Shop Latte: Supporting Local Small Businesses Just Became Easy and Accessible
As someone who grew up in a small business, I have a soft spot for shopping small.
And as someone currently living in the United States, I have made it my duty to divest from large corporations and shop small as much as possible.
Somewhere along the way, corporations were granted legal personhood, and small-business support really went downhill from there.
Covid introduced this new age of corporate slop to the nth degree, and I think most of us are pretty fed up with it.
It’s time we take back the economy, reel in the excessive consumerism, and redirect our hard-earned dollars into the pockets of our community members, small business owners.
This is a topic I’m deeply passionate about, and I’m so grateful I had the chance to connect with Sarah Moon of Shop Latte, a platform for people to find small businesses in their area (or anywhere else in the United States).
Shop Latte launched in May 2025, yet it already has over 1,500 businesses signed up in all 50 states, as well as various categories to choose from, so you can select woman-owned, black-owned, Latino-owned businesses - basically whatever type of business you want to support across industries.
Keep reading to learn about the revolutionary platform connecting small business owners to their local customers and beyond.
Introducing Shop Latte
Put simply, Shop Latte is a platform for locals to discover small businesses.
The name comes from the quintessential “Farmers Market experience” when you grab a latte before you stroll the market to check out all the local businesses.
Although it lives online and seems like a directory, the vision behind Shop Latte is bigger than that.
It’s designed and in progress to be more of a community hub for customers to stay connected, like a virtual town square, if you will.
When I talked to Sarah, she spoke about small businesses having a pulse on what’s happening in the community.
Shop Latte is an easy way to stay connected to local small businesses.
The idea stemmed from how productive Facebook Groups are, but FB groups don’t really support small businesses because of promotion restrictions.
Additionally, to keep pace with corporate marketing departments, small business owners have had to become social media content creators, keep up with algorithms, and constantly churn out content.
The idea behind Shop Latte is to reduce the reliance on social media marketing while giving business owners the ability to communicate directly with customers who sought them out via the Shop Latte platform.
It also gives users and business owners less reliance on these platforms that started on a wholesome premise but have gone on to shape culture and even the government, for the worse.
Sarah is no Zuckerberg, she sees Shop Latte as bigger than herself. She knows the impact it could make for small businesses, and she hopes to sway current shopping options, too.
Impressive doesn’t begin to describe Sarah, who is not only the founder of her business, but already a small business owner in her own right, as well as creating the full experience, research, and design for Shop Latte!
Seriously, how does she do it all?
The Woman Behind Shop Latte - Sarah Moon
Meet Sarah Moon, recent Master’s program graduate, small pet care business owner, founder of Shop Latte, and product developer for Shop Latte.
Quite the resume, if you ask me!
She started her pet care business in 2022 and also started selling dog treats with her mom.
I was blown away talking to Sarah as she told me about her Master’s program in integrated business design and tech, mind you, on top of her design degree.
Her masters program is geared towards entrepreneurship and startups so when a professor gave them the task to create a website for a nonexistent business, that’s when she came up with making the website for Shop Latte.
Resourcefully, Sarah was able to recruit students who were looking to complete a capstone project for their own program, and was able to get the backend coded by these students.
Shop Latte was born.
Knowing she had limited resources and capital, she contacted a coder to get the front-end basics, as well as building out more of the backend, to get it all going.
Ultimately, Sarah made an impulsive decision to take on the role of designer to bring all the features she envisioned seeing on Shop Latte.
So on top of running her own small business, Sarah runs and designs Shop Latte, adding more and more features to make it easier for customers and small businesses alike.
The latest feature is block posts.
If we’re going back to that original Farmer’s Market vibe, latte in hand, imagine the block posts to be like visiting the bulletin board.
Small businesses can make announcements, talk about events, whatever… but the best part?Shop Latte limits small business owners to one post every 7 days, eliminating that pressure social media has placed on us to post everyday.
That means no more spamming customers and business owners can focus on running their businesses.
Revolutionary in this day and age we find ourselves in, where more, more, more is never enough.
The seven-day post limit is one of the most intriguing elements, in my opinion!
Marketplace of the (Near) Future
Sarah is dreaming big, but I believe it’s fully in her grasp.
Beyond the warm, welcoming platform she has created to connect small business owners to their local customers, Sarah pictures Shop Latte becoming the go-to place for shopping.
The goal is to create a marketplace, based loosely on Amazon’s concept, with way more ethics and concern for the small business owner, customers, and planet.
In addition, she hopes to create a separate extension that functions as a B2B hub for small businesses to connect to local goods, manufacturers, and service providers, instead of having so much dependence on outsourced labor and goods.
This is ultimately an effort to stabilize the local economy and bring the power back to small business owners, the true backbone of the United States.
Any angel investors out there? Let’s help Sarah make this a reality for all of us!
If you’re a small business owner, you can create a profile for FREE today on www.shoplatte.com.
You can see Conscious Content Clips on Shop Latte!
And if you’re just a small business lover like myself, make sure you check out the platform and find the small businesses to replace your Amazon purchases, because you know I’m all about that!
