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Every Friday, I post a small insight into running Curio City and/or Blue Hills Editorial Services. My most recent posts are directly below. You can also start with the first post, or use the subject labels to the right to home in on particular topics. Feel free to comment on anything that interests you.
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Friday, December 05, 2014

Yup




Cyber Monday proved that there is nothing wrong with my website. Christmas blew in with 15 transactions worth more than $800. Sales peaked on Wednesday with a nice, round 30 orders -- half of them for Santaur ornaments, and half of those going out of the US. It's already been a very good week. Now I need two more just like it. I don't know if it's possible; my most popular stuff is already gone or very nearly so, and we're still a week away from the desperation stage when people buy the unpopular stuff.

Most of my competitors jacked Santaur's price to $20+ after Gizmodo and Reddit featured it; I quickly sold 30 at $15 and could have sold twice as many if I'd had them. It's probably stupid, but I reordered yesterday knowing full well that I won't see them until 12/11. Since sales usually crash by 12/15, I probably just spent $225 on something that won't sell for another year. But maybe I can l blow out one more shipment if the hysteria keeps up.

PayPal didn't kill me, obviously, although $8.23 inexplicably disappeared from my balance. I'm meticulous about my deposits and half an hour's error-checking didn't uncover any mistakes. I finally decided not to waste any more time and wrote it off...but I don't see how money can just disappear unless PayPal is playing some cute game. I've had a lot of international sales; maybe they took extra charges for exchange rates? I don't know. There's no line item showing the debit and the merchant interface is useless.   

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