a crystals & jewelry adventure

A number of people starting up a jewelry business or other type of small business have asked me about payment processing online. Obviously, if you’re going to sell anything online, you have to have at least one type of payment method. There are several types, and each has its pros and cons, risks and benefits. Sometimes even a lot of small “cons” are less important than one big “pro”, but it’s up to you to decide for what works for you.

Here are some things about my experiences with different sorts of payments over the years I’ve been selling my jewelry and crystals online. My experiences, are, of course, limited to getting money in to my hands here in the US and US bank accounts. Non-US methods may vary widely, including some countries that will only allow one or two methods or only specific processors.

Cash
Pros: Still good anywhere, tv commercials notwithstanding.
Cons: Very risky for people to send in the mail. If it gets lost, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

PayPal

Pros: Millions of users worldwide, great fraud screening to protect you, easy for the buyer. With a Business account, you can accept MasterCard, Visa, Discover, AmEx, JCB, e-checks, and PayPal balance payments very easily, and if you want, you can use their free shopping cart. You can transfer money into your checking account for free. You can get their free debit card and get your money via ATM instantly, or pay for things right out of you PayPal account. A squillion tools at no extra charge for things like printing packing slips, printing postage, dispute management, etc.
Cons: Some people feel it’s unsafe and won’t use it if you hold hot irons to their feet. My experience is that it’s no less safe than credit cards online because that’s their entire business life, being a secure payment processor so they’re committed to it. Transferring money into your checking account from Paypal takes 3 to 10 actual calendar days. Yes, I know they say 3 to 5 business days, but if there are holidays along the way and weekends, it can be up to 10 calendar days. They will hold your funds if they get a dispute from a customer, although if you can prove you are in the right, although that can be time-consuming, they will give it back. Break their terms and regulations, and like any processor, they will shut your ability down immediately so you can neither process payments and get your funds down immediately.

Accept Credit Cards with Your Own Merchant Account
Pros: You have more control. It builds trust in some customers’ minds. People who won’t use PayPal will often still use credit cards online. With some merchant accounts you can accept credit cards offline by phone or fax or in person, as well as online.
Cons: You take on a lot of risk and expense by handling credit card information yourself. Risk because you are the one in charge and if anything goes wrong, you’re legally liable for the problem. Expense because you not only need the merchant account ($30 to $100+ a month), but you need things to go with it: a gateway solution (in many cases $30 to $100+ a month), a secure site and shopping cart (or a secure shopping cart service) which varies widely, a business checking account to transfer the money into (costs vary widely but are often $.10+ a transaction, which adds up over the months, plus any monthly charges), PCI DSS compliance scans and review (average $319 per year), etc. I calculate that presently it’s costing me $150+ a month to accept credit cards — and that’s even if I were to do no business at all! Also, if you want to be able to accept credit cards by phone, fax, or face to face, there are often additional charges for supplies or fees. They will hold  or pull funds from your day’s processing and/or checking account if they get a dispute from a customer, and you have to go through quite a few hoops to disagree with the dispute and get the money back. They have been heavily favoring customers when it comes to disputes, so it can be a quite difficult and time-consuming to prove anything with them. Break their terms and regulations, and like any processor, they will shut your ability down immediately so you can neither process payments and get your funds down immediately.

Credit Card Acceptance Services (like 2Checkout)
Pros: Less expensive and less risk to accept credit cards than having a merchant account. Often has a secure shopping cart service included in the monthly fees.
Cons: Less control than having a merchant account, which at times can turn into problems for customers with orders. Usually more expensive than PayPal, checks (good ones) or money orders (good ones). Break their terms and regulations, and like any processor, they will shut your ability down immediately so you can neither process payments and get your funds down immediately.

Checks (Mail in Personal or Business)
Pros: Far less expensive to accept than credit cards or PayPal, if the check is good. Provides a payment method for customers who can’t or won’t use online payment methods.
Cons: Takes longer than online payments. Many sales are likely to be lost in between the “I see it, I want it” phase and actually getting a check in the mail. Risky. Can be “rubberized” and bounce up to 2 times each depending on your bank’s handling of them, racking up fees for you of $25 or more per bounce. Basic risk management requires that you hold shipping out the order until the payment clears, which annoys shoppers, and causes you to have more stuff sludging through your order delivery process. Extra labor needed to get them deposited. Delay until they clear to get use of the funds usually.

e-Checks
Pros: No wait time to get the e-check to you. Might be less expensive to accept than credit cards or PayPal if the check is good. Makes an “instant” payment method available to customers who can’t or won’t use other online payment methods.
Cons: Risky. Can be “rubberized” and bounce up to 2 times each depending on your bank’s handling of them, racking up fees for you of $25 or more per bounce. Basic risk management requires that you hold shipping out the order until the payment clears, which annoys shoppers, and causes you to have more stuff sludging through your order delivery process. Break their terms and regulations, and like any processor, they will shut your ability down immediately so you can neither process payments and get your funds down immediately.

Money Orders or Cashier’s Checks
Pros: Provides a payment method for customers who can’t or won’t use other payment methods.
Cons: Slow to get to you, slowing down your whole order delivery process. Extra labor needed to get them deposited. Risky. Yes, I say risky. Money order and cashier check fraud has taken a dramatic increase in the last year or two. Because it’s nearly impossible to keep track of every type of money order or cashier’s check out there, handling them requires calling the bank or service it’s written by and verifying them, or just hoping they’re good. Exceptions to this are US and Canada Postal Money Orders. With both US and Canadian Postal Money orders, you can verify that they are good by knowing and using the anti-fraud methods they provide. Both can be cashed at the US Post Office. However it still takes extra time to handle them and get your funds in hand.

It’s a lot to sort through to determine what payment methods are best for you to accept. I suggest determining for yourself how much risk and how much expense (money and time) you feel comfortable with, and find methods that work within those constraints.

Priority Mail is the default shipping method at CrystalsAndJewelry.com unless you choose Express Mail. Some people have asked why First Class is not an option.  Why? Because First Class is unworkable and ends up being very little savings.

Why is First Class mail unworkable? Because if something is over 12 ounces, the post office will not allow it to be shipped First Class, and it has to go Priority instead anyway.  My shopping cart service, which does many other things that save, chokes on that with First Class mail, so it would have to be calculated manually.  By the time everything is said and done, First Class mail is nearly as expensive as Priority mail anyway.

How can First Class be nearly as expensive? Well, first off, the postal service doesn’t provide free packing, so that cost would have to be added, as bubble envelopes and small first class boxes would have to be kept in stock all the time. The boxes run from $1 to $5 depending on size, and even bubble envelopes in less than quantities of 1000 run 40 cents and up to $2 or so.  Then a handling charge would have to be added in order to cover the time needed to calculate the postage manually  and then charge it to your credit card or get additional PayPal payment manually. The time itself can add up to anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour depending on whether we have to email multiple times, etc. and that can become a very hefty handling charge. So by the the time all of that is added, the savings would come to a maximum of $1-$2. It’s just too complex for too little savings, when most people want the speed of Priority Mail anyway.

The shipping method question basically came down to a choice between raising all prices to cover the additional expenses of First Class mail which effects everyone regardless of shipping type, or just not offer First Class in general.  I chose lower prices for everyone by using Priority Mail as the primary shipping method. In the end, that saves most people more than the max $1 or $2 First Class might save, and gets things to everyone more quickly.

I continue to get custom jewelry requests and now will occasionally take custom jewelry requests now. BUT…

Plan on at least 4 weeks for any custom jewelry. Why? Because I can’t totally stop everything else to do it. I’d actually love to be able to. Would anyone like to take over the business end of things or hire me so I can?  Let me know!

The moolah bit is because my schedule is already tight, so I have to stop some other business thing in order to do custom jewelry, and custom jewelry is always more time-consuming than other similar p ieces. So the absolute minimum for custom jewelry in any case whatsoever is $100.  I often have to locate and purchase the materials. I have to communicate with you about the plans for it.   Then I have to make it. And all of that has to happen at the expense of doing other business things and jewelry things that keep my business (and thus me) afloat.

So, that’s the scoop on custom jewelry.

This is a set of Chakra Pendants that I made for my Mother for Christmas.  There’s one pendant for each of the 7 chakras. Mother was thrilled to get the first ones. Woo! I’ll be making them available to everyone soon.

Eni Oken has a new wire jewelry tutorial up: Border for Net Bezel Pendant.  So go get it already. ;)  No, Eni doesn’t pay me for telling you about her tutorials. Sheesh. Someone actually asked me that.  I just think they’re great, and I think you will too.

Know of other jewelry making tutorials?  Let me know. I’m always interested in learning more. And I can share the info with folks here too.

And again, I have to say: Pay for your tutorials if Eni and others sell them. They can make this huge amount of work inexpensive for each of us only if we each do our part. Respect the artists who share their talent with these inexpensive tutorials: buy yours and don’t share it or sell it to others.  If we had to go the traditional route and buy these in a book, they’d cost more and we’d have to wait for a whole book-worth to be ready. Ugh. I’d not like that.

Question:

“I have some rings, from my grandmother, that are jade. My aunt put the rings in silver cleaner. Is there anything I can do to fix the jade stones in the rings?Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it!”

My Answer:

Jade is a soft stone that can be damaged permanently by harsh silver cleaners or other harsh chemicals. Harsh chemicals usually strip off the surface of the stone, and sometimes a good lapidarist can repolish the stone. The only thing I know of that you could possibly do is get a local jeweler or lapidarist to look and see if they can be repolished.  You might do a google search for lapidary clubs in your area to find someone who could look at them (without it costing a fortune) and at least give you an idea if it’s possible. Good luck with it!

Eni Oken has another new tutorial up. Woo!  Go get it right here.  This one is a spiral pendant. Yum yum.

As I mention every time, do Eni and all of us all a favor, don’t share them or give them to folks - if we all pay for them, she can keep her prices outrageously low like they are now.  She does incredibly high quality tutorials with tons of photos and great instructions. They’re more than worth the few bucks she asks for them.

Gotta Market Your Jewelry Website

I did a post  in May about Making a Jewelry Website. This is the next article in the series.

Build it and they will come just doesn’t work on the web. So you have to market your site. Over and over and over again. It’s a never-ending process.  And they all cost time, energy, and some money. Some cost a little. Others cost a lot. 

Email Newsletter

It’s almost impossible to have a successful website without having an email newsletter. And as marketing tools go, email newsletters are inexpensive. My sales go up by 300% or more the day after my newsletter goes out. Whoa!  Why is that?  Basically, because it reminds folks about your site. There are literally billions of sites out there, and there’s no way any one person can remember them all. So send them a reminder. Start one yourself as soon as you start your website. Need more convincing?  You can go all over the web and find more info about it, just google it or yahoo it.  Try "email marketing" for a search term.

The mailing list service I use is  Your Mailing List Provider and they’ve been great for the whole time I’ve used them. Their double opt-in and bounce handling options make doing a newsletter so much easier than it used to be. Plus, you can do HTML or text newsletters or both. And they keep adding features that are super-handy. For the money, they’re the best I’ve found.

Tips for Email Newsletters

• Do it in HTML within the email itself.
  Make it pretty. Use photos judiciously, but do use them.
• Put the newsletter IN the email. Don’t expect your readers to open your email, then click on a link to go to your site to read your newsletter. Make it easy for them.
• Make it interesting to your readers.
  Readers might become buyers. So make it fun for them to subscribe to it and read it.
• Do NOT make it just "I’m selling this now." 
  That will kill an email newsletter almost as fast as not sending one at all. You can do that occasionally — if your newsletter is normally interesting — but doing it regularly makes people unsubscribe or delete the newsletter.
• Write your newsletter like you were talking to them personally.
  Grammar and punctuation need not be perfect. A friendly tone is needed.
• Send out your newsletter no more than once a week.
  More than that and it comes across as spam. Unless you have that many really fun things to say, that is.
• Write your newsletter regularly and purposefully, even when you have a small number of subscribers.
  If you don’t, you’ll end up with no subscribers at all.

Email newsletters are great marketing tools, but they also have to be fun and interesting to your readers. 

Sterling Silver is 925 parts out of 1000 silver by law in the USA. So sterling silver is mostly (92.5%) real, honest-to-God silver. The other 75 out of 1000 parts can be any metal and may vary by the recipe any given refinery uses, although it’s normally mostly copper. Sterling Silver, .925 Silver, and .925 Sterling Silver (sometimes called "traditional sterling silver") all mean exactly the same thing: that it’s  92.5% silver and 7.5% other metals.

.925 Argentium® sterling silver, (Argentium®) is a proprietary alloy that contains germanium as part of the 75 parts out of 1000 that are not silver in sterling. The germanium in Argentium® makes it a real sterling silver that is far, FAR more tarnish-resistant than traditional sterling silver.

Anything I have that I show or mark at CrystalsAndJewelry.com as sterling silver or .925 sterling silver is 925 parts out of 1000 silver. Additionally, anything that I show or mark Argentium® sterling silver is 925 parts out of 1000 silver and also has germanium in it.

Several people have asked recently if I could tell them how to make jewelry with crystals like I do, or recommend a good book about it, or do I teach classes. Unfortunately, I really can’t tell anyone exactly. I’d have to write a book myself, since I’ve never seen one about making jewelry with crystals and natural stones.  And at this time, I don’t teach classes or write tutorials because there aren’t enough hours in the day for me as it is. :)  I can give you some information on how I learned to do what I do, and how you can learn it too.

I’ve spent the last several years making wire and crystal or gemstone jewelry virtually every day.  I also have earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in jewelry making, where I studied casting, fabrication, and many other jewelry techniques. I’m fairly sure that it’s not necessary to get a degree of any sort because I’ve seen work far better than mine made by people who didn’t have a degree, but the time spent learning about making jewelry, and actually practicing making it, probably is an absolute requirement. I’m quite sure anyone can learn to make jewelry as well as I do or better, if they’re willing to put forth the effort to learn and practice.

Here are some of the  online tutorials and resources I used to learn more about making wire jewelry in general, and I applied the principles learned first to regular shaped stones like cabochons, then to crystals and natural stones.

• Eni Oken’s Jewelry Lessons - ranging from beginner to advanced, great, inexpensive tutorials and lessons. and I’ve incorporated many of Eni’s techniques into my own work
• Studio Heath - also ranging from beginner to advanced, inexpensive lessons that are well worth the small cost, again, many techniques I’ve incoporated many of DK Heath’s techniques into my work
• Wire Sculpture.com - many DVD’s and online videos for sale, much more expensive than either Eni Oken’s or DK Heath’s tutorials, but if you prefer demonstrations and can’t get to a class, this would probably work well for you 

And here are a couple of of the books I’ve used to learn techniques I use for making jewelry with crystals and natural stones.

The ultimate key is to keep learning and to practice. Practice until your fingers know instinctively how to make the wire behave the way you want it to. Learn different ways to shape the wire so that it will hold the crystals or stones firmly. Practice until you no longer have to think about it step by step. Then learn and practice some more. If you’re not sure what I mean by the difference pratice makes, check the pendant to the left, which I made in 2002 and the one to the right which I made in 2007.

Good luck in your learning and practice!