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It ok for Tazo to have a crappy landing page because they have excellent placement at point of purchase (aka. physical landing page). They have placement and pa
by fleitz 16y ago
It ok for Tazo to have a crappy landing page because they have excellent placement at point of purchase (aka. physical landing page). They have placement and packaging that converts, and built in defaults that result in sales. (eg. if you order tea you're ordering Tazo at a large number of coffee shops)
They also have excellent testimonials by having a large chain such as Starbucks serve their teas. Tea is generally an instant gratification purchase, and not something you'd wait 2 days to arrive over the internet. (Yes, perhaps there is an opportunity for a Zappos of tea, but internet retailing is not a core competency of Tazo)
If you're ordering tea from the internet, it's probably specialty and not something you can pick up from one of the hundreds of coffee shops you can find within a few miles of where ever you live. Hence if you are 'really really obscure hipster tea' then you need a good landing page, Tazo does not.
In the world of people who buy tea Tazo has the #1 ranking in terms of 'google for tea' (aka. starbucks). Designing a proper landing page and website will add almost nothing to their bottom line where as changing their packaging would have a much bigger impact, or sweetening the deal for distributors so the local mom and pop coffee shop is more likely to carry Tazo. People often forget that 98% of purchases are made offline. No one is going to order Tazo tea from the internet, nor will they decide to order Tazo tea the next time they are at the coffee shop because of a landing page. Therefore from the perspective of their bottom line their landing page is as good as it needs to be.
Also it appears that their 'landing page' is: http://www.facebook.com/tazo?v=info http://www.facebook.com/tazo?v=info and not tazo.com
- Umalu 16y agoBut how much would it cost Tazo to upgrade their landing page to be merely mediocre-but-usable? I would think that for a company of Tazo's size and success, the cost of doing this would be trivial.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- sudont 16y agoWhile the monetary cost is trivial, the amount of effort to turn around management is huge. This happens in a lot of corporations, where the best known subsidiary may have a radically different methodology. In this case, it’s Tazo’s approach to the web. Remember, Tazo is owned by Starbucks, which designs HTML5-featured sites around the iPad. They’re no stranger to a forward-thinking web presence.
- jamesjyu 16y agoSure, if Tazo were a 3 man startup with no bureaucracy or communication overhead, and with a high incentive to change their page. Never underestimate how much effort and time it takes for bigger companies to make seemingly minute changes. The more players involved with a product, the harder it is to make radical changes.
- philwelch 16y agoAccording to Wikipedia, the Tazo subsidiary has about 50 employees.
- sjs 16y agoThen that's another problem they have to solve.
- JoeAltmaier 16y agoTakes a month for EBay to change an icon on a page
- Zak 16y agoI'm wondering why they have a landing page at all, rather than simply directing viewers to the site that opens when you click the link on the landing page.
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoLooks like the result of hiring a designer that thinks they can create (develop) for the web because they learnt flash: <!-- START OF SmartSource Data Collector TAG --> <!-- © 1999-2004 NetIQ Corporation. All rights reserved. --> <!-- V7.0 --> <!-- $DateTime: 2003/10/28 16:26:23 $ --> Hmm, ...
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- blatherard 16y agoTazo is a division of Starbucks, not its own company. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tazo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tazo)
- ankimal 16y agoHow is it ok to have a crappy anything most of all your website?
- fleitz 16y agoBecause Tazo is not an internet startup therefore their website is irrelevant to sales which is what matters. Tazo isn't trying to raise VC from power points, their trying to sell tea, and from the looks of things have done a pretty good job of it.
- picasso81 16y agoA company's web site is a reflection of their brand (start up or not). This is a poor reflection. Being a food product / brick and mortar entity does not get you off the hook.
- qq66 16y agoFrom a philosophical perspective this is true, but even if this website is a poor reflection on Tazo, this has a minimal impact on Tazo's revenues and profits.
- zyphlar 16y agoTazo isn't an island unto itself. Major brand websites affect the style of the entire internet (see Google and Twitter for two recent examples) and so it's right to say this is an example of a crappy 1998 "landing page."
- Zak 16y agoI suspect the change would bring in enough profit over the course of a year to justify the 10 minutes it would take a bad web developer to put in a redirect from the landing page to the main site.
- Bud 16y agoTheir website is irrelevant to sales? Bzzt. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Anything worth doing (and websites, in case you did not notice the last 15 years of history, are definitely worth doing) is worth doing properly. Tazo is definitely not doing this properly. The site is actively annoying and well-nigh unto impossible to navigate. Where do you get this crazy attitude that the web is not relevant to sales? Have you been locked in a Wal-Mart with no access to the Internet since 1990?
- lwhi 16y agoA company shouldn't be allowed to do some things wrong, just because they're doing a lot of things right. It doesn't make sense. The actual site is pretty engaging, informative - and involves some interesting navigation widgets. Fixing the landing page is a no-brainer.
- netcan 16y agoallowed?
- bkudria 16y agoYou're right, they shouldn't be allowed. Quick, call the company police!
- FluidDjango 16y agoActually: Call stock holders.
- philwelch 16y agoI think you're right. I've never even seen landing pages of most of the food brands I eat. Why would I bother?
- angrycoder 16y agoYou are out of your mind. Their site flat out does not work with the default behavior of most modern browsers. In chrome, you get nothing but a tiny bit of text with no option to continue to the main site. In firefox and IE, you get a browser notification that the site is trying to open up a popup window.
- SomeCallMeTim 16y agoI have FireFox/NoScript, and with that it's even worse: After a few seconds of a screen with a tiny "broken plugin" window, it does a redirect to a "noflash" page. The only link on that page is to the Adobe Flash download. The redirect is one where the back button doesn't work; to me that's one of the most incompetent web design flaws: Send people away from your main page and then not give them a way to get back. It's bad enough they demand you have Flash (do all iPhone/iPad users drink coffee?) I've seen similar "Please enable JavaScript in your browser" pages without a path back to the main page as well. Idiocy.
- wildmXranat 16y agoYou had me at the first sentence. I thought there was something genuinely broken about that site. If that is the expected behavior, and it's far from good, someone ought to get reprimanded for that job.
- zitterbewegung 16y agoWeird i'm using chrome and I got the popup and was able to navigate to the site. (v 8.0.552.231)
- thirdstation 16y ago"You are out of your mind. Their site flat out does not work with the default behavior of most modern browsers" I think you are missing the fleitz's point. From his post: "It ok for Tazo to have a crappy landing page" They are omnipresent in meatspace. I'd say they overspent on the website. They could have gone with a one-pager that said something like "We're Tazo Tea. You can find us everywhere. Go buy some." He wasn't saying that is OK their site is non-functioning but that they really don't even need a website.
- lukevdp 16y agoRegardless of whether it affects their revenues and sales, they went to the effort of building a website, and then made it nigh impossible to get to. At the very least, they're wasting a large portion of their investment in building a website. Imagine if a tech startup created a physical bi-fold brochure, but then glued it shut. It doesn't matter a whole lot because it isn't mission critical for a tech startup, but it sure is a stupid thing to do.