g for a 50 g pouch gives away 1.5 g each time. Over 40 pouches that is 60 g, more than a whole pouch you meant to sell.
• Dust and broken leaf. The bottom of a sack collects fannings that won't sell as whole leaf. Decide what you do with them and count them out.
• Tasting and brewing. The tea you brew at the counter, for photos or for a tasting event comes from the same sack.

Hold back a reserve for these, weigh the sack every week or two, and write any gap down as a loss. After a month you know your real loss per sack, and that is what your reserve should be.

Refunds need a rule too. Opened tea doesn't go back on the shelf, so refund it without restocking. A sealed pouch returned in good shape can go back, and its grams go back into the sack's count, which may add a few more of the small sizes.

Pricing per 100 g

Customers compare tea by price per 100 g or per ounce, so price each size knowing what it works out to. Small sizes cost more per gram to sell, because the pouch, the label and the minute of packing cost the same for 25 g as for 250 g.

Take a tea that costs you $45 per kg delivered, so $4.50 per 100 g. Pouch and label cost $0.45 for the smaller sizes and $0.60 for the 250 g. A ladder could look like this:

Those margins look high, and they need to be: free shipping thresholds, payment fees, samples you give away and tea that goes stale all come out of them. Check two things on every ladder. Each size should cost less per 100 g than the one below it, and two of a size should never cost less than the next size up. Here two 50 g pouches cost $22.00 and the 100 g costs $19.00, which is right.

The price per gram calculator does this math for any sack and pouch size. Depending on your store's country, Shopify can also show a unit price, such as $19.00 / 100 g, on the product page.

Where Carboy fits

Carboy keeps each tea as one pool in grams and sets every pouch size's stock in Shopify from it. It reads sizes like 25g, 50 g, 4 oz and 1 lb from the variant names and converts between grams, kilos, ounces and pounds inside a pool, so a 4 oz and a 100 g variant can share one sack. Orders, and refunds and cancellations you restock, move the pool, and every size is rewritten within seconds.

When you pack a batch of mixed samplers, take the tea out of each sack's pool with Record a loss and a note such as “20 samplers”, so the count stays honest. The tea shops page shows a full example.