Steepster Changes

[Robert Godden]

Many of us, me included, enjoy multiple tea communities.

I log in to steepster sometimes.

They’ve recently made some changes which look quite good, but in the process, they have upset me, and other vendor I imagine.

-Firstly, they have a new “Availability” field, in which they have every tea in the known universe listed as “Currently Unavailable” and offering to email you when it is available. This is not only incorrect, it is detrimental to our business. It almost looks like they have created their own shop (with no products in it)

-They have a company information field that I can find no way of actually updating (there is nothing in it, which looks shifty)

Does anyone know anything of this? The blog has some details but nothing that helps me, and I have emailed them a few times without any response.

[bram]

Sounds like a good idea implemented without enough thought/effort, making it an idea gone bad.

[peter]

Yeah, its a little disturbing also because they don’t give any information about why it isn’t available. Are they manually updating the database? It used to be that the buy now button would link to the tea at the vendor’s store (I was surprised that those links were never littered with affiliate links, would have been a great way to monetize steepster).

It is arguably lawsuit material because they are using the vendor’s imagery, name and publicly making the claim about the status of the product (which can impact your business). It is also notable that there is no link to vendor’s website anymore. There is a big lack of clarity in their new design.

I would post not only in their forums, but also on the blog post about it. In a sense, they are assuming some marketing control of your brand without offering a clear and obvious way for you to maintain control of it. That’s a legal liability on their part.

Ed. Note: This is something I spend a long time thinking about when I built out Tea Planet. I knew that if I was going to be listing and using the images of tea companies and displaying their brand, I had to build in an obvious way for them to gain control of the individual pages. Every page displays a form to do that.

[Jackie]

I don’t go on to Steepster but I will take a peek now! Certainly sounds like you have cause for concern Robert. As to Tea Planet, thanks for reminding me of it again @peter. I think the thumbnails need to include the state/country because there are so many tea leaves there now, that you can’t picture where which place is, unless you zoom right in.

[Xavier]

What kinds of details can you find in their blog?

[peter]

Here are the highlights from the blog post. It looks like the page is going to show the teas an unavailable until they come up for sale through Steepster themselves. I’m under the impression that they intend to warehouse all the teas in the database and sell them directly to their customers.

— Make it quicker and easier to understand information about a tea
— Include more useful details for each tea
— Help you track when teas and teaware become available for sale through Steepster
— Highlight interesting content from our awesome community

[peter]

There is also a forum thread about it as well, but there is no indication the devs are monitoring the comments in the thread. http://steepster.com/discuss/6947-the-new-tea-page

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