Best Online Tea Stores
When it comes to buying tea online, there are countless options to choose from. From well-known international brands to small, artisanal shops, there is a wide range of retailers to choose from. But with so many options, it can be difficult to know where to start. To help you find the best online tea stores, we’ve compiled a list of some of our top picks.
How did we construct our ratings?
- Tea quality
- Delivery times
- Online store experience
Tea quality:
Tea quality was the main criteria we based our ratings on. It’s incredible how much tea quality varies from store to store.
Delivery times:
Our tea addiction needs to be dealt with, and this means that once we run out, we new tea, fast!
We’ve experienced delivery times of only one day to over three weeks, with no shipping information and barely any support.
Online store experience:
When reviewing these stores, the purchasing experience was a top priority for us. We purchase tea for the office on a regular basis, so it’s important that the process is smooth and easy.
There were a few key features that we looked for in each store, including: the organization of the teas (how well they were sorted and how easy it was to find a specific tea), the ability to add teas to a wishlist (this is a feature we really appreciate on our go-to store, myritualtea.com – we can add teas to collections or per staff member and add them to the cart whenever we want), the level of detail provided for each tea (such as caffeine content, ingredients, origin, etc.), lead times, and the ease of placing an order.
These factors all played a role in our overall assessment of the stores.
Our ratings, at a glance:
10/10 – My ritual tea
8/10 – Le palais des thes
7/10 – Ikkyu
7/10 – Mc Nulty
6/10 – Silk road teas
5/10 – Kusmi tea
4/10 – Davids tea
10/10 – My ritual tea
This has been our go-to store since we found out about it. My ritual tea has a vast collection of incredible teas; we also love how flexible it is for us to regularly try out new teas and appreciate the minor website feature like the “wishlist,” which allows our team to put teas there collections without having to log in.
Based on all the teas we’ve tried from them, their collection was of the highest quality.
The collection also has a wider variety of teas ranging from specialized fermented oolongs to blend teas, so there’s something for everyone.
My ritual tea has scored highest on all our rating criteria and has also been our go-to source for our office tea supply. Our topper!
8/10 – Le Palais des thes
Le Palais des these are a great website to find teas online, and we love browsing their website. We’ve had some great teas but received quite a few disappointing ones, mostly their specialty teas such as the sencha, specialized oolongs, or black teas were often of average quality, especially since they have an overall higher price.
However, their collection is quite large, and there are tons of hidden gems to find.
This is a great option and a great website, but we think that the tea quality can be improved to match their higher prices.
7/10 – Ikkyu
This is a great place to find nice Japanese green teas. The collection consists of high-quality teas, and we’ve loved each one we’ve tried. Ikkyu gets a lower rating in this list; however, it would have ranked at the top in a list that would focus exclusively on green teas.
7/10 – Mc Nulty
We love Mc Nulty for its more nice and exclusive vibe. Mc Nulty also has a physical shop in New York City, which I always go to when I am around. The quality of the teas is excellent, but the online experience could be improved, and the collection is also relatively small. The Phantom hands’ team was helpful in answering our questions and giving us insights into their productions.
6/10 – Silk road teas
Silk road teas have a good, varied collection of quality teas; however, we were unable to justify their prices, which are often 4 to 5 times higher than our top contenders that offer similar, often better teas.
We found some exciting specialty teas tough; however, the price makes it hard to try more.
5/10 – Kusmi tea
Kusmy tea has a strong brand identity and fantastic packaging, but the product quality is really disappointing and definitely overpriced. We’ve tried a few of their specialty teas (Gunpowder, genmaicha, Yunan), and these were all of noticeable low quality. Kusmi tea might be a good option if you are looking for blends, as these are usually done with lower quality teas; however, we couldn’t justify their prices in that case.
4/10 – Davids tea
We’ve hadn’t tried this brand prior to deciding to write this article. We tried 5 of their specialty teas and 5 of their “blends” that we also tried in iced teas as per their recommendation. The quality of the teas was overall disappointing, and we were unable to justify how the prices were twice as those of our top conders. We really liked to go through the information that they provide about tea, guides on iced tea, and also the ability to search by “mood” such as “sleep and relaxation” or “Alertness and focus.” We could recommend Davids tea for people looking for blends for iced teas that don’t require high-quality teas; however, this article is focused on plain tea, so it came at the end of our list.
