I have no idea what a free account gets me, but the fact that the lowest "Explorer" tier costs $39/month for 1 map per month causes me to lose interest immediately.
I have two suggestions:
1. Show a bunch of prominent examples of star maps on giftable items like mugs and shirts memorializing various events like a birth or a wedding. The more explicit you are about the stars matching the night sky on the day and place of the event, the better. I could see these making for cool party favors, but I think the concept will go over a lot of people's heads (pun intended) unless it's spelled out for them.
2. Offer a la carte pricing. The couple planning their wedding on a shoestring budget might buy a star map for $40, but starting and cancelling a $40 subscription could be too much of a hassle.
Longer term, I might look into partnering with a company like
zazzle.com and integrating into their create-your-own-shirt-or-mug-or-whatever pipeline for a royalty.
Thank you for the feedback. The key addition that you get with the Explorer is access to bulk prices and bigger maps, but I probably don't say that clearly enough... you can actually buy and make maps with a free account.
Even after reading this and now knowing that you can make and buy free maps with a free account, it's still really not clear from your website that is the case.
My recommendation: make it as stupidly easily possible to buy a single map whenever you want, with the option for no account at all (and make it clear you can do that through your website).
I could conceivably see myself using this, the output looks really nice. But as soon as I need to sign up for an account, even if it's free..... ugh :-/
Make it easy for people like me who might be on the fence to give you my money :)
Hmm, I suspect you are right, thank you for the feedback. I think my customers will be business owners with some technical expertise (you need to at least understand what a transparent PNG is, and be able to paste it on your background), but I don't want to discourage end customers. I need to think about enabling map creation without accounts. I am requiring accounts now because you'll have to design a theme before you make your map (star colors, labels, fonts, etc) and I am assuming you'll want that to be saved. But I could make it optional...
You could also build up a temporary pseudo-account based on an anonymous user's session that could optionally be upgraded to a permanent account with an ID and password at any time.
This is common with e-commerce sites. Many don't require you to make an account to add items to your shopping cart or even to check out. But if you want to make an account, they make it super easy prefilling info they already have, and they certainly won't make you lose what's in your cart.
Another customer segment you could go after: I generated the star map from the day/time/location of my wedding, and themed the colors to match the wedding colors. My wife thought it was a great idea to print + frame it.
I have just updated the Plans page. I hope with the new changes the pricing is more clear, and also the benefits of subscribing. The rest will take a bit longer...
I think another problem you have is that there are a lot of potential customers who don't even know they want this yet, and you need to educate them so they understand why star maps are a cool idea particularly as a party favor.
I think you'll be able to improve your conversion if all your sample images included text describing what the star map is commemorating. Ideally there should be at least one such image on the homepage.
I know this may sound dumb, but before I saw the video, I hadn't considered why I'd want to generate my own star map over just using an existing one someone else had already generated.
Most of your customers are probably going to put commemorative text on the poster/shirt/mug anyway, because star maps don't really stand well on their own IMHO. I doubt many people other than astronomers and star geeks would be able to remember the difference between two night skies commemorating different events particularly if there in the same hemisphere and season.
You might think your customers won't be as thick headed as me, but now that I understand it, I'm seriously considering becoming a customer someday.
It's still unclear to me who the plans are targeting. I'm guessing maybe you're targeting creators (Etsy store owners, etc), and not the end consumers? That isn't clear if so, and I would still expect to be able to use your site to buy one-offs as a consumer.
I've tried again, thank you for the feedback. I have added the prices in the Plans page, I hope this will make it crystal clear what you can do. Today is being a very instructive day!
I have two suggestions:
1. Show a bunch of prominent examples of star maps on giftable items like mugs and shirts memorializing various events like a birth or a wedding. The more explicit you are about the stars matching the night sky on the day and place of the event, the better. I could see these making for cool party favors, but I think the concept will go over a lot of people's heads (pun intended) unless it's spelled out for them.
2. Offer a la carte pricing. The couple planning their wedding on a shoestring budget might buy a star map for $40, but starting and cancelling a $40 subscription could be too much of a hassle.
Longer term, I might look into partnering with a company like zazzle.com and integrating into their create-your-own-shirt-or-mug-or-whatever pipeline for a royalty.