Website not converting – any ideas? | Hacker News Reader

Website not converting – any ideas?

balsamicsauce.com

19 pointstmandarano54 comments

I mostly sell software to businesses rather than selling balsamic sauce to upper middle class women but, hey, if you want free advice:

1) Every e-commerce company ever will tell you to offer "Free shipping" even if you have to build it into the price of the bottle. Your target customer doesn't care about the difference between $15 and $20 but, oddly, she does care about paying five whole dollars to ship something she could "just pick up at the store."

2) You're currently selling authentic, which is better than selling nothing at all, but authenticity is not the primary driver of the food purchasing decisions of upper-income Americans. Some options which would complement authenticity: exclusive ("not like the kind you get at the supermarket" / (generally not explicit but heavily implied) "better than what the poor people put on their caprece"), healthy (oh God is that a big one), decadent, social conscience (produced by small family-owned farms rather than big evil agribusiness) etc.

Yes, there's a bit of tension between someone wanting to use class consciousness as conspicuous consumption, but meet your customer where she is at -- and she is at Starbucks.

3) She doesn't care about your story. She cares about her story. Does this make her better than the other moms of the PTA who buy $5 balsamic at the supermarket? If so, lead with that, support with your story.

4) Get some photos of people on your site. Laura of Laura in the Kitchen, for example, as she is a good stand-in for your customer's ideal self. Failing that, if someone who is involved in actually making the balsamic has camera appeal, use them instead.

5) Do some deep thoughts on where people are in the purchasing process when they find you. If they're sure they want this, you don't put the "BUY OUR STUFF" nearly front and center enough. If they're not, your current focus on persuading them that you're the best balsamic makes more sense.

"upper middle class women" "moms of the PTA"

holy wtf dude?

Is that like "WTF, the primary market for this is not upper middle class women" or "WTF, you are being very blunt about this." If the second, guilty as charged. If the first, I'd very much like to hear who you think buys premium-priced balsamic.

Let's focus on your "moms of the PTA" comment.

To his credit, "moms of the PTA" are quite close to our target customer.

OK. Can you articulate why you object to me using those words, now that we're in apparent agreement that the target customer is actually an upper middle-class woman? I mean, I know why it would cause a few of my professors to sputter, but their rationale for that isn't persuasive. Maybe yours is.

Your summary is my sister in law and her mommy group friends. They would totally buy this stuff if they thought it would make them "better" than the other women in the mommy group or if it were more socially conscious in some way so it could be a talking/bragging point at the next mommy meeting.

Yes. It's a social critique style comment.

It doesn't have to represent the 100% of the consumers of such products. Just the majority.

And by the unwritten rules of how we talk about such things (in essays and such), they don't even have to be "moms of the PTA" literally. It's enough to be "moms of the PTA"-like, ie. ascribing to belong (and exhibit) the same kind of social characteristics (class, sophistication, etc) as "moms of the PTA".

> Is that like "WTF, the primary market for this is not upper middle class women" or "WTF, you are being very blunt about this." [...] If the first, I'd very much like to hear who you think buys premium-priced balsamic.

Upper-middle class foodies. Who are probably less likely to be women than the market for non-premium balsamic.

This is a fine hypothesis but, without data, it's hard to see why it's probable. In the USA, two-thirds of grocery shopping is done by women. There are studies:

http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2011/in-u-s-men-are-sh...

...which suggest that men make 38% of retail grocery shopping trips. So, if you're going to envision a representative person who is looking for a grocery item, you should probably start out by envisioning a woman.

It is, unsurprisingly, difficult to find more specific information online for free. Instead, by googling "market analysis salad dressing", I find approximately six market research organizations that offer to sell me a report. Perhaps the OP has bought such a thing, but none of the rest of us are likely to bother.

Of course, what actually matters when trying to convert website visitors is not the demographics of the universe, or of US grocery buyers, or even of US buyers of balsamic vinegar, but the behavior of the people who are actually reaching the website. About whom we really know nothing.

Women who are older than PTA age. The percent of old people in the population is increasing, and older women tend to have more money, more time, and fewer kids in the house. Most PTA moms in the U.S. do not feel they have the time or money for premium groceries one might linger over. They do care about healthy, but they're not feeding their kids premium balsamic.

That's not at all that the PC parent meant by this.

And I don't think it's true either -- that older people are the major buyers of premium groceries. I don't see that many older people when I go into premium grocery stores -- except if by that you mean 35-50.

Sorry, patrick cares more about the actual reality of what motivates buying decisions of the target demographic than whatever is nicer to believe.

Correct. Thank you Patrick.

Women are more likely to shop for food than men.

Upper middle class women spend more on premium food products than lower middle class women.

(I'm a friend of Patrick's and have had dinner with him enough to guess that he's not food-savvy enough to know that upper-upper class women wouldn't buy "balsamic sauce" because it isn't packaged in a thimble and doesn't cost $150; he just happened to get that one by accident.)

Moms often cook for their families.

Moms of the PTA are especially engaged with their family life, and are especially likely to take seriously the process of shopping for premium food products.

This is called customer targeting. It's about as sexist as it is ageist to target advertising for American Girl Dolls to 8 year girls.

I'm not sure what's so hard to understand about this. Sometimes, by being knee-jerk and superficial in your reaction to gender issues, even in the "right" direction, one can actually come close to betraying a lack of understanding about what the real issues are.

(I say this as someone who has spent an embarrassing amount of money on vial-sized jars of balsamic.)

Holy wtf back at you.

For calling the Politically Correct SWAT teams into innocent conversation. Can people say anything that does not annoy the PC crowds anymore?

Yes, in the real world, women drive more food purchases such as this than men. And mostly "upper middle class" women, or, to be more precise, upper middle class wannabes, buy something like balsamic.

You know patio11, sometimes I read your blog posts and get a feeling of lingering doubt, like, "there's no way this guy can be as clever and successful as he claims." And then I see a comment of yours (like this one) and any trace of doubt evaporates.

Thank you! Extremely helpful.

6) Don't have an order page that 404's

http://www.balsamicsauce.com/collections/frontpage/products/...

I think your website isn't converting because you sell a product that requires a buyer who is going out of their way to find balsamic --- something US customers buy in aisle 3 of Whole Foods --- and your packaging has none of the signals that people who go out of their way for that use to gauge quality.

* Stop calling it "sauce". Cheese can be a high-quality premium product. "Cheese sauce" not so much.

* Stop calling it a "glaze" if it is in fact something you could call "vinegar". Nobody is shopping for "balsamic glaze". I'm left wondering if I know what the product actually is, which is death to an attempt to get me to buy it off a website.

* The plastic bottle is killing me. Safeway Supermarket balsamic looks like this: http://tinyurl.com/kxyfumo --- the "real" thing looks like this: http://tinyurl.com/layjtkc

If you want to see the acknowledged uncontested masters of premium food product copywriting at work, you're in luck, because they too sell balsamic vinegar over the Internet. Ladies & Gentlemen I give you the Versace of $40 bottles of black peppercorns, the Zegna of $30 jars of mustard: Zingerman's Delicatessen in Ann Arbor:

http://www.zingermans.com/Product.aspx?ProductID=V-MOD-1

Their balsamic comes with a book. (Juniper, "the most expensive wood". Sheesh. Juniper is a weed.)

I'm guessing from the typos and grammar errors on your site that you're in Italy. Good. Play that card for all its worth; use italian words to describe your product. What's Italian for "glaze", "blend", "aged", "condiment", "sweet", "syrup", and "grape"? Start branding.

Speaking as someone whom I'm guessing is right in the OP's target market (extremely picky foodie willing to pay considerable sums for premium food products), tptacek's point about calling it "glaze" is right on.

Personally, I looked at the website, saw "glaze", and immediately thought "OK, I'm not buying that. I buy really good balsamic vinegar, but there's no goddamn way I'm buying something calling itself a pre-made glaze."

Safeway Supermarket balsamic looks like this

It seems that the URL you used there had session information within it -- hopefully that didn't have any security ramifications.

I don't have a Peapod account, so I imagine no.

Some thoughts:

1. Get a better hero photo. The JPEG artifacts were the very first thing that caught my eye, even before I fully processed what the photo was of. The photo is also too close-up. It's a caprese salad, but because it's so close to the black beads of liquid, that context is lost. Consumers of balsamic use it in context, not alone. The context is lost in this photo.

2. Tune up spacing, padding, margins, line spacing. Some need to be tighter, some more spacious. Right now things look unbalanced.

3. Get a clearer brand logo. The logo is blurry and badly compressed.

4. Keep all elements in your carousel the same height. Right now, the video pushes content down.

5. Messaging on the carousel moves around too much.

6. Consider not even using a carousel. Single photo; single call to action.

7. Use a web font. Right now, everything is using Arial on my Windows PC.

8. Use properly-sized images. On http://www.balsamicsauce.com/pages/balsamic-glaze some images are being scaled in the browser.

9. Use JPGs for photos, not PNGs. PNGs should be use for the logo graphic and iconography.

10. Simplify the scripting on the page. Pet peeve: the site loads scripts from what appear to be a dozen third-party domains.

I'm no expert, though, so take all of my advice for what it is: just some random ideas from a total stranger.

He's using Shopify for e-commerce, he might not have too much choice in regards to where scripts are loaded from, especially since he's using a few 3-rd party add-ons/plugins/etc. as well.

One thing I noticed is that the Google Fonts request is incorrect, I get ""NetworkError: 400 Bad Request - http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=.|" in Firebug. But this doesn't have anything to do with conversions.

What is the purpose of using JPGs instead of PNGs.

For (almost all) photos, JPGs are smaller and therefore load quicker. Its compression is much less noticeable in photographs, and therefore the size savings are usually worth it.

For logos, text, geometric imagery, etc, you generally need the image to remain relatively undistorted, so PNG is the way to go.

The text is not contrasted enough against the pictures, too.

My first impressions as a layman:

A. Have that yellow button be buy now, not read the story. Have the story on the product page.

B. Way too many clicks to order, something like 5 pages to get to checkout. I think it should be Home -> product -> checkout. There's a reason Amazon loves it's one-click.

Shipping kills it.

Sell it on Amazon etc. Tell people where they can buy it.

After my first click, my initial guess is that your links are broken.

e.g. The "Order Now" button on your first banner links to this page: http://www.balsamicsauce.com/collections/frontpage/products/... which is a 404.

Yikes! Thank you.

Just on the front page:

• White slide text against bright background photos is difficult and unpleasant to read

• A small yellow "Order now" or "Read our story" button with ordinary black text is easy to miss and not enticing to click on. Try CSS Button Generator instead: http://www.cssbuttongenerator.com/

• Lots of things on homepage saying "Order now!" but I have no idea what it is I'd be buying or why I ought to want to buy it

• Lots of emphasis on "Read our story" but I don't have any reason to want to do this right now (maybe you're targeting only highly qualified leads who are already brand fans?)

• The homepage itself is confusing - it looks more like a restaurant's page designed to cater to people who are already deciding whether to dine there... that is, a page that simply needs to create the right ambiance to get people to take action offline. This design is not well suited to online commerce, though. If you want better conversions, benchmark websites that already convert - e.g., see Amazon.com; it tests religiously, and also sells food

Overall, if I'm hitting this website with no idea what it is, it's too confusing (too much info / too hard to read / calls to action to buy something or read something I know nothing about and do not yet want) and too generic-looking for me to stay.

It seems like you went for style first - and the style, from a purely artistic standpoint, is indeed very sleek and very nice.

It's just better at being pretty than it is at selling me anything. I might suggest a redesign focused on hard, practical sales, and once you've figured out what sells best in your niche, then work on prettying things back up, without sacrificing what you've discovered makes the site convert.

You should also submit your question to

http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/

and

http://www.reddit.com/r/entrepreneur

You never actually mention the size of the bottles. So, $15 for what? Okay if I look at the image maybe I see 7.95 fl oz? Maybe 2.95 fl oz? 235 ml. How big is that? How big is that bottle I usually buy at Trader Joe's for $4? e.g. am I paying a 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x premium for this balsamic? How much different does nice balsamic really have in the taste anywhere? These are all my questions as a low-end balsamic buyer.

Ah, thank you! I can't believe we're missing this. We'll add it.

How about giving out small packets of it for free or price of shipping? Collect e-mails and then convert them from there.

You need a big call to action button on the front page that says 'Order Now' ! Right now it is not even immediately apparent that you are selling the product. It could very well be a recipe website or something...

Also http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/

Hah - http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/ was the first thing that came to mind when I loaded up the site - nice!

Some other points:

- The main image in your carousel, the zoomed in tomatoes and mozzarella, is poorly pixelated and makes the site look unprofessional

- You use the phrase "Our Balsamic" in several places - maybe it's just me but this is painful: Balsamic is an adjective* - please oh please finish that sentence for me - your balsamic what? * http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/balsamic

- Some of your giant carousel's elements are very attractive looking, but the whole thing is much wider than the rest of the site and throws the whole look off - removing the carousel entirely, working some of the most appealing images into the site in a more tasteful way (really you already do this, and you have all of those elements in triplicate from the top navbar to the carousel to the bottom quad of linked images) and making the whole page fit in a single no-scrollbars-on-common-resolutions layout would be far better and not make me want to leave the site as soon as I arrive...

I agree with you on this.

I looked at the site for about 10 seconds and I didn't realise it was a store until I flipped tabs and read the first comment.

My initial impression was that it was some kind of recipe site.

I've read occasional copies of Cooks Illustrated and know only enough about balsamic vinegar to realize that I've probably never tasted the real thing.

I might be part of your target market!

Unfortunately, what I, clueless aspiring foodie, have read about balsamic vinegar is that the real thing costs $50 or $100 a bottle and up, so if I see a bottle with the word "balsamic" on it, but it doesn't cost as much as that, and it doesn't look like the ones I see on websites like this one that I just googled up:

http://whatscookingamerica.net/balsamic.htm

... I am seized with the deep and unreasoning fear that I'm being ripped off.

Yeah, I know it's not the same product. But that does not make me feel better!

And, you know, if I want to buy something that looks like balsamic and that has a nifty label that uses words like "tradizionale", I don't need to click a button, I can just walk over to my cupboard and take out one of the three bottles I already own. (Two of them were gifts.) They taste... pretty good? I guess? I wouldn't know! In my more cynical moments I suspect that at least one of them was lovingly designed in the traditional chem labs of Northern New Jersey.

If I ever bother to fix this situation, my plan is to find someplace where I can actually taste a range of vinegars and decide if I believe that the difference matters.

Or maybe I can get to culinary heaven faster with the help of the right website. What might help me to click your buy button? Consider this phrase on the site I just linked to:

"If a company produces a "traditional" balsamic vinegar, they will also produce a less expensive, but high quality vinegar as well. This is the same vinegar with the same heritage but not aged as long. You can have confidence in purchasing these balsamic vinegars."

Clever. By a staggering coincidence, the page this quote appears on has some links to Amazon where you can buy $100 bottles of vinegar (sales rank: 238543 in their category)... next to some links to Amazon where you can buy some $13 bottles of vinegar (sales rank: 5842).

Do what these folks did. Add some super-premium balsamic to the product line. Put it in some kind of classic bulb-shaped bottle with an "authentically wooden" cork and wax. Get the one that bears the official seal of the guild and that has been blessed by the Vatican and what have you. Whatever makes it look more real to somebody like me who knows nothing. Put it on your website wrapped in golden paper with a nicely printed Guide To Your New Vinegar and a gaudy price like $150 for 3 ounces.

Then write some copy that goes like this: "We welcome you to try our super-product, the greatest balsamic vinegar ever made, an elixir that reduced Mario Batali to tears... though, lest you become overwhelmed by the force of its flavor, we encourage you to taste it only one drop at a time via an authentic Venetian glass eyedropper that we also sell on this website. But... let's get real. The farmers who make this stuff do not eat it every day. They prefer to sell it to hedge fund managers. Moreover, they are wise, and they have been doing this for hundreds of years, so they know how to make a blend of less-expensive vinegars from the same growers that provides almost as great a taste, but inexpensively enough that they can enjoy it every day. And now you too can enjoy it every day in glaze form for only $20 a bottle."

I believe they call this "anchoring". ;)

(Incidentally, I do have fun writing anecdotes, but need I point out that I'm only one person, I've never visited your website until today, and I don't buy vinegar over the internet? Test with your actual audience.)

Bounce rates continues to rise. To fight it, I've tried to simplify the site and have even removed the blog from the main page and moved it to a tab in the header. Mistake? Good idea?

Is this your company or are you just doing this on behalf of a client? If you're attempting to bootstrap and do everything yourself, this might be somewhat helpful for increasing conversions: http://goodui.org/ , although it's targeted at primarily software-based products/services.

I am attempting to bootstrap and do it all myself.

Where is your traffic coming from? Unless you have super specific keyword driven adwords / organic results this looks like a very specific niche and I would expect quite high bounce rates.

Exactly what I was going to ask.

Consider reaching out to some cooking / DIY bloggers that fit your target and sending them a bottle to try.

Bounce rates are probably rising because you've just posted it on HN.

I've made sure to omit the HN hits from GA.

I can't read the hero text for my life. The white on those pictures is KILLING me.

http://i.imgur.com/UoD5gTv.jpg

Here are some great tactics that will help increase conversion... just published this actually.

How Mad Libs Help Conversion:

http://blog.sweetiq.com/2013/07/drive-more-conversions-with-...

No one calls it Balsamic Glaze in the US. We call it Balsamic Dressing.

Interesting. Foodies actually refer to this as a balsamic reduction / balsamic glaze. Do you use a lot of balsamic vinegar?

Never heard anyone call it Balsamic Dressing in my life. (US)

I hope this is useful...

General - site is overcrowded with too many photos and too much "stuff".

Suggestions:

1) Put a large bright "Order Today" button in the top right corner. Everything is secondary to this button.

2) Tone down everything.

3) Too many photos and screaming words without substance makes the product seem more about marketing than quality.

4) Don't underestimate the "quaintness" factor. The best site I've seen selling a similar product had a "terrible" website but sweet text.

Home:

- "Hero" slides have too many photos and text on top is hard to read. Simplify drastically. The photos are also zoomed too far in. It's like talking to someone that stands too close.

- Don't say "join our family" for ordering.

- Don't reuse photos like the raspberry one.

- Add some whitespace between hero slideshow and the logo.

- Logo bigger?

- Row of boxes: Our story, our balsamic, how to use... The text is repeated twice (and is the same links at the top and footer). Perhaps the text could be better.

- Do you really need a "cart" and "my account" link in the top right?

- Useful links in the footer are just the same links again.

- The Purchase links in the footer are nice. I would also consider moving the shopping cart block up a little.

- Join our family seems nice, but it confuses me. The text below the box makes more sense "signup to get the latest recipes, exclusive offers, special gifts and more..." Could this be trimmed down and more specific?

Our Story

- The photo at the top is pretty but turns me off. I don't get warm feelings until "A Family Collaboration"... Perhaps take everything out above it.

- How about a photo of people...not a stock photo, but one that looks like a real family photo.

About Our Balsamic - Too many fonts, colors and photos...and reuse of the same photos again. - The text seems pretty good... but perhaps tell us more about what makes a balsamic good.

Recipe Blog

- How about just "recipes"

- I like this page but it confuses me. Could it include more text on each recipe or perhaps a little less before I click?

- The recipes look great!

- The photos seem a little overpowering

Order

- I don't like this page at all. I don't know where to click and I assume I can somehow order here.

- Could the menu bar link at the top just link to the actual order page?

Actual Order Page

- Love the top part... put too much text further down. Perhaps use some of this text on other pages? I got this far. I want to order something... Don't make me read more text... Let's complete the sale and move on.

- I don't like the photo of 16 bottles. Can we just have a second "add to cart" button or a quantity discount at the top?

Other Ideas

- FAQ page? What is Balsamic? Why does aging make it better? Can I tour the farm? I'm not a chef, will it be OK to use on regular food?

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