I stumbled across a troubling occurrence this evening, its troubling to me because I learned tonight that there is a member of the online tea community who recently opened an online store to sell tea, but didn’t do it on Tea Trade. I’m not irritated about this because she didn’t set it up on Tea Trade, but more that the path she took is costing her significantly more money and potentially significant loss in sales performance.

Warning: this is a rant and a long read…

Let me explain:
To me, this was a lost sale and something of a failure on our part. Tea Trade sells web hosting and e-commerce services directed at individuals selling small quantities of tea. Jackie and I used Twitter to communicate with this potential Tea Trade customer and described how we could take her existing web presence, move it to Tea Trade and unify it into an online store. We offered instructions and help (I move and setup websites for existing bloggers for free) and unfortunately we never heard from her again.

Tonight, I found out she set everything up herself. No problem, I’m a firm believer that a person is free to do as they like. However, now she using three different websites to conduct her online business.

Why this is confusing:
People interested in reading about or shopping from this person have a lot of work to do to make this purchase. Since she is operating three separate websites, there is a psychological and emotional disconnect as the visitor browses her brand. I know about this disconnect because I built Tea Trade. Someone who comes to our Marketplace can be surprised when they click through to a seller’s site only to find a new website. This is something I work to mitigate every time (having the Tea Trade menubar at the top helps a great deal with this).

The scenario:
Let’s say that the visitor is browsing her blog (which has a certain, stylish look) and then learns that she sells tea. So she follows a link to her business website (with different look and different web address) where she markets her tea. Now, at the business website, which isn’t set up as an e-commerce site the individual tea posts that she has for sale actually link to a third site on Shopify where the purchase can be made and the visitor can browse her offerings of tea – if the visitor even makes it there.

In a world where individual clicks count against you, we are talking about a path that is 10+ clicks long with plenty of distractions along the way. Good e-commerce web design does two primary things: reduces clicks between start and goal; and reduces distraction and outbound links. The goal is to build a funnel from the front page of the website with no links except those that take a visitor deeper into the site, into the content and closer to the checkout page. The point is not hand your potential customer a way out, but remove as many opportunities as you can to keep them from getting out.

Why this disappoints me:
The end result is that I wonder if that person is underestimating her costs. Even with our 6% transaction fee, we are substantially less expensive than Shopify. We charge as charge as little as $20 per year to own a shop. Shopify charges more than that each month… She could sell a lot of tea on Tea Trade and still cost far less than what Shopify charges. In fact, I even offer a (not-quite-advertised yet) website development service where I will build, modify and configure your online store for you for a reasonable fee. She could have paid me the same amount she paid Shopify and I would have built her a site that normally would cost many hundreds of dollars and she would have complete control over it. Not to mention that I offer unlimited and very personal one-to-one support and training on how how best use your sites, and I provide that 7 days a week at all hours of the day or night.

The worst part is, I could have unified all of her websites and information into one, beautifully built online presence that is easy to navigate and guides customers to your goal.

We are good at what we do:
I’ve personally migrated over a dozen existing blogs onto Tea Trade. These are blogs that came over wholesale, the most significant one is SororiteaSisters.com. You all know it. It used to be hosted on WordPress.com, now I’m proud to say it lives on Tea Trade. When @teaequalsbliss and @liberteas were ready to bring it over to us, it was clearly no small decision. They had invested countless hours and even money into building up a fantastic backlog of tea reviews and posts. Due to the size of the blog, they asked me to handle the migration for them. The morning I set out to accomplish this task, I saw a professionally and amazingly organized website with well over 2,000 posts in its history.

I admit that I was nervous with being entrusted with such a gem and the fact that @liberteas just handed over the password and said, “please do this for us” was an incredible leap of faith on their part. I set about my task wondering how it was going to turn out.

It took me about ten minutes. In less time than it takes me to consume a whole pot of tea, I had transferred over one of the physically largest personal tea review sites on the internet to Tea Trade. It all went of without a hitch and now SororiteaSisters.com’s reviews are a mainstay of the Tea Trade homepage and activity stream. This is an example that we know what we are doing, and we’ve only gotten better.

Are you letting your ego get in the way?
We offer a lot to help the tea community connect with each other while allowing individuals the opportunity to maintain a sense of control and independence over their web image and presence. We offer full website service and more. The individual about whom I started writing this post received a full offer of guidance and help from Jackie and me. We reviewed the Twitter conversation tonight and the assistance we offered; it was made clear how much we would go out of our way to help her establish her presence on Tea Trade. We heard no more. Perhaps there was a sense of “I want to do it my way.” But is that always best for business?

If you are thinking of improving your blog, want more comments (Tea Trade blogs get more comments than tea blogs on competing platforms), want to evolve your blog into a store, or simply want to add a few teas to sell from your kitchen then we can help you. We can give you a fully integrated website where you can blog and sell tea right from one place.

Don’t let your pride get in the way of making efficient, sound, and prudent business decisions about your online presence. The services we offer can help virtually anyone wanting to write about, talk about or sell tea.