What Will I Get?
- Your own store on Caketu.com
- Free to list as many products as you like
- Set your own prices
- A web address unique to your business: caketu.com/baker/[yourstore]
- Set your delivery charges and limit by distance (or specify collection only)
- Manage your schedule
- Limit orders so you're not overwhelmed
- Set your own store policies (or use ours!)
- No sale = no fee. There's no listing fees, no membership fee, just a simple 10.2% referral fee on sales.
What Will I Get?
- Your own store on Caketu.com
- Free to list as many products as you like
- Set your own prices
- A web address unique to your business: caketu.com/baker/[yourstore]
- Set your delivery charges and limit by distance (or specify collection only)
- Manage your schedule
- Limit orders so you're not overwhelmed
- Offer customisation options
- No sale = no fee. There's no listing fees, no membership fees, just a simple 10.2% referral fee on sales
It just takes a few minutes to give us your details and once we’ve verified them, you’re good to go!
Your Caketu Store
Think of your Caketu.com store as your own mini website. You’ll have your own URL like this: caketu.com/baker/[yourstorenamehere].
Personalise your store with a logo and banner image, links to your social media channels etc.
List as many products as you like, with pictures, descriptions and ingredients. You can set your own policies, and there’s an About section where you can tell customers about your business and your passion for baking!
Customers can see your products and order any time of day or night.
There’s no haggling over prices or details – if they like your cake, like the price, and you have availability for the date they need, they can order it there and then.
Think: See cake. Like cake. Buy cake!
Less time spent on queries means more time for you to do the things you love, and fewer awkward questions everyone hates.
You’re in control. It’s your store. You get all the benefits of having your website, but without the hosting fees or maintenance worries, and a LOT more functionality!
What Can I Sell?
This is a marketplace for cakes and other edible goods for celebrations.
If what you make doesn’t fit that category, then we’re not the platform for you!
Store Setup
Joining Caketu is quick and simple.
Don’t worry if you’re newly registered, haven’t had a food hygiene inspection, and don’t have a rating yet – lots of councils have a big backlog! It’s fine to submit the link to your page on the Food Standards Agency website that says you’re ‘Awaiting Inspection’ on our sign-up form.
If you can’t find your page on the FSA website, but know you’ve registered with your local council, don’t worry! Just contact us – we’ll work through it with you to get it sorted – the FSA website search facility is a bit clunky and hard to use!
Once we’ve checked you’re a registered food business, we’ll send you a welcome email with a link to our store setup Wizard. This walks you through the basic settings you need to get your store online. It takes about 10 minutes if you’ve got things like logos to hand. Once you’ve done working through that, you’re good to go!
If you don’t have an official logo for your business, don’t worry, just upload an eye catching cake, or a picture of you instead! You can amend details later in your dashboard if you need to.
There’s a playlist of short videos on our YouTube Channel to help you navigate Caketu, including registration.
Listing Products
You can list as many products as you like, there’s no restriction on numbers, and no listing fees!
While it’s easy to list products using our template (once you know how!) we appreciate it can be pretty daunting to list your first cake. There’s a lot of things to consider! What sizes do you offer? What flavours? Do you offer vegan/gluten-free etc? What colours?
Making sure all the different prices and all the different options are correct and the availability settings match when you want to work and how many orders you can accept… there’s a lot to think about!
This is why we offer an initial setup Zoom meeting for free to all newly registered bakers.
Here we’ll spend an hour with you, checking what products you want to list, and what you need from the platform for it to work for your business. Then we’ll help you get those all-important store settings finalised and your first cake(s) listed while you look on and instruct.
Once we’ve listed a couple of cakes for you, it’s easy then for you to duplicate a cake and its settings to list more!
If you do want to try listing your own cakes – there’s a How To video for how to list a very simple (no options) product on our YouTube channel, and more videos on our channel explaining other settings, including ‘variable products’ where the customer can choose the colour/flavour/size etc. (with different prices to match):
As well as general customisation in terms of colour/flavour etc. you can offer personalisation – name/age/message etc. Just give the options in the product description and the customer can add the details at checkout.
The beauty of Caketu is, once the customer has ordered the product, you know they’re happy with the options they’ve selected. No need for further discussions, negotiations on price or add-ons, or awkward conversations about discounts!
Customers who want a more bespoke cake design service can still contact you with queries directly, as they do now. There’s a enquiry button in your store.
We know there are a lot of customers out there who don’t buy bespoke cakes simply because they don’t have the time to commission them. They don’t want a supermarket cake, but they need the convenience of one.
Caketu gives these customers an easy way to find the right cake for them, with a minimum of hassle, and gives bakers access to a whole new stream of customers.
What Does It Cost?
There are no up-front fees for joining Caketu, and no listing fees. It’s no sale = no fee. We think it’s important that we only make money when you do!
You just pay a simple 10.2% referral fee whenever you make a sale. This charge covers the card processing fees, the cost of hosting and running the website, and any advertising and marketing we do on your behalf, so we think it represents pretty good value!
It can cost £££ to get someone to build you a basic business website. You can do it cheaper if you’re prepared to DIY – but there’s a steep learning curve and it takes a considerable amount of time.
To build a proper e-commerce website, one where you can actually list items for sale and take orders for specific dates, you’re talking considerably more – way out of the reach of most small businesses! We believe Caketu is a really good, value-for-money way to get your beautiful cakes online – and to offer customers a way to easily order bespoke cakes from you without all the back-and-forth messaging that’s usually needed! And if you don’t sell a thing – you won’t pay a thing – you can’t say fairer than that!
All payments, and the distribution of who gets what is handled by our independent financial services provider, industry leader Stripe. You register with them when you sign up to Caketu and everything financial is handled automatically and securely.
Manage Your Schedule
This is a big concern for a lot of bakers! Particularly if your business is a side hustle – you need to know you can manage the orders you receive!
With Caketu, that’s not a problem. If you only want collections a couple of days per week, or only a few cakes per month, you can totally control your schedule to suit how you work.
If you want to run a limited offer for a seasonal product like Valentine’s, Father’s Day, or Halloween, with a limited number available for just 1 or 2 dates only, you can totally do that too.
There are 4 different ways of controlling your orders. There’s an 8 minute video here that explains them, but in a nutshell:
- Set your lead-in time (notice period) in hours. This sets the first available date on the calendar to book that product. You can set different lead-in times for products with different complexity to match the notice you require for each.
- Set the bookable days for collection (or delivery if you offer it) – and, if you want, the maximum number that can be booked for that day.
- Set availability across a group, or all of your products, using the ‘resources’ setting. This way, a purchase of one product will limit the availability of all other products that share that resource.
- Set store-wide holiday dates. Customers can still browse all your products on those days, and book for other dates, but no collections can be booked for those days.
Using these in combination means you can be assured that you can handle all the orders you receive, no matter how many cakes you have listed!
Setting delivery charges
Caketu is collection by default. But if you wish to, you can choose to offer delivery, and set your own charges for this.
You can even set charges priced by distance, according to rules you create in your dashboard.
Then the customer can decide at checkout if they want to collect, or pay for delivery.
So, you’d like to join Caketu.com?
Let’s check – you’ve already got:
- registered food business
- food hygiene rating (or awaiting inspection)
- business insurance
Great! You can sign up here:
Reviews
Only customers who have actually purchased from you can leave a review. This ensures that potential customers can trust the ratings they see are genuine, and bakers don’t receive soul-crushing negative reviews from people who have never even bought one of their cakes!
What if I sell online elsewhere/have my own website?
That’s not a problem! In fact, if you already have a price list online, Contact Us and we may be able to help you transfer your products over to your Caketu store, making less work for you.
We don’t expect you to be exclusive to us. We believe customers will return time and again to Caketu.com because it’s genuinely a decent platform, easy to use, with helpful customer reviews and secure payments, and we hope you’ll enjoy the benefits too!
How would this work? All my cakes are bespoke and personal!
This is the beauty of Caketu – each cake IS bespoke and personal – you just set the parameters up front for them to choose from.
When listing the cake – set as a ‘variable product’ with customer options for, size, colour, flavour, sponge flavour, number of layers, and dietary need – and prices to match. Then in the description state if they can add a name/age/message (they can input this information at checkout).
Lots of customers would love a cake tailored to their needs, but don’t have the time to arrange it. They don’t want a supermarket cake, but they need the convenience of one! You can now access these customers – offering them popular cake styles with just the level of personalisation that’s perfect for them, while still keeping it quick and simple to arrange.
If anyone likes your work, but wants to ask for a completely unique cake, or one you don’t have listed on Caketu, they can contact you using the Ask Baker a Question button.
Hungry for more information?
You can listen to me talking to Yvonne from Adventures in Kakeland podcast about what Caketu.com is all about, why I set it up, and why there’s crazy cockatoos everywhere! Available on iTunes, Spotify and wherever you get your Podcasts!
We have a Frequently Asked Questions page with more info.
We have a You Tube Channel, with How To videos and shorts. You can also find us on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook!
There’s also a private Facebook group community just for registered Caketu bakers who might want to connect with others. You’ll find information on how to join in the Knowledgebase section of your store dashboard. Hoping we can build a supportive, welcoming community of like-minded bakers eager to share tips and info!
Tell us what you want to see!
We may add further functionality in future, e.g. to take and manage bookings for courses, cake stand hire, invoicing etc. We’re very keen to offer you what you want and need to manage your business effectively, so if there’s something you’d like to see incorporated into Caketu.com, let us know!
I hope this has been helpful in describing some of the many ways in which Caketu can help support your business and reach new customers.
You can read our full Terms & Conditions for Bakers here.