The scrumptious combination of sugar, spice, and everything nice that is the Girl Scout cookie has been systematically destroying American waistlines for decades, but now that these delicious morsels can be ordered online, they are bound to cause an obesity crisis of epidemic proportions. After years of banning the sale of the cookies online, the nonprofit Girl Scouts of U.S.A. (GSUSA) has finally embraced the online side of commercial trade by allowing its members to sell the cookies via mobile app or personalized websites.
Although online commercialism has been adopted by nearly all product sellers, the GSUSA had previously prohibited the practice for fear of placing some girls at a disadvantage to others when competing for the highest number of sales. The issue was recently brought to light when TLC child reality TV show star, Alana Thompson aka Honey Boo Boo, cornered the market with her Girl Scout cookie-selling Facebook page. Honey Boo Boo’s Facebook audience of over 700,000 enabled her to far outsell her competitors with minimal effort.
The GSUSA’s change in stance was mainly attributed to the scouts themselves. “Girls have been telling us that they want to go into this space,” Sarah Angel-Johnson, chief digital cookie executive, tells AP, “Online is where entrepreneurship is going.” The GSUSA will grant each scout their own personal cookie website from which to sell cookies and track progress, but buyers must first receive an email invitation from the scout herself to be granted access. In order to protect the scouts’ identities, the site bars girls from posting any identifying information outside of their first name; scouts under the age of 13 are required to use an anonymous name.
Online sales are not intended to replace the face-to-face operations, whose effort nets in $800 million annually from boxes priced at anywhere between $3.50 and $5.00 depending on the local scout council’s price designation, and scouts are only permitted to use a single method. If a scout selects an online storefront, she cannot open a physical stand since the idea is that each method has its own particular set of skills to teach. Scout officials suggest that online sales teach articulating and tracking goals, how to handle money and customers in a new way, and the logistics of processing payment and shipment details.
In addition to the web-based platform, scouts opting for online sales will be granted access to a mobile app that tracks sales on the back end and sell bundles of cookies on the front end. The app is expected to go live in January 2014.
Source: AP
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