Monday, December 1, 2008

Da Bidness

I want to thank everyone that's ordered items over the past couple of days. The "Secret Master" sale on Black Friday was a huge success and I think everyone that took advantage of it is really going to like their stuff. Between those sales and yesterday's patch orders I had over 60 packages to mail out this morning. If I can keep that sales tempo up I should be able to sell out of the new patches by next week.

In no particular order, here are a couple of things I've learned over the past couple of days:

- Chipboard mailers suck. I've been using gloss-finish white CD mailers for my patch orders with great success, but I decided to use brown chipboard mailers for the photo sets in order to save money. That was a big mistake. They're heavier, they're subject to casual water damage from rain and snow, and the thickness of the cardboard means they don't qualify for letter rates if more than a few sheets of paper are inside. If I have any left after this week I'm just going to toss them on Ebay and order gloss finish cardboard mailers as replacements.

- When an ordering clerk says "Oh yeah, these chipboard mailers can hold an 8 1/2" by 11" sheet of paper folded in half," he's lying. I went to pack up all the "Secret Master" packages at 3 o'clock this morning only to discover that I had to fold the Pabodie plans in quarters to get them inside the mailer. Have I mentioned how much I hate chipboard mailers?

- I'm genuinely surprised how much of my business comes from outside the United States. I expected a domestic/international ratio of, at best, 70/30, but it's actually roughly 50/50. Almost all my international buyers are European, and most of them hail from France and the United Kingdom.

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