I've been following your posts since you started with the business. Have to say that I'm impressed by your tenacity in keeping this fun idea going.
Now, your marketing copy is all over the place. The layout is so hard to follow. Things are just too spread around, and the eye cannot follow an easy reading path.
Put everything into two columns, side by side. Put more pictures, and more information. Get a smaller third column on the right side for the testimonials.
Also, your headline is not bade, but it has nothing under it for me to read . The job of a headline is to get people reading the copy. You have no copy.
The big ugly green button is akin to a car salesman handing you a buying contract for a brand new car before you even shake hands. Get that out of there!
I believe that if you did a video of you hand picking specialized candy for your customer then sales would improve. People are not buying the candy, they are buying the experience. Let them see the process through a camera so they can relate and live out their Japanese fantasy.
In fact, do a 10 minute long video of you shipping for candy. Put all the different candies and give out your opinions. Talk to Japanese people, and have them share their favorites. You could even try and get the best selling candy manufacturer into letting you do a little tour of their factory.
There are so many neat things you can do that will turn this into a 10K business ASAP.
oh yes, have some random Japanese person pick stuff and ask them to say eg "from whatevercity, greetings to the rest of the world. I am Mr x and picked some of my favourite candy for you. this one is called sgggddtgcf, it tastes like qetffhh. the bright green one is a bit special, be careful. -- I hope you will enjoy them!". show the shopping/picking. ask cute Japanese girls if men are most of your customers. maybe do that once per month. maybe personally address some of your customers in it (ask before).
I think Japanese people are very camera shy. For example on social networks in Japan, most don't show their face in profile pictures. I did meet one guy who was the total opposite, so I managed to make a video with him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb7PP2z3nnw
The thing with these videos is that I need to make two per month, and I'm not sure how I would source that many people to agree to appear in the videos.
But yeah, it would be pretty awesome if I could figure out how to pull that off.
Candy is hardly a gendered product, and foreign interest in Japanese culture and food isn't either. Adding gendered advertising in such a way is unlikely to gain many new leads, but will certainly limit the audience dramatically.
For some reason, the "testimonials from random Japanese people" idea seems rather unsettling to me. It makes it feel exoticized, touristy, and fake.
Looking at the front page, I didn't really experience the problems you describe. I had just two issues:
1) The photos of the candy should really near the top and visible without scrolling -- 'candy' is not a term I come across often, so I wasn't completely certain what was being sold. Perhaps I'm unusual, but I don't bother with videos unless the product has already interested me.
2) My eyes skipped past the price completely. I was actually about to write here that they left it out, finally spotting it only when I went looking.
...the green pay button was fine for me -- not particularly ugly or dodgy looking.
Hi, thanks for the feedback. The current layout is the result of lots of playing around with the site. Testimonials and the video had a big impact on conversions, so they are front and center now. I guess I might be biased from looking at the site a lot, but to me it seems pretty clean.
I think it needs to be clear exactly what step I want the user to take to join, so that's why that huge big green button is there. It's also not half bad looking in my opinion, although depends on your browser since it uses some recent webkit CSS stuff.
Factory tour / other kind of video back scenes content is probably a good idea. Since the current video works, it may be that that would work even better. Even before that though, I've been thinking of experimenting with a video that would just explain the service in simple terms.
You have a lot of ideas, have any for how to bring in traffic?
Personally, I really like the design. The only thing I would do would be to slightly increase the line-height on your copy. It should make it slightly easier to read (I usually aim for about 1.5em but some prefer slightly less).
Have you tried targeted ads on reddit? Maybe for something like /r/snackexchange? I just spent $30 on a test ad, if you're interested I can share the traffic stats with you.
Things might be different now, the page was less optimized back then. I might try again later, but I'm really hoping Reddit would just lower their minimum daily spend. Right now they have no advertiser there at all, I'd love to advertise if it was just a tad cheaper.
Nope, you're experience mirrors those of mine. It's hard to convert redditors; in part due to neglecting the self-serve platform. With that said, $60 to bring in a brand new customer isn't that bad.
Maybe it would be cheaper to hook up with a subreddit mod and run a give-a-way. $50 worth of candy for a front page post sounds like a better value :D
Now, your marketing copy is all over the place. The layout is so hard to follow. Things are just too spread around, and the eye cannot follow an easy reading path.
Put everything into two columns, side by side. Put more pictures, and more information. Get a smaller third column on the right side for the testimonials.
Also, your headline is not bade, but it has nothing under it for me to read . The job of a headline is to get people reading the copy. You have no copy.
The big ugly green button is akin to a car salesman handing you a buying contract for a brand new car before you even shake hands. Get that out of there!
I believe that if you did a video of you hand picking specialized candy for your customer then sales would improve. People are not buying the candy, they are buying the experience. Let them see the process through a camera so they can relate and live out their Japanese fantasy. In fact, do a 10 minute long video of you shipping for candy. Put all the different candies and give out your opinions. Talk to Japanese people, and have them share their favorites. You could even try and get the best selling candy manufacturer into letting you do a little tour of their factory.
There are so many neat things you can do that will turn this into a 10K business ASAP.
Good luck!
PS. Shoot me an email to rm at innovafy dot com