Having had the webshop and TUG on the web now for 10 years i felt it was time to show appreciation back towards my customers so I introduced lagniappe items.
The word “Lagniappe” has its roots from Louisiana French/Creole and the meaning (see wikipedia for more info) is an implemented feature and works like this at TUG:
When placing an order you can choose one free item found in this category item, and only one piece of that item. This product you just add to your cart at no cost as a bonus thingy to your order!
I will try to keep the free (Lagniappe) items on a feasible level, meaning that it is my hope the products will appeal to you and that you will use this free feature to enhance your order. This can however be a challenge because of the business, selling vs free equation, i think you understand what i mean!
There is more to this that meets the eye, the aim is to have this work two ways as a win win situation for both parties. Instead of TUG adding a free item to your order (any order) which you might not have wanted anyway and never would have used or such, you now instead of your own free will choose your little freebie, a product that you actually want.
What I know of there is no other similar store (is there really a TUG clone out there?) in our close vicinity (yeah the world is close… just a click online away) that have this type of extra thingy going on but i expect it so hold on to your horses and remember were you saw this first.
The keen-eyed will see that the items in the free category will change from time to time, items will be “freed away” or be depleted in stock and never return etc, but as said i will try at least have a couple of items for your choosing.
This feature is just put in there, live on the web and it requires some gentleman (or gentlewoman) touch from the customer side as well because of the limitations in how the webshop-plattform works (I use Tictail, check them out). What have happened so far is that some persons have added more than one free item (quite many products in one go actually.. “if its free it’s for me i´ll have three” kind of thinking….) and I have no other way to explain how this works but through added explaining text to the products involved.
I am sure this will straighten out sooner or later and there is really no big issue here, there must be a learning curve and so on so it is not a big problem but i have to follow the setup and that means that there will be times when if someone is adding two or more free items and I only send one (because of the setup) it could end up with that the receiver wanted the “other” free item more and is disappointed and.. well the whole subject is to add something fun, something extra (almost a surprise even that you have chosen the item yourself) that you wanted to have and will enjoy!
So to wrap this up, feel free to check the free items out from time to time and remember to add 1 item to your order, as of this moment you find 8 products to choose from… if you wish that is!
Ps Life is like a box of chocolate etc etc… so you never know what I might put in as a new free item! 😉
//Martin
