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by tptacek 4721 days ago
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.

2 comments

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.