Teamup Calendar – adding reservations for guests to your site

Posted on by Christian

In these covid-19 times, many restaurants coffee shops and boutique stores sudden face the need to add reservations to their website. Sure, you can use Facebook events for each day and make a number of slots but not everyone wants to use Facebook or register for events.

Using Teamup, it’s easy and free to add simple guest booking service to your website. It is one of the case demos on their site for many have already discovered this great calendar service.

calendar
TeamUp Scheduling

https://www.teamup.com/live-demo/

If you would like to add a guest booking feature to your site in these Corona times but don’t have necessary skills to do it or simply don’t have the time, get in touch with me!

Often, your POS vendor has modules he can add for you with the added benefit your reservations will seamlessly integrate with the rest of the system. Or you can use mijnplek.nl, an initiative by KPN, to add simple quick reservations to your website at the cost of installing an additional app.

Web Traffic Before and During Corona Crisis

Posted on by Christian

I manage a couple of websites on the web and the effect of the crisis around the Corona virus is visually dramatic. For one customer there is a drop in web traffic of 2 orders of magnitude. Where 10K impressions during the last week of Fabuari were normal, now only 100-200 are expected.

People staying home don’t go out to eat, they get groceries and cook at home. People don’t need a coffee house if they can’t walk around or travel. If you can’t go shopping, you don’t need to check the collections of retail stores.

Drop in web traffic due to Corona crisis

As soon as the “curfew” went into effect in the Netherlands, March 17th, traffic slowed to a crawl. While some businesses still see similar traffic to before Corona, a few even more I’m sure, that effect will not be as visual as the drop.

No visitors, means no sales, no sales means no income. So I can fully sympathize with businesses that went into panic mode. Adding additional products, such as vouchers and gift certificates can help create extra income for the time being.

Setting your business on Google My Business to ‘temporarily closed’?

Posted on by Christian

With the crisis around the Corona virus, many businesses are closed either by force or voluntarily. Changing your opening hours on Google My Business (GMB) to notify customers of your changed hours of operation is not only a nice gesture to your following, but also great for your ranking in Google Search because active business entries in Google My Business are favoured over stale ones.

However, with rules and regulations changing over days, keeping up with the changed business hours is a little time consuming. There is also an option to mark your business as “temporarily closed”… Wouldn’t that do the trick too or does it affect your rating on Google negatively?

In light of the Corona crisis, Google has changed the way it interprets these settings and due to these changes it is safe to mark your business as “temporarily closed” if it’s for more than two weeks.

Google adjusts reaction to Google My Business opening hours

Google will not drop you from search results and will not filter your business out just because it is closed. While it used to do this to more accurately reflect the state of businesses, there are so many shops that are closed now, that they changed this behavior and better serve the businesses during this crisis.

Source: searchengineland.com/

Daily Herald Newspaper features Barista Christian Peper

Posted on by Christian
newspaper article about Christian Peper

Double Dutch Café, inside Market Garden supermarket, has hired barista Christian Peper to bring third wave coffee to the island of St Maarten.

The cafe wants to make the best coffee available on the island of St Maarten and odes so by raising the standards to make coffee. It’s no longer about adding hot water to ground coffee beans but about choosing the right water, using the right water temperature, picking a light to medium roasted bean, setting the best grind level to achieve 25 seconds brew time and serving it instantly.

 

Market Garden Cafe has a Head Barista

Posted on by Christian

After two weeks of set-up and soft opening, I’m proud to say that I’ve been busy creating an excellent coffee corner inside the Market Garden supermarket in Simpson bay, Sint Maarten. My mission is to show that excellent coffee is possible, even when you grind beans on-demand.

I have helped them design the shop’s workflow and set-up. I told them where to place the machine for best customer contact and how much room a barista needs to work efficiently and comfortably. They bought an espresso machine in the US but didn’t know how to configure the machine. So I calibrated the amount of water, ground coffee, found a sweet spot and frothed milk from the many different milk or milk-substitutes that the supermarket caters. I asked for a Mazzer Super Jolly grinder but they were impossible to get on time, so I’m making due with what I’ve got. The Baratza Forte AP with ceramic burrs is a great machine though!

I am currently sourcing some espresso beans on the island to try and make a damn good espresso. The cafe will be working with Starbucks beans and they’ve already sourced too many to get rid of, so that’s what it is. However, it’s fine for Cappuccino and other milk coffees, iced coffee and frappuccino. Given the island’s taste, that is what sells the most anyway. But for the few coffee gourmands and espresso fans, it’s trivial to get a couple of kilos of great medium roast natural processed beans and please them too. And who knows… maybe I can convert a few of them 🙂