Keeping Track of Discontinued Tea in the Steepster Database!
A lot of good ideas in here, thanks everyone!
We’ve thought about this problem before and a number of different solutions, just haven’t had a chance to implement anything yet. In general, we’d favor a more structured solution to the data (ex. harvest, year, discontinued, etc) by making it fields that relate to the tea vs. just writing it in the description or title. That would give us more flexibility/power to present the teas in different ways that may be helpful to people looking for teas based on certain conditions and characteristics.
In the mean time, I’m happy to support or endorse a solution that people generally like, whether that’s in the description or title, until we’re able to more deeply integrate the information with the tea.
Personally, I’d prefer putting it into the tea description, for cleanliness and looking ahead to cleaning up the teas once we are have a chance to integrate that type of information. I’d think having that listed in the description would be less “damaging” to the overall listing and easier to clean up in general.
This is a little bit off-topic, but have you considered including a URL (to the tea on the original vendor’s website) as an optional field in the “tea info”? I personally just think that would be useful, but it also has the benefit of making it easier for someone to click through and see if a particular tea is available.
We actually have that now, but we just don’t have a lot of the links. Those links are controlled by admins. The reason it’s limited to admins is because we had planned for the possibility to use affiliate links, and also so people couldn’t add spam links out to their own sites. But we obviously have a limited capacity to add links for the 50k+ teas on the site, so we’re considering ways to make that easier and get more teas linked to places where people can buy them.
Oh… you mean the “Currently Unavailable/Notify Me When Available” box? Yeah, that is almost entirely useless.
Ok, I clicked around randomly until I found a tea that wasn’t just listed as “Unavailable”. It appears that several of the popular Whispering Pines teas have a link added, so now there is a “Buy Now” box, and a link below the box that says “Available from 1 seller”. If I click on the “Buy Now” button (which, if I weren’t doing this right now for the sake of experimentation, I would NEVER do, because hovering over it doesn’t tell me what it links to, and I hate clicking on random things when I don’t know what they’ll do, particularly when they are trying to make me buy something). Anyway, if I click on the Buy Now button of evil, it brings up a little box that says:
“Compare prices for Golden Snail Yunnan Black Tea
Size Price Seller
N/A N/A whisperingpinestea.com”
Wow, so helpful. And the link that looks like it’s to the main Whispering Pines page actually links to the product, so I guess that’s good, except for the part where I like links to actually go where they say they’re going to. Clicking on the “1 seller” link below the Button of Evil brings up exactly the same window, so I’m not sure what the point of having two different links is. And neither one actually does what I want it to do, which is take me to the freaking manufacturers website (not necessarily because I want to BUY NOW, maybe I just want to see how they describe the tea, if they have any reviews on their own website, what else they sell, what their shipping policy is, or just look at Brenden’s pretty pictures).
No. Just, no.
What I want is for there to be a URL field at the bottom of the tea info, that says:
“URL: whisperingpinestea.com/bi-luo-chun-yunnan-black.html” and if I click on that link it takes me to that page. (Bad example right now because the website is down, but you know what I mean).
I fully understand the need to find ways to monetize the website if you want to continue providing a “free” service to the users, and affiliate links make a lot of sense. If you ever get the affiliate link system actually working, I will probably go out of my way to click through Steepster whenever I’m buying tea online, just to support the site. But I really don’t think it makes sense to withhold a useful bit of information/functionality just because you haven’t worked out the proper way to consistently monetize it yet.
Right now there’s nothing stopping spammers from adding links to their own sites anywhere else in the decription. And yet, I haven’t seen that being a problem, probably because it would be laborious and annoying to individually go in and edit the info for hundreds of different teas. And if anyone ever actually did that, well, the small army of regular Steepster users would just go in right after them and change it back. So I think you’re doing yourself a huge disservice by restricting this to admins, rather than just trusting the large majority of your users to do the right thing.
To clarify, the reason the link didn’t work before was because it looks like WP has updated thier site since the links we’re last entered, so the URL we had before was invalid. I’ve updated the link for the example you posted above, so you can see how it’s actually supposed to look, assuming we have the correct/current info. It’s not a matter of trying to rstrict access to information, that’s totally the opposite of what we try to do with Steepster. That’s just a case of a bad link.
As for what is shown on the popup showing the link, price, etc, that’s just limited by the info we’re able to pull from the link. We’re hoping to make that more sophisticated in the future, but right now it is dependent on the format in which any given company lists their page meta data.
Like I mentioned, we recognize that we have a limited capcity to add the links ourselves, which is why we are looking into/planning ways to solve this.
And I wish we could just open it up without concern for spam, but the not-too-distant spam attack of 2014 still has us gun shy. But in seriousness, the links that people can put around the site don’t pass through search credibility, since we don’t actively monitor them. With the buy links we’d want to pass through credibility since it’s hugely relevent to the company and the page, but that would make it really valuable for a spammer to hijack those. All that is just to say we want to be careful about how we do it.
But the bottom line is, we want to make it easier for people to find and drink new and amazing teas. So, we definitely want to do a better job connecting the tea page in the future.
I think you’re missing the entire point I was trying to make. My problem was not the broken link, my problem is the user interface for the “Buy Link” (which I personally find super annoying) and the underlying assumption that the ONLY reason to bother having a link to the vendor’s website is for the purposes of facilitating a sale (thereby cashing in on “affiliate” benefits).
In my opinion, the whole notion of having Steepster do my comparison shopping for me by somehow going to various websites and extracting prices and displaying them in a list, is total BS and a huge waste of your developers’ time. The vast majority of teas are going to have only one seller when you click on that link, and I am entirely capable of clicking through to the vendor’s website, and then finding the pricing and all other info I need to decide whether or not I’m going to place an order. There is no need for Steepster to extract and display metadata for me, thank you, I can make that decision on my own. I can fully understand that you’d want to retain exclusive control over affiliate links, since any tampering would obviously affect how they function. But my point is that I shouldn’t have to click on an affiliate link (with a big, flashing BUY HERE or whatever) just to check the official ingredient listing for a tea I’m interested in, or to read the vendor’s steeping instructions. Having a URL in the description that people can use for informational purposes and edit themselves if a company changes their website, in no way prevents you from ALSO having a “Buy Link” with all the appropriate safeguards. It’s disingenuous to conflate the two, the way you’re doing.
I’m sorry to hear you disagree with the way the site is currently implemented. We have a lot of experience building websites and have put years and years of thought and work into Steepster, but that certainly doesn’t mean we’ve got everything right. And it definitely doesn’t mean we can make a perfect website for all different types of people trying to do different things. We try to do what we think is best for the site and move forward.
I, however, don’t really appreciate your presumption about our intentions. I never said the only reason to have a link to the vendor’s website is for purchasing, that is just the context in which we were discussing the issue. If anyone understands the benefit of having more information about a tea, that’s us. That’s one of the main functions of and reasons why we built Steepster in the first place – to help people provide more information about teas to the benefit of everyone else!
As for your questioning of our intentions, you noted this is a free service and we’ve never done any traditional advertising or things of the like, and we have links for probably less than 1% of our teas (I’m guessing the number here), only a fraction of which are actually affiliate links (if they’re even still active). I think our past activities and plenty of people on the site would vouch for our commitment to Steepster and that our efforts and actions are far from disingenuous.
At this point I’m not interested in debating the pros/cons of this specific interface implementation and what implacations it has on Steepster, the community, and us, as I don’t think we’ll necessarily see eye to eye, which is totally fine. And even if this does seem combative (that’s not my intention), it honestly does make me happy to see that you care enough about the site to have a strong opinion and passion about it’s direction, for which I’m very thankful.
Maybe you just don’t understand how people buy tea. Like, I can understand the assumption that if you put a “buy link” on each individual tea page, then someone who reads an amazing review of that tea is going to go “Wow! I must have that tea!”, click on the link, buy the tea, and ta da! Everybody wins.
Here’s how I actually buy tea:
Usually I’ll find out that a particular site is having a sale, either through my email or through the forums here. If it sounds interesting, I’ll go to that site and start browsing through the teas, looking for ones I might want to buy. At the same time, I’ll open steepster in another tab, and go to the listing of teas from that company (which usually involves searching for the name of the company, clicking on one of the search results, clicking on the name of the company in the tea info, then clicking on the “See All Teas” button). Then I’ll probably spend about 20min going back and forth between the two sites, opening new tabs for each tea that looks interesting, cross referencing with reviews, my wishlist, other people’s recommendations, etc. You want to buy enough tea to (hopefully) exceed the “free shipping” threshold or to at least make the shipping feel like it’s going to be worth it, but at the same time, you don’t want to waste money on tea you’re not going to enjoy. Anyway, by the end of this process I’ll have a bunch of teas in my cart on the vendor’s website. Then, more often than not, I’ll save my cart and go do something else for a while, come back to the cart 1-2 days later and check in with myself to see if it still seems like a good idea. :)
When I said if you got the affiliate links working I’d happily use them to support the site, I wasn’t kidding about the “going out of my way” bit. Like, instead of just opening the vendor’s website from a browser bookmark or history when I’m ready to make a purchase (one click), I would go to Steepster, search for the vendor, pick a tea belonging to that vendor, and then click in the “buy link” for that tea (4 clicks). I’ll happily do it, because I want to support the site, but the “buy links” do not in any way, shape, or form, actually facilitate my tea-buying experience. If you just had a single page with a listing of all the tea vendors you have affiliate arrangements with, so someone could just choose a vendor off the list and navigate to their site, that would actually be substantially more convenient (not to mention a much smaller task than keeping 50,000 individual product links functioning and up to date). I obviously can only speak for myself, not all the users of this site, but I wouldn’t be surprised if my experience turned out to be more common than you might think.
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