Selling Merchandise and Non-Alcohol Items on Barcart

Overview

Barcart Pro users are able to sell merchandise and non-alcohol items on Barcart alongside alcohol items.

In most states, compliance restrictions prevent licensed alcohol retailers from selling merchandise and other non-alcohol items (unless the merchandise is being offered as a promotional item at no cost to customer).

For any merchandise or non-alcohol item being sold for a monetary value, the seller most often will need to be separate from the retailers who are fulfilling sales for your alcohol items.

Our platform is able to split consumer orders so that the alcohol sale is routed to a licensed alcohol retailer, while the sale of merchandise or non-alcohol item is routed to either you or your designated 3PL.

Costs

Selling merchandise and/or non-alcohol items on Barcart requires a Pro account ($299/month), as well as one of our Shopify integrations (i.e. a direct integration into a Shopify website you own or Shopify Buy Buttons integrated into your non-Shopify website).

For all non-alcohol sales, there is a standard payment processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction. These fees are automatically deducted from your payouts.

If you are on a Shopify Basic plan, there is an additional transaction fee of 2% for any sales that are not fulfilled through Barcart's retailers. The transaction fee is 1% for Shopify plans and 0.5% for Shopify Advanced plans. This is a fee that is charged by Shopify to use the Stripe Payment Gateway for your store, which is required for compliance. Barcart pays for this fee at the time of purchase and will bill you for the pass-through costs on a quarterly basis.

Consumer Shipping Fees

At this time, combined alcohol and merchandise orders do not result in multiple shipping fees charged to the end consumer. This is because unique shipping rates for each product type would result in one, single-lined shipping rate that is not clearly split-able between two different vendors post-purchase.

Given this, we can only accommodate one of the following shipping rules for your products:

Free shipping for all non-alcohol products - In this case you are choosing to completely forego shipping revenue or you can bake it into your retail price for the goods.
Same shipping profile as alcohol products - If you choose to have your merch share a shipping profile with your alcohol, we will remit shipping fees, based on our standard shipping rates, to you on merch-only orders. Orders with merch and alcohol will only result in one shipping fee being charged, which we must give to the retailer. See our standard shipping rates outlined below.
1. One caveat here is your merch will not have nation-wide reach, and you'll be limited to the same shippable states as your alcohol products.

Barcart's Standard Shipping Rates

Orders less than $44: Flat Rate $19.99 Shipping
Orders greater than or equal to $44: Flat Rate $14.99 Shipping.

Order Management

Our team will set you up with a Barcart fulfillment account and demo as part of your onboarding. This account will be used to receive revenue and manage orders.

Management of merchandise orders (e.g. updating order status, creating shipping labels, etc.) must be handled using one of the following methods:

Directly In Barcart
In ShipStation via Barcart's direct integration
In Shopify*
Via a Shopify-integrated app*

*If using options #3 or #4, when dealing with orders that include both non-alcohol and alcohol products, you or your fulfillment partner must wait until orders are split before fulfilling them. This is because orders with alcohol must flow into Barcart first for both compliance and technical reasons before they are split into their alcohol and non-alcohol sub-orders - you can read more about these combined orders below.

Orders with Both Non-alcohol and Alcohol Products

Our team has to manually split these orders in order to ensure fulfillment for both products runs smoothly. This means, you must wait until the barcart split tag is applied to the order in Shopify. This happens approximately 1 business day after the order is placed.

Fulfilling the full order without waiting for the tag will close out the order in Barcart, preventing the retailer from seeing or fulfilling it. As a result, the customer will not receive their alcohol and will likely raise a complaint to our support team. This is overall a poor customer experience, so it's important that split orders are fulfilled properly.

Customers with these combined orders will receive two different order shipped emails: one email is sent when the non-alcohol product is fulfilled and another is sent when the alcohol is fulfilled by our retailer.

Payments

Payments for each order are delivered to your Stripe account that is connected to your Barcart fulfillment account.

Getting Set Up

Whether you or a 3PL will be fulfilling, we’ll need to set up a fulfillment account that will properly route the funds from non-alcohol sales to you and the order details to the fulfiller.

Before setting up your non-alcohol products, email partner@getbarcart.com to let our team know who will be fulfilling these items. Please provide the following information:

The first and last name the account will be under.
The email address the account will be under.
- Your fulfillment account will have to be under a separate email than any of your existing Barcart accounts.
Ship from address and phone.
Return address and phone.
State(s) you will need to collect sales tax in
Preferred method of merch fulfillment (see options 1-4 in order management section.)

Our team will then create a fulfillment account for you and have you connect your Stripe account to receive payments. If you or your 3PL will be using ShipStation, you'll also be able to connect your ShipStation account.

Once set up with a fulfillment account, you can proceed to add products through the same process that you added alcohol items. Our team will then approve the products in the system and you’ll be able to generate the buy buttons.