Doug,

Thank you for the well wishes!

I sincerely wish you well in your business. You haven't gotten to the position as one of the pre-eminent leaders in the coffee industry by being complacent. Competition is extremely eager to knock you out of your position but I doubt they will ever succeed. What I do know is if you are the cheapest there is no where else to go. A business built on price is like a home built on quicksand. It's the proper mix of all the elements with quality being unquestionable that makes it difficult for someone to displace. You have the quality and there is no doubt about it.

Bob

Gift Cards where delivered today of course since I posted this last night


I was pretty sure you sold fresh coffee but had a hard time finding where you said it..

https://www.intelligentsiacoffee.com/he...n-schedule

Pretty clear and succinct.

zin1953 wrote:Looking forward to that, Doug -- it's the primary reason I don't order Intelligentsia, unless I'm actually at the café . . .

Or you can convince a local coffee shop to start using BC for their espresso, and buy direct from them!
A fairly new local shop had a 'new hire' convince them of the finer qualities of Intelli's Black Cat.
I'm waiting for them to settle in but it looks like a great opportunity for me. My only kvetch is that they're not quite ripping through it as quickly as they're getting it, and it can be ten days old by the time I'm ready for a fresh pound.
Soon I'll figure out their schedule, they'll get their customer needs/ordering routine down pat, and it'll be fresh BC no farther than three stoplights away.

Bring a 'gift' of Black cat to a local shop, and let them figure out the rest!

Yes I have found it but only after reading a few dozen pages...

I read every LEARN page last night but missed the sub pages of the learn pages....

You can find the info at LEARN > Our Process sub page Roasting & Production
very bottom of long page..

Every bag is roast-dated before it leaves our warehouse. Coffee this fresh is still chemically reacting and releasing carbon-dioxide, so each of our bags is equipped with a valve to vent the pressure created by the beans de-gassing. The bags are heat-sealed, rolled down and taped or tin-tied shut. Our coffee is roasted to order and shipped that same day.

Also HELP > FAQ > First Question

I think this info should be easier to find for dummies like me....

Most sites have a Shipping Page that tells buyers about how shipments are made, this is all 20/20
There is a lot of info to deeply embedded in site for a online buyer just browsing to find a store..

I want the home page to tell whats what asap.......

IE: "We sell some of the finest coffee and freshest coffee period"

Not whats in season or black cat tools and a huge changing image.......
Those things would make me surf right on by....

Say you sell great stuff and show me the price and how much shipping cost and educate me on how to use what you sell...

It's linked to from multiple places that I could find - including from the shopping cart itself.

Having a little web design experience myself, I agree with Johnny that Intelligentsia's well-written FAQ should be linked from the main navigation bar, ideally with inclusion of some of the current HELP page content. For good measure, I would also add it under LEARN as the first item.

Hint to webmasters: To really gain insight on user habits, Google Analytics has an overlay navigation feature that shows which links are the most popular stepping points. By combining path analysis and bounce rate, you can accurately determine (a) where your site's navigation fails, and (b) the effectiveness of your efforts to improve your site's user friendliness. Unfortunately Internet users have the attention span of a gnat. If they don't find what they want in 30 seconds-- or are at least confident they're on the right path --they're gone. Design accordingly.

Thanks HB
looks pretty cool for free
https://www.google.com/analytics/

I have to try it on my hobby site

Just checked Doug's site and he uses Google Analytics as code is on his home page..



I dabble in graphics and made this for Doug..
I can send you a Transparent Gif of this image without coffee bean background if you want...

I had the same issue with the Intelligentsia site.

I would not have found the roasting information without Malachi's link. Looking in the help page, way up in the upper corner, was not obvious to me, the "learn" page seems like where it should have been.

And the shopping cart doesn't really help, I would hope to find that information before I started to check out.

Randy

I think, in general, we all are often too likely to turn to a site like H-B (or one of the other community type sites) for "help" in these cases. All vendors provide contact information (with everything from email to phone info) on their sites. I would like to gently suggest that the first option when running into a problem or having a question should be the vendor themselves - and that it would be fair to give the vendor a chance to respond before turning what could in fact simply be a misunderstanding into something that is public and problematic.

While it's great to see vendors like Intelligentsia responding so quickly to a thread like this - I think a more measured and less public approach might be more sensitive and polite. There has been a tendency at times in the past for these queries for "help" to come off a bit more like vendor bashing and less like a request for assistance. And this, of course, serves no-one in the end.


On a different note entirely - it is general best practices on a web site to have all primary, secondary and tertiary information linked to from the "footer" of the home page. This is something that nearly every commercial site in the world tends to follow. If you look at the Intelligentsia site, you will note that links to both "contact us" and "help" are included in the footer. While I can see being confused by "learn" v "help" - you will notice that clicking on "contact us" brings up a page that includes not just phone number and a contact form but also links to the FAQ, the Production Schedule and the Shipping Schedule.