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Home / Cafe Culture / GreatCoffee.comThis site review is from April 2000.
Name: GreatCoffee.com Roasters Pay Attention!This month we wanted to locate a coffee roaster that created a great web site for their customers. A great web site by our criteria has excellent product descriptions, an easy to use shopping cart, good navigation, and a decent overall design. We couldn't find one roaster that had all of those qualities. Instead, we found roasters that lists of their beans with no descriptions, confusing or nonexistent shopping carts. We found the site that best captures how a quality roaster should sell coffee on-line is not a roaster at all; it is GreatCoffee.com, an on-line coffee seller. GreatCoffee.com has made partnerships with several roasters to sell a vast selection of coffee varietals and blends. In addition to selling beans, they also sell coffee equipment such as french presses and home roasters. Select roasters use GreatCoffee.com to sell their coffee. The prices are slightly higher than buying from a single roaster, but the advantage is that a user has a greater selection and is able to buy from multiple roasters on a single purchase.
Product DescriptionWhen investigating the purchase of coffee on-line, a consumer needs a good product description. GreatCoffee.com displays some of the best coffee descriptions on the Internet, because each bean type has a critique written by Coffee Review. Coffee Review is an on-line coffee buying guide that uses the cupping expertise of renowned coffee guru Kenneth Davids. Each coffee receives a score on a 50-100 scale. The reviews are broken down for the different cupping elements such as aroma, acidity, body, flavor and aftertaste. In addition to the numeric scores, the reviews have descriptive notes on the taste, crop, and advice on who should drink it. GreatCoffee.com also has a helpful coffee bean search engine called Coffee Concierge. This allows the user to search on style of coffee, level of roast, price, and review rating. Shopping CartThe other major strength of GreatCoffee.com is their shopping cart. It is very easy and intuitive to add and remove products to the shopping cart. On the upper right corner of every screen the number of items in your cart are listed with the dollar amount. The biggest flaw we found while surfing independent roaster sites was their failure to make an intuitive shopping cart. Some roasters rely on the user to complete their own order form. A few ask for credit card information on non-secure pages. Those roasters need to view the GreatCoffee.com shopping cart system.
SummaryAn independent roaster that wants to sell on line should keep two goals in mind. The roaster must describe the coffees to someone that can't see or smell the products. In the article How To Stereotype Roasters, I explain that a coffee's description helps the customer develop an impression prior to purchase. This is especially true for purchasing via the web. The second goal is (if the roaster decides to sell on-line) is to make an intuitive and secure ordering process. We couldn't find a roaster that was able to make a web site that equaled the site of the on-line coffee retailer GreatCoffee.com. INeedCoffee is proud to award the April 2000 Site of The Month award to GreatCoffee.com. |
