Welcome to Taunton Bay Soap Company’s new home on the internet, Tribe! As I type, it is still a work in progress & you all have been so patient while we continue to wrap it up. We appreciate that more than you know!
Even once we do have payment processing up – the main reason for the wait – we will continue to work on little things here & there. We may also switch up the design once we’re settled & can finally give it the attention it deserves. But in the meantime, we wanted to share our new changes & go over a few features with you so that you can be in-the-know & get comfortable here!
First – I don’t think I’m the only one who believes this website was LONG overdue. We were stuck for some years with a different & much more “simple” platform that allowed us very little control, & we know how difficult it was to browse. Since we had no ability to edit the design of our site & could only post all products in a list format, it was just shy of a nightmare trying to go through our products let alone explore them. We didn’t even put all of our offerings on there just to consolidate the list & make it all somewhat easier for customers to view.
But here on this new website, all of our products are listed & organized into easy-to-understand categories. You’ll find everything from our kratom products & herbal teas, to our essential oils & various items from our “witchy corner”, including spell kits & smudge sticks! You can click the “shop” link at the top of the page to view all of the categories, & then from there choose the subcategories you’d like to explore. Nearly all of our products are now listed separately so you can view each one individually.
You can also easily search for products in the search bar on the main shop page, either by name or using descriptive words. We added as many tags to each product as possible so that you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for!
Next, this website is an all-in-one kind of deal. Where our previous website was essentially two websites connected together, & you couldn’t always easily return to the main page without knowing where to click. Here, you can now seamlessly view any page or product without having to switch between two websites or visiting outside links.
You’ll also notice that some things have stayed the same – many of the other pages here are just copies of the ones we had on the last website. One such example is the Kratom Testing page, which we created a similar experience for & gives a really easy was to find the product you want to view testing on. Just visit the Kratom Testing link in the dropdown submenu at the top right corner, & click or tap on the product picture of your choice. It will take you to a gallery of test results, the same ones posted on our previous website. You can view the date of testing & what “series” each test is for (which is the last 4 digits of your lot number. For example, if the lot number for your Red Maeng Da ends in 3333, that would be a 3000 series batch). You can also get a better view by clicking each picture to see the details of the test results. The only difference is that the dates on the new website will be the date it was received/downloaded by us, instead of the date it was uploaded into the system, which was how our previous page dated results.
Changes To Your Shopping Experience
There will also be some upcoming changes to your shopping experience, the biggest being our shipping costs. With the change of website, our free shipping promotion of the summer has ended, & there will be various levels of shipping prices based on the total order weight. Small orders (packages under 500g) will be $8.95, 500g to under a kilo packages will be $10.95, & kilo packages up to 4.5 kilos will be $12.95 to ship. It will now also add extra shipping costs for even larger orders, which is why we use to have those ordering more than 4 kilos call in their order by phone the last 6 years – when we had the old website, we didn’t have the option to set automatic weight shipping or shipping for individual products. This new shipping program will help cover our costs when we need to use more than one larger box for orders over 4.5 kilos.
Unfortunately, like everything else recently, shipping costs have gone up & will do so again this winter or spring when USPS has their annual price increase. It costs us an average of $14 to ship a single kilo, so rest assured you’re still getting discounted shipping even with the increase! But this new shipping system means good things for you guys, too – it will go a long way to helping cover our shipping costs so we can offer more sales, giveaways, & further the quest to continue providing the excellent service, explore exciting new products, & more that you all deserve from us at TBSC.
Speaking of shipping, there are areas that we are unable to ship to due to new & old local laws in the states, cities, or counties. This includes the already illegal states of Indiana, Wisconsin, Vermont, Rhode Island, Alabama, & Arkansas, as well as the addition of cities or counties in Oregon, Mississippi, California, Florida, Colorado, Illinois. This new website is set up so that those who have billing or shipping addresses in the areas listed above are unable to checkout. If you have any questions or concerns regarding this policy, please call us at 207-669-8246 9am-5pm EST/Monday-Friday & we’ll be happy to assist.
We’ve also added the addition of age verification to the website. While the majority of our products do not require age verification, we have restricted our entire store to 21 & older. For your convenience, we’ve also added a checkbox option to only verify age once every 30 days, which will stay active as long as you shop from the same device.
We now have the ability to add product reviews as well, so feel free to leave yours! Just visit the product page of your choice & leave your comments in the reviews section.
What About Sales & The Weekly Code?
This new site will also allow us to do more (as well as different types of) sales & codes. Since we can organize everything into neat little product categories here, we added “single” products (as opposed to the list structure we had previously) so that we are able to do sales on specific strain or blends, categories of products, & more! You may even see BOGO sales or “free shipping above $X” type sales as well.
As for the Weekly Code – we will continue to do our weekly videos, & now that we are closing in on the final touches of the website, I will also be able to focus more on our social media pages again to do more live streams & video posts (of course being the webmaster AND marketing manager, I switched my focus for a while to finish this massive project as soon as possible!) But we have phased out the weekly code itself, in favor of other types of sales or discount opportunities, as mentioned above. We’re also considering a loyalty program & other nifty ideas… so stay tuned for more on that!
For now, that is all we have for you. I’ll be updating our blog more regularly in the future with informational entries & updates on the company. And we seriously can’t wait to hear your thoughts on the new website!
– Bekkah with Taunton Bay Soap Company
*Updated 11/2/22 to remove Utah from the shipping restrictions list, update shipping costs to explain our new weight-based shipping scale, & edit the section about the weekly code, which has now been passed out in favor of other & better promotions. Many cities in Mississippi have also been removed from our shipping restrictions list when we changed processors 11/1/22.