What's the Big Hurry?

The next time someone asks me if they can get their order overnight, I'm going to have to say No. Or Maybe, if I'm feeling optimistic. I said Yes twice last week, and Priority Mail Express let me down both times. (UPS air is too expensive to compete.)

The first time was arguably my fault for trusting carrier pickup rather than driving the envelope to the post office myself. Acceptance cutoff for same-day delivery was 5 pm, and they scanned it in at 5:48. Never mind that my carrier had picked it up by 3:30; the one-day package became a two-day package in those 48 minutes, and my customer's son's school project was ruined. A full refund did not delight either him or me.

I drove the next Express package to the post office immediately and got a time-stamped receipt for it, but my diligence (and half an hour out of my day) did not pay off. The package disappeared from tracking after it left the Boston sorting facility that night. It should have arrived in LA the next morning. I was still waiting for an update after the delivery deadline passed that afternoon. It finally arrived a day later, but the tracking never did get updated. Fortunately, that customer was okay with it taking an extra day.

You know who gets blamed when USPS drops the ball? The guy who collected their $30 fee, of course. I don't make any markup on Express packages; in fact, my shipping module seems to be charging the commercial rate whereas I have to pay the retail rate, so I'm losing a couple of bucks on expedited postage. I don't get any extra revenue for the extra work, but last week I took a lot of extra grief. 

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Last week really did end up being my first-ever two-digit sales week, netting just $69 from two transactions. As of this Wednesday, I was sitting at zero after six days in a row with no business. A test transaction went through normally on Tuesday, indicating no technical problems, but I still suspected that something I couldn't see must be broken. After all, Google says that I had 1,600 visitors in January, 2% of whom bought something, and that was a poor month. The dam finally broke on Wednesday night with three modest but reassuring sales. I'm currently sitting on $137 this week, and that feels like progress. 

Historically, these past two weeks are supposed to be among the year's worst. But if this keeps up much longer, Curio City's going to die all by itself and save me the decision to kill it. Monday's paycheck would have netted out to just $52, so I decided to combine it with the next two weeks...meaning February's only going to give me one paycheck, and it's going to be a tiny one.

Fortunately, I just accepted a $3,000 editing job from a new client who will probably become a repeat customer, and yesterday I earned $200 on a rush job for another client. I still expect a mega-project in the middle of March, and I have feelers out for a couple of other jobs. Work completed in March and April won't pay off until May or June, but it will pay off bigly -- it would take Curio City nine months to pay me $3,000. If the Blue Hills pipeline keeps filling up, Curio City will be a distraction by this summer.  

(And yet, I just finished setting up my January 2019 Excel sales page. I really don't plan to use it, but I'm compulsive.)   

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This is going to be my last candid post about Curio City for the foreseeable future. After Blogger autoposts this to Facebook (and Twitter, apparently), Sunshop will put a link to it at the bottom of my store's main page. Almost nobody ever clicks those links...but reading about a failing business will surely repel the few shoppers who do. Humans naturally support winners and shun losers -- that's why third parties never prevail in winner-take-all elections, no matter how unpopular the mainstream parties are. I can't risk being shunned during this sales slump. So next week I'll post something positive about Curio City -- I'm incapable of lying outright, but I can generate happy talk. The following week I'll plug Blue Hills. Once those two upbeat posts are linked, I'm not going to post any more gloomy news that will knock them off the page...at least, not for a few weeks. 

A Summer Miracle

Apparently "summer miracle" is an anime show, hence this week's cryptic picture. 

Miraculously, August was another winning month. I don't think I had any Blue Hills activity to throw off the numbers, so here they are in the traditional format. 

August

Total income: +5%
Payroll: -7.4%

Marketing: -35.1%
Net Income (Profit) vs LY: +93.7% (+$157)

Actual Profit/Loss: +$304

2017 YTD

Total income: +66%
Total COGS: +9.4%
Payroll: +263.6%

Marketing: -30.4%
Net Income (Profit) vs LY: +257.7% (+$5,072)

Actual Profit/Loss: +$3,104

I said "miraculously" because I am putting no effort whatsoever into marketing and I've cut my ad spend considerably. The fact that I beat LY anyway just shows you how badly I suck at self-promotion.

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Back in the day, I swore that I would never gouge my customers on shipping. If you've been around long enough, you have seen me debate nickel-and-dime handling fee hikes and cuts, always trying to cover my costs as accurately as possible. 

Times change. Now that so much of my stock is marked down to cost, postage overcharges are often the only place I make any money at all. I have come to rely on collecting anywhere from 50 cents to a few bucks more than it will cost me to fill orders.

And so it's a bigger deal than you might think that the USPS broke my shipping module (again) with yet another rate change. These USPS changes always catch Turnkey flat-footed. When I was more engaged, I used to proactively post on their forums to make sure that the modules would be updated promptly. Turnkey usually denied that any changes were required. Then, when the modules broke, they were at least be alerted to take quick action. 

This time the USPS broke First Class Package rates -- last time this happened, it was because they renamed First Class Parcels. Packages up to 13 ounces (nearly all of my non-kite sales, and probably half of my total business) can take advantage of these cheap rates. When they suddenly go away, so does a lot of my business. I suspect that they might have broken Priority Mail rate lookups, too; the last several packages that I shipped cost me more than I collected.
I hope that Turnkey will update Sunshop on Tuesday or Wednesday, and things should get back to normal. I used to get seriously bent out of shape when I lost three or four days' business to software problems, but as long as it gets fixed reasonably quickly I'm beyond caring very much.  

September ought to be a terrible month as kite sales fall to nothing. Ordinarily I'd see early Christmas orders starting this month, but I don't expect that to happen at all this year. Losing all of Labor Day weekend to a broken shipping module isn't going to help; in fact, the month's net sales are negative at the moment, and there is a $150 kite return hanging over my head. 

I am expecting one tiny Blue Hills paycheck this month and I should be able to bill out a more substantial job, although that won't pay off until October.

Like It Or Lose It

Is it time to abandon Facebook? This video blog post (on the bottom of that page) recently accused Facebook of suppressing unpaid posts. Only 10% of the author’s 118,000 followers ever see his stuff. Unless you actively engage with my content by liking or sharing it, Curio City will quickly disappear from your news feed -- unless, that is, I bribe Facebook to promote my posts.
 
The accusation and Facebook’s dissembling isn’t new, but my numbers back it up. If you’re reading my blog after clicking a Facebook link, you’re among the 15 of Curio City’s 196 subscribers who will see this post. My wife won’t see it because she doesn’t visit Facebook very often and she’s stingy with the Like button. Even I have to scroll way to the bottom of my personal news feed to see my Curio City posts. If I want my other 181 followers to see my posts –people who clicked Like for that reason – I have to pay the Facebook. 

Facebook is a terrible advertising platform with only a 0.5% click rate. Nobody goes there to shop. They hold our posts hostage because they can’t sell advertising. Sites like Cracked.com and I Fucking Love Science stay in people’s news feeds by adding tons of unique and interesting content every day to get clicks to their own sites, where they’re selling advertising. That would be pointless for me since my store is a store, not a humor or news site, and I don’t sell ads.   

I used to ponder killing my email newsletter because it’s no sparkplug, either. Email looks a lot better now that Facebook is suppressing posts. Last week I sent out 402 emails. Eighty-five unique opens gave me a 22% success rate, ahead of the 18% industry average but below my own 26% history. The 12 resulting clicks (14%) matched the industry-wide benchmark but fell behind my own 21% track record – granted, it wasn’t my best newsletter ever; I cranked it out in one morning and made the mistake of putting Valentines Day in the subject line, which automatically turns a lot of people off. The two sales that I got from those 12 clicks is a great conversion rate. Constant Contact costs me $16/month and I don’t use it every month, so it’s not exactly cost-effective. On top of that, I lost money to coupon redemption. But there is value in merely appearing in people’s inboxes every now and then…and I’d need something like 1,200 followers to reach 85 people on Facebook. 

Back to my original question: Is it time to abandon Facebook? No, since it costs me no money and very little time. Reaching 15 people for free is better than nothing. My occasional “likes” and very rare “shares” can put a post in front of 30 or 40 people. And every business needs a Facebook page for credibility, even if nobody ever visits it. It’s time to stop thinking that Facebook = marketing, but not time to abandon it completely. 

With Facebook constantly getting worse, I decided to see if the Pinterest page that I made two years ago is still there. Lo and behold, people have pinned nearly 100 of my products with absolutely no encouragement from me. The value of that is questionable; the four different people who pinned the Peace Sign Veggie Peeler generated exactly zero sales. I don’t think I can delete or hide pins by other people, and I get lost trying to navigate my own page(s). But I have a feeling that investing time in this will pay off a lot better than Facebook if I can hold my nose long enough to figure it out. Maybe next week I’ll put some hours into Pinterest. 

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The post office denied my $8.99 claim against a “2-Day” Priority Mail package that took 16 days to reach its destination. As far as they’re concerned, they met their obligation by delivering it at all…and that’s technically true, since Priority times aren’t guaranteed. (I’ve already written about my opinion of the USPS’s estimated delivery times.) I appealed with documentation showing that the replacement shipment cost me a $14.50 loss. 

Their verdict on my e-filed claim came in a paper snail-mail letter. They will undoubtedly deny my appeal the same way. The USPS hates email.

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This week I sold my 500^th Create-a-Bird kite. Some people buy them to fly as-is; more buy them as a craft project for children; but with Easter looming, most will be stage props in church plays. At half the size of the Dove kite (135 sold, btw), Create-a-Bird is best for small indoor stages. 

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And finally, I sold four more Tunes for Two splitters, doubling my sales to $82.89 -- still a loser, but not as big a loser.

The Post Office Is Going to the Dogs

You’re laughing; the post office has been renowned for inefficiency and unreliability since time immemorial. But that reputation was undeserved as far as package delivery goes until five or six months ago.

When you click the Get Shipping Rates button on my checkout page, Sunshop sends your package weight and destination to USPS and UPS rate servers that quickly return a list of services and prices. A few months ago, USPS started adding delivery time estimates to the Priority Mail rates that they return: 1 Day, 2 Day, or 3 Day. Now you might see a list that looks like this:

·         $3.47 First Class Package

·         $5.90 Priority Mail 2-Day

·         $17.99 Priority Mail Express 1-Day

·         $20.57 UPS Second-Day Air

·         $47.82 UPS Next-Day Air

You can get 2-day shipping for $5.90 from the USPS versus $20.57 from UPS? Great, make it so!

You order a bird kite on Thursday. Those don’t fit in a drop box so I have to request a carrier pickup. If I process your order Friday afternoon, USPS will (probably, but not definitely) pick it up on Saturday. It will be in transit on Monday and Tuesday. If they hit their 2-day target, you’ll get it on Tuesday – five days after your order – but it might be Wednesday or Thursday if they’re running a little behind, as they commonly do. Your “2-day shipping” just took the better part of a week. You’re a little cheesed off because you “paid extra for priority shipping,” as several customers have declared (and I’ve got to hand it to USPS marketing; people take “priority” literally when it’s really just the cheapest service for packages over 13 ounces). Who do you blame when two days stretch into five or more? Why, that would be me. You don’t know that USPS displayed that “2-Day” text without any input from me and you don’t know that it’s not guaranteed. You just think that I advertised service that you didn’t get. Are you going to shop here again?

One First Class Package disappeared without a trace since they made this change. After I filed a missing package report I got an email from the local post office saying that they would monitor my package status. Three attempted replies to that email brought no response; that package is just gone and the post office won’t talk about it. 

I’ve refunded shipping charges to two irate customers whose orders were significantly delayed after they “paid extra for priority shipping” and talked several others off the ledge. Some people accept my explanation, and some think I’m blowing smoke up their ass. 

On Dec. 31 somebody really did pay extra to have a small package delivered via Priority Mail rather than the cheaper First Class Package rate. It was supposed to arrive on Jan. 5. On Jan. 8 the customer contacted me; there was no tracking after acceptance in Braintree on the 31^st and she demanded action. On Jan. 10 I reshipped her order and filed an online refund request. Five days later the lost package reappeared on the radar screen – it took two weeks to cover the 99 miles to Springfield! Ten hours later it was in California. Now I’m not going to be able to recover that loss, either.

Last Saturday I received an order at 11:42 am. The customer paid $17.54 for “Priority Mail Express 1-Day,” added a note saying “I need it for Monday!!!!! Please!! I payed for 1 day Express Mail. Thank you” and emailed me to make sure. I verified that Express Mail is an overnight service to New York City and got a package bearing a label showing “1-Day” with a delivery date of 1/13 to the post office before their 1 pm pickup. On Monday night she complained that not only had her package not arrived, it was showing a delivery date of Wednesday. Three days from Boston to NYC! Even plain old Priority Mail typically gets there overnight.   

One must request service refunds at a post office counter. After my 10-minute wait in line the postal clerk apologized and promptly processed a refund. A manager tried to derail the process but gave up when I stood firm and the clerk took my side. I walked out with $17 in cash. In a rare flash of good luck, my customer was so thrilled with her mini-briefcase business card holder that she insisted that I keep the money. Profit! I ordinarily need $85 in sales to earn $17.

A good 9,500 of the 10,000+ packages that I’ve shipped in the past eight years have gone via US mail. Before the recent unpleasantness I had only lost two shipments without a trace in all that time. Sure, there were late deliveries, packages that disappeared after being confirmed delivered (presumed stolen), things that arrived damaged, things that were deemed “undeliverable” to legitimate addresses. Such are the vicissitudes of shipping. But UPS takes longer, damage is much more common, and they've lost one or two packages out of far fewer carried. (FedEx isn’t a player for my purposes and I only recently learned that DHL still exists.)

This all stops being funny when it costs me money.