I skipped a couple of weeks because it's July. There's nothing going on. After 400 posts I've run out of things to say about nothing.
"Curio City Online fans want to hear from you!" gushed Facebook's email. Maybe they do. I wouldn't know since Facebook doesn't actually deliver my updates. It's no secret that they suppress business posts if we don't pony up money to "boost" them; fewer than 20 of my 200 followers will see this update unless it gets a few Likes, and that only ever happens when I beg (which is bad form) or during the Christmas season (when everybody's suddenly interested in a weird little retailer).
PayPal, OTOH, has not been a waste of time, although it did take more time than it should have to get it to that point. Payment processing costs are down noticeably. Getting them to honor the deal that we negotiated took at least half a dozen emails after numerous spot-checks over a couple of months caught them slipping into their old standard terms. Trust, but verify.
PayPal conveys almost no information about my customers (like what type of credit card they used) and gives me no control whatsoever over fraud filtering. Their attitude seems to be "don't worry your lucrative little head about it." That hasn't been a problem...yet. Given the number of complaints I've read about PayPal arbitrarily taking back deposits, it's probably just a matter of time.
My open-to-buy turned black this week for the first time since last Christmas. That's an accounting technicality since I'm currently staring down a $2,400 Mastercard bill with just $700 in the bank, but it was nice to see before a couple of deferred reorders immediately restored the customary red ink. There just ain't no getting ahead.
