How do you buy tea?

Pasting my comment here:

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.

The buy links annoy me – while I’d happily support Steepster by buying via an affiliate link, those page links make it seem like steepster is selling the tea, and it’s in stock or isn’t.

I wish they’d get rid of them, or maybe replace them with a single “Use this link and support Steepster” button that went to a single page with the affiliate links on it.

Like Lindsay, if I knew that my order from YS or Verdant or Davids or whatnot could be made through an affiliate link to support Steepster, I’d go out of my way to use the link.

I feel the same, I take a lot of time and consideration into buying tea so I always scope out the websites beforehand, especially since the “buy” links are almost never there or working.
If they were always there and working and I knew they supported steepster I might be more inclined to use them, but for now I don’t pay any attention to them.

I understand the idea behind them, but I wish they weren’t called Buy Now / Notify Me When Available.

Why not call it what it is? Something about it being a link to the vendor? “Click here for [Insert Vendor’s Name]’s page?” Then they can still get advertising revenue, and we know what we’re clicking on without any confusion about whether the product is in stock or not.

95% of the time, I make multiple visits to a site and fill multiple shopping carts before I actually commit to a sale. I might impulse buy a single tea if shipping were free, but that’s almost never the case, so planning a purchase carefully, to make sure I’m buying enough to make shipping worth while is always a consideration.

I would happily go through affiliate links if they were available and functioning, since Steepster is the only reason I’m aware of so many excellent companies.

I appreciate Jason’s explanation of why that box exists, and I could see it being useful for large tea brands that are carried by multiple retailers, but it seems like most of the teas I come across are either from small, independent companies that don’t wholesale, or big brands that have been retailed with private labelling, under a small brand name.

A straight forward affiliate link to the tea or even just the tea company’s site would be awesome. Maybe easier to populate, too? I think I’ve gotten into the habit of just not even seeing that box any more, since it hasn’t been useful.

I confess to being obsessive. At the current moment, I have three spreadsheet pages for potential pu-erh purchases and one for black/flavored teas. Prior to Black Friday, I might have twice as many. I tweak these until there is 1) a sale or 2) I can’t stand waiting. I almost always make an order large enough to qualify for free S&H, so have to really love the company. Since shipping from China pretty much starts at $15, a pu-erh purchase is usually over $100, which is why I don’t do impulse purchases. I use steepster reviews, TTB sampling, and past purchases to decide which companies to buy from.

Right now my buying/shopping habits are all out of order because a certain favorite retailer is closing and I keep placing “promise myself this is the last one” orders. However, my normal approach to shopping is pretty similar to Lindsay’s.

I keep my Steepster wishlist up-to-date. I also make a mental note of companies that look interesting. Unless there’s cause to believe that a specific tea I really want is going to disappear, I wait until a sale. Then I pull up the company website in one tab and Steepster in another. I check for anything on my Steepster wishlist and put that in my cart first. Then I look at what else the company offers. If it looks interesting, I check it out on Steepster to help me decide whether to purchase it. By the time I’m happy with my cart, I’ve put so much time into planning it that I usually won’t wait to complete the purchase.

Like others, I would happily go out of my way to use an affiliate link through Steepster. That’s not quite how the Buy It Now buttons work right now. Mostly they’re a visual nuisance. I like Lindsay’s idea of having a single page with all of the affiliate links on it and/or Anlina’s suggestion of replacing the Buy It Now button with a direct link to the retailer’s website.

I would also prefer it to be more transparent and clear that the link is an affiliate and that I would be supporting a website I like. Thanks for sharing your experience. I do a lot of research myself before purchasing, I also ask friends and well we are picky aren’t we? It could be hit or miss.

I wonder if Jason (or any of the other admins) are actually reading these comments. This seems like pretty valuable user feedback…