Girl Scout cookie sales go online for the first time
Girl Scout Lily Yu knows her top-sellers: "Probably Thin Mints."
She's also fine-tuned her sales pitch: "It helps the Girl Scout troops so they can go on to trips and stuff."
With has five years of experience selling cookies under her sash, this Girl Scout from Troop 32617 in Oakland has learned a few things.
"It's really good to be really friendly and don't eat cookies while you're selling cookies. It's not a good idea," Yu said.
This year, for the first time, she and other Girl Scouts will be able to sell their cookies online.
"There's a little chart on the side with how many boxes of cookies you want with the prices," Yu said as she showed KTVU her website.
Girl Scouts of the U.S. created a specific website their Scouts have to use for cookie sales.
The scouts can personalize their pages with a picture of video and a written sales pitch, explaining their "cookie learnings" -- what they've learned from the experience in the past -- and "cookie earnings," where they can explain how they plan to spend the money from their sales.
There are also safety controls in place. Parents use their own email and passwords to create their daughters' accounts.
"I can log in and check in and monitor what's happening on her site," Lily's mom Monica said.
Customers can't find the individualized scout sites by Googling them. Girl Scouts must email the link to invite customers to buy, so they only contact people they -- and their parents -- already know.
"I and a lot of parents would be really hesitant to have our daughters participate in something like this if we weren't really confident it was a safe program," Yu said.
Yu and other Girl Scouts like her will still continue to do door-to-door sales in their neighborhoods and set up Cookie Booths in front of stores and businesses.
Girl Scouts of Northern California Marketing Director Nikki Van Ausdall said the Digital Cookie Website is meant to be in addition to the traditional, in-person sales experience.
"Taking the girls into the modern age and giving them a skill set that's going to help them when they go off to college and beyond," Ausdall explained.
Lily Yu said she is excited to expand her business, and make it a cross-country enterprise.
"It'll be better because I have grandparents who live in North Carolina, and now they can buy cookies from me, too," Yu said.
Lily and the girls from her troop have already planned to share their earnings.
"My troop plans to go water rafting and camping with the money we make from cookie selling," she said,
She'll start working towards that goal Thursday morning, one cookie and click at a time.
"It makes me feel pretty good knowing that I worked kind of hard for it," Yu said.
Girl Scouts in other parts of the country have already started cookie sales with the new digital site. More than 53,000 scouts have created individual accounts for cookie sales.
To find a cookie booth in your neighborhood, potential customers can visit the website, Ilovecookies.org and type in their zip code to find the nearest cookie booth in their neighborhood.