With the new year well underway, it’s time for our websites to receive a much-needed upgrade. Behind the scenes, we’ve been quietly engaged in the reassuringly named Operation Apocalypse: a complete, nose-to-tail rewrite of the data that underpins our websites.
The first fruits of our labours will be pushed live over the next few weeks. What you will see is that all the product variants, sizes mainly, will be grouped together. Instead of, say, three separate and independent products for 8g, 15g, and 35g variants, you will see a single product with the choice of those variants on the same product page.
This isn’t revolutionary; most sites work this way. It simply makes things much easier and faster to find. However, achieving this required restructuring all our product data across nearly 1000 product variants.
This all serves our new mantra: Price, Convenience, Selection.
Convenience
The real benefit lies in the future. Once this foundational work is complete, we can easily implement the next wave of improvements, starting with product descriptions. Ever since I started at Mr Snuff, I’ve felt that the product descriptions were inadequate. Some were simply wrong, many were just filler, but mostly they failed to properly and honestly inform a buying decision.
With the new data structures in place, we can finally roll out new product descriptions based on the individual snuff profiles we’ve been compiling over the last year. Each description will be generated from the underlying specification, ensuring consistency and, crucially, the ability to properly compare apples with apples. This will also provide the recommendation algorithms with the data they need to offer genuinely meaningful recommendations.
Price
As part of this release, we have also revised all our prices. Some go up, many go down, but all are now properly calculated to ensure the best prices while maintaining profitability. In fact, we are so confident that these price changes are to your benefit that once they go live, we will be issuing a new guarantee: We won’t be beaten on price!
Selection
As promised, we have been looking at expanding our selection of products. New high-quality mixing tins are going live with this release. Snubies World Tour in 15g and 35g variants are arriving soon; Simply Snuff is getting a 15g variant option added across the range; a new Yellow Dragon madras is coming from India; Neo-Bernard’s is on its way; we aim to get better packaging for the Indian snuffs; and we are still pushing for high-quality resealable soft packs for bulk buy variants across as many products as we can. Finally, a selection of spoons, an expanded range of handkerchiefs, and some cool Nasal Lavage bottles (I use mine every day) are all in play.
It’s a new year. Last year was all about preventing the ship from sinking. This year, we hope to unfurl our sails and start to make some headway.