The PayPal Mystery Loop

Today’s post is a bit more disjointed than usual.

Every year I’m amazed anew when the shoppers swarm exactly when the calendar says that they will. Another last-minute stroke of luck rescued November. I kick-started last weekend by accepting a customer’s lowball price offer for all 35 of my remaining dark green 2-LED caps. A superlative 13-transaction Saturday then proceeded to push the month $500 over LY, and the frenzy commenced. I’m hitting 400 visits a day now and routinely closing 20+ sales. That will continue through next week unless I run out of merchandise.

Despite the warning about supply problems that I laid out last week, I'm getting caught short in a couple of areas. Panther Vision has actually run out of Power Caps (can you believe that?) and their new shipment isn’t due until the week of 12/7…if it clears Customs promptly. Those caps are my bread and butter and meat and potatoes. I haven’t been this low on them in years. I sold out my Peace Sign Ornaments very early on. I'm nearly out of LED Peace Sign Tree Toppers. The sales rep for that company has ignored my last two emails, and now it's too late to reorder.

This December can’t possibly match LY, but I’ve known that all year. This fourth of the Six Weeks of Christmas was better than expected given that the corresponding week LY was supercharged by my NY Times mention. The fact that I’m actually within hailing distance of that high water mark is impressive. My open-to-buy is back in the black and my cash on hand is in five figures. I feel rich!

Facebook has surpassed Octopus Overlords among my top referring sites. Those news bleets that I send out periodically must be drawing a little traffic.

Besides managing the sales rocket, I’m trying to define a couple of bugs prior to going after Turnkey for them.

The PayPal bug: Four or five people have complained of being unable to complete PayPal sales. When they return to Curio City from the PayPal interface, Sunshop takes them back to the account setup screen rather than forward to the checkout confirmation screen. They can’t get out of that loop. I’m still getting the expected number of PayPal transactions so it’s not a general problem. But I figure that for every person who reports the behavior, several more probably give up and either go away or pay by another method. I don’t know how much business I’m losing to the PayPal bug, but I must be losing some.

I can’t reproduce the bug on my own business computer, my gaming computer, or my wife’s computer, using either Firefox or Internet Explorer 8. None of the complainants have yet given me any useful information – they all seem to be low-skilled computer users who can’t or won’t answer simple questions about their browsers and computers. If I can't duplicate it, I can't understand it, and if I can't understand it, I can't fix it. My suspicions, from most to least likely:

1. It is a cookie handling error tied to a specific browser, probably IE, and possibly an older version of IE.
2. It is caused by products with Option Stock. Sunshop tracks and enforces the quantities of each separate color or style option for products that have them. PayPal sales complete properly when a customer buys only one variant of a product with options stock, but I haven’t tested it yet with multiple options of the same product. (See the Google Checkout bug below).
3. It is caused by a virus or spyware on the user’s machine. It’s easy to blame the customer, but they do seem to be inexpert computer users, and those are the people most likely to have infected computers.
4. It is caused by simple user error, such as completing their bill-to or ship-to information wrong. Again, I’m reluctant to blame the user...and Sunshop should prevent them from leaving the account setup screen in the first place.
   
5. It is caused by large sales. I hadn’t had a PayPal transaction exceeding $100 in months. But I got one this week, so I think I’ve ruled this one out.

It’s hard to test PayPal. I can’t check out using the same Curio City account that’s receiving the funds and I don’t have a separate, personal account. I should create one and perform some tests. I obviously don’t have time for that now.

The Google Checkout bug: I recently noticed that when somebody uses Google Checkout to buy a product with Option Stock, the individual Option Stock inventory numbers get updated properly, but the product’s overall In Stock number is not debited. I think that this caused one instance of selling more pieces than I actually had in stock as the program consulted two different on-hand quantities. I don’t have a GC account so I can’t verify this directly or demonstrate it for the developers. It must relate to Google's callback API -- but is the problem on Google's end, or Sunshop's end, or did my last upgrade introduce an implementation error?

The Google Checkout bug suggested possibility #2 for the PayPal bug – since I'm pretty sure a bug exists, it might logically affect both payment types. Both of these bugs most likely appeared with the Sunshop upgrade to 4.2.0. So the ultimate question is whether they derive from an error in the upgrade process, or an error in Sunshop’s code.

Turnkey’s Support forum is full of developers, not merchants, so they never see real-world operational bugs (and most merchants lack the tech savvy to recognize stuff like this). The Turnkey company rep is primarily concerned with denying and disowning bugs, as is the way of software companies everywhere. So their Support forum hasn't been any help so far, and I haven't had time to force the issues.

If you can suggest a possibility that I haven’t thought of, please leave a comment. I'm leaning toward believing that the GC bug is a straight-out Sunshop flaw, but I'm baffled by the PayPal loop.

Red Ink on Black Friday

Week 3 of Christmas will follow the first two weeks into the crapper unless an unexpected rush pulls it out in the next day and a half. “Black Friday” is typically quiet while the Normals are out looking for deep discounts in stores. “Cyber Monday,” which finds the office workers back at their desks, is better, but accounting-wise that’s in December.

If November does come in behind LY, it will be my first losing month since June. After pulling all the stops out of advertising I'm now paying a frightful sum to buy 250-300 visits a day, but my conversion rate has fallen. Many transactions are in the $10-20 range when they should be averaging $50-100. Wednesday brought a respectable 10 sales. It would have been a good day if my historic average of $40 each held up, but instead the day finished at $185. Bleah. People are shopping, but few are buying. Those who are buying are spending less, and they’re buying the wrong stuff. Well, at least I’m liberating a few dollars that have been locked up for years in old, dead merchandise.

How to explain this? I lost half a day’s business to a technical problem late last week before I found and fixed it (thanks to my developer’s rapid response to the Brad Signal). I lost 32 newsletter subscribers when Comcast decided to block all email from Constant Contact. I emailed all of those customers individually and asked them to re-enroll with a different email address, but I don't expect to get any of them back. Setbacks like this crop up routinely, though.

I think macroeconomics are to blame. Last October’s financial crash only hammered people with stocks and big retirement portfolios. Housing values had only begun to plummet and employers had just started destroying jobs, so ordinary people were not yet impoverished. A year ago the rich were hurting, but the middle class could still shrug it off. This year, bailouts have restored prosperity to the rich, but average people are desperate. And my customers are average people.

What can I do? Yesterday I used a newsletter and Facetweet to put out a discount code good for free shipping (actually 60-cent shipping because Sunshop is too stupid to waive the handling fee). That code is BIGBIRD – use it! It’s good on a minimum $25 purchase to any US address, and it expires Monday. I should probably facetweet a reminder on Sunday. It was a particularly entertaining newsletter, if I say so myself. Sadly, only 44 out of 278 recipients have opened it, thanks to yesterday’s accursed holiday. If it were up to me the Normals would be chained to their desks 365 days a year. :)

Both the new Power Caps and the old 2-LED caps have stopped selling almost entirely. I’m buying 50 clicks a day, but only bottom feeders looking for outrageous discounts are responding. I don’t think anyone’s undercutting my retail price online…they just plain aren’t selling.

With my core products dead in the water (even Whisky Stones have fallen to nearly nothing) this week is running about 25% behind LY, which was in turn down from 2007. So with only three more weeks to go I’m up against LY’s free mention in the NY Times gift guide. December is not going to be pretty.

Here are November’s numbers:

Total income: -2.9%
Total COGS: -16.5%
Payroll: +371.5%
Net Income (Profit): -39.7%

The YTD numbers:

Total income: +20.6%
Total COGS: +15.8%
Payroll: +50.3%
Net Income (Profit): -21.4%

What is there to be thankful for? Well, November didn’t drag the YTD numbers down too badly. The bar is set low for next year. Costs fell farther than income, and more money went into my pocket. The year should still end with a small profit, and if it's smaller than LY’s, then I'll owe less tax on my K-1 income.

Measuring the Days

A late surge saved last week from the disaster that I prematurely reported in my last post. It was still behind LY, but not dramatically so. Thank you, customers, for playing the cavalry. Don’t scare me like that again.

Last week I reluctantly stopped advertising DayClocks because bottom-feeders have driven the price into the ground. The very next day, DayClocks announced their first new model in years – a smaller version of the Oak Contemporary. The day after that, I actually sold my first DayClock in over a month, followed by another one the very next day. I’d like to wait 10 days to see if the discounters will ruin the new clock, too, but I can’t waste valuable Christmas days on indecision. So I spent the $200 price of admission, even though my open to buy is $2,600 in the red and the old Contemporary DayClock never sold well.

But last week is ancient history. This week began with an uphill slog when one of last week’s customers canceled a $116 order that she had placed in error. Watching a day struggle to reach zero is depressing, but these things happen. Right now it’s a nail-biter whether the week will achieve LY or not. Forget about plan. Merchandise shortages are appearing. Manufacturers were conservative this year, so supplies of the most popular stuff are spotty. Retailers would rather miss incremental sales than mark down leftover inventory, so stock levels are light. Virtually everybody is understaffed from job-cutting – yesterday I gave up trying to reorder Temperature Controlled Faucet Lights when the manufacturer’s phone went unanswered. And because companies fired their oldest, most experienced workers, the overworked cheap youngsters who are left can't meet the pace. If you're one of those shoppers who waits for last-minute markdowns, you’re only going to find crap this year.

*****************

Several months ago I read a news report about the Mass. Medical Security Program running out of money. Enrollment had spiked from 3,800 to 27,000 people as of August. The state had sent us information about this program when Anne was first laid off, but there was no way we could qualify at the time. I trashed the paperwork and forgot about it. Six months later, with her salary a distant memory, our circumstances were sufficiently reduced to give it another try.

Yesterday we were accepted! The state’s 80% reimbursement will reduce our stifling $770 monthly health insurance premium to a manageable $154 for as long as Anne’s unemployment checks hold out, surpassing the expired federal COBRA subsidy. This is not the first time I’ve thanked the gods that we live in the most liberal state in the US. Saved by socialism! I don't know how people in miserly red states survive without lifelines like this. They just suffer, I guess.

Now I can cheerfully mothball the health insurance topic until the next threat comes along. It looks like we’ll be OK until COBRA expires next August. I think Anne’s unemployment checks will continue into Fall 2010, although the DUA seems to be unable to tell her when her claim extensions will all be exhausted. Maybe the national economy will take another plunge and Congress will keep extending benefits forever.