The Cavalcade of Crap

As usual, I walked the entire Boston Gift Show floor before lunchtime. As usual, I found only a few dubious candidate products amid the cornucopia of mass-market junk. As usual, my most productive time was spent browsing the handmade and local vendors in the last couple of aisles; as usual, most of that stuff was crafty kitsch and boring ordinary jewelry. And, as is becoming usual, I found one good vendor just as I was about to give up and declare it a wasted morning.

It’s not the Next Big Thing on a par with lighted caps. But I’m confident that I’ve found my first successful jewelry line since supply problems killed off Typewriter Key jewelry. I met a local artist who makes beautiful, high quality, custom jewelry designs with a clever hook, and who will be happy to dropship to my customers. Working this out before Mothers Day is suddenly high priority. Right now, I’m waiting for the jeweler to respond to my initial proposal. There’s no link here because I don’t want to tip my hand until I have a product page set up and the details worked out.

But getting back to crap…. I had to pay quarterly taxes last week. Last year the IRS had changed me from a quarterly filer of Form 941 to an annual filer of Form 943. This year they changed me back to quarterly again. QuickBooks tells me that $526 of my current $826 bank balance belongs to the IRS and the Mass. DOR. The state returns were easily done online. It only took an hour to pay my sales tax, report my wages, pay my income tax withholding, and pay my unemployment taxes. The sales tax report is always tricky because only my Masshole customers are taxed, and they’re only a fraction of my total business. I know that the other 49 states would love to rectify that. I pray that it never happens.

As of today, my paper form 941 has still not arrived. I was going to download the PDF and print it out today when I discovered that the payment is actually not due until 4/30. So I’ll give them another week to send my preprinted form. Stoopid government.

Digging up even more crap…. My website was down sporadically for at least two days last week. MochaHost blamed two unspecified “server problems” that are apparently solved now. I hope that being offline explains why sales slumped so seriously last week. I’m probably not going to hit my plan, and even beating LY looks iffy. It’s likely to be my slowest week since October 2007. At least last week was a good time for downtime, if one must endure such. Our first gorgeous spring days and some competing personal priorities (income taxes, doctor appointment, etc.) took me away from Curio City anyway. The yard isn’t going to rake itself, is it?

The Forrester Research Group predicts that online sales will grow 17% this year despite the lousy economy. I hope that’s more relevant to me than all the recessionary hand wringing that dominates the news daily now. I don’t care if bricks and mortar retail dies. If you’re a regular reader, you already know that I can’t understand how stores survive anyway. And I hate shopping.

A number of readers (“one” is a number, right?) mentioned liking the bulleted “coming topics” that used to appear at the end of my posts back in the olden days. I don’t write as far ahead as I did when this blog was new, and I’ve blown myself out on a lot of subjects, so it’s harder to forecast future posts these days. But I’ll try.

Coming topics:

• Post #100
• Moving things around
• Running with the Big Dogs
• Focus, Juice
• Legal Extortion

Whom Should I Hate This Week?

Today you get a mercifully short story.

Google Checkout has officially crossed the line from nuisance to persistent problem. I can receive and process GC orders, but Sunshop is not quite playing along. The “callback API” is the last step in the process. Google uses that to call Sunshop, update my transaction list, and adjust my database. Without that callback working, I have to debit my database manually and the sale never appears in Sunshop at all.

The GC error message implicates a security problem. Turnkey’s support guy opined that there is a problem with my chained SSL security certificate. GoDaddy, the certificate provider, says that my site design is to blame – mixing secure and non-secure items on the same page breaks their seal. My developer says that my certificate is not a chain and is installed just fine…but because Google isn’t trying to load a page, GoDaddy’s explanation makes no sense. He did not offer a theory of his own.

Meanwhile….

GC had the same parcel post rate lookup bug that has been in every Sunshop build for years, so I notified them about it. They were grateful, and fixed it. I asked them why they don’t offer First Class parcel rates. They had not heard of that, said they’d add it, and were grateful again. I asked this twice-grateful contact in Google’s tech support for help with my callback problem. He says that my chain certificate is, in fact, not properly installed. I installed the “intermediate” certificate without installing the “root” certificate. I need a “GoDaddy Class 2 CA”. Yeah...of course I do. Back to GoDaddy again.

They punted me to another support department. I begged them: Please send me this root certificate thingie, and clear instructions on what to do with the gorram thing. Just minutes ago they replied that “the intermediate certificate is not installed correctly”. Damn. That was the one and only thing that I thought I had done right. Now what? Do I go ahead and reinstall it? Run it past my Google buddy first? The odds are high that I'm going to screw up whatever's working right currently. Will I finally be forced to beg for MochaHost’s cooperation? That went very poorly the last time I tried it.

My hunch says that before this is all over, I am either going to end up either buying a new SSL certificate from somebody else, or moving to a new web host. My server performance has been marginal lately anyway.

I don’t even know how to tag today’s post. I certainly hate somebody for all of this, but whom? I think this deserves a new label.

March Sales Update

Cap sales came roaring back last weekend – what a relief after an eerie several-days silence. The prospect of my best-ever seller petering out emphasized the importance of finding the Next Big Thing, and soon. Maybe I’ll get lucky at this weekend’s Boston Gift Show (a.k.a. Cavalcade of Crap).

March delivered some very happy statistics. With a day and a half left to go, I've already exceeded LY by 118% and beaten plan by 25%. Year-over-year gross sales are up 105%, gross profit is up 94%, my personal paycheck is +91%, and the bottom-line profit is +216%. (Usual disclaimer: the dollars behind these percentages border on trivial, and the year will come down to November and December, as always. But still.) Next year I can raise my payroll percentage another half point. Yay, me.