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.

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. 

I am often asked about how my website CrystalsandJewelry.com is done and what I recommend for jewelry artists wanting to start their own sites. I have done my whole site on my own, and still do. I had an "unfair" advantage with getting my site together because I was a professional web and graphic designer when I started CrystalsandJewelry.com. So it wasn’t exactly a leap for me.  That’s not the case for most folks, though!  So here are some tips on things I use and recommend for starting your own jewelry site.

The single most important tip I can give you is this: Once you start doing jewelry as a business, in many ways, it’s a job, not an adventure. The making jewelry is still an adventure, but so many other things are business, that sometimes the fun of making jewelry can get lost in it all. Consider what that means before you take the leap. Consider it again. Consider it yet again. Then, if you’re still interested, have at it! 

I’m not saying that to discourage you from starting a jewelry website, by any means. I don’t  worry about competition from other jewelry artists because we each have our own unique style and personality that we bring to our jewelry and our websites.  I do, though, want you to realize what a large undertaking a successful jewelry website is. I’ve seen many excellent jewelry artists become discouraged and even stop making jewelry altogether because they thought doing a website would be an easy way to make a buck, but found it wasn’t. I don’t want that to happen to you. It’s not easy to have a successful website of any sort. It can, however, be a great way to do business and get your jewelry recognized.

All that said, let’s have at some of the basics of actually putting a site together.

Gotta Have Photos

It’s fairly obvious that if you want to sell jewelry on the web, you have to have decent photos of the jewelry.  The best resource I’ve ever found for photographing jewelry photos is here. But here’s my two cents worth also.

• Camera - I use an old Olympus 740C with ultra zoom (macro) and 3.1 megapixels and it’s more than enough for web photos. The features it has include all these things below that are either necessary or just really helpful.
• Macro capability is a must for any camera for photographing jewelry.
• Megapixels, not so much if you’re only going to be putting photos on the web.
• Other features that are super-handy are white balance control, auto focus, and color balance control.
• Lighting - Cloud Domes, Photo Tents, and photography lights all help. Rather than go into them all here, check Rena’s site for tips.
• Photo Editing Software
• The cream of the crop is Adobe Photoshop, but it’s also overkill if you’re just doing photos for the web, in my opinion.  If you have the $700+, nab it, it’s the best. If you don’t, try one of these:
• Photoshop Elements which is essentially Photoshop Lite. I’ve heard really good things about it, although I’ve not tried it. Cost: Around $100
• GIMP or GIMPShop - Two open source photo editing softwares with great reputations. And the price can’t be beat. Cost: FREE
  Personally, I use Photoshop because I already had it when I was doing professional web and graphic design. If I were starting out now, though, I’d go with GIMP or GIMPShop.

Gotta Have a Way to Get Your Site Out There

One thing  to think about before you go making your own site is whether you really need a site all of its own, or whether a blog format would do. Since I’m talking about websites as opposed to blogs, my info here is assuming you want to do a website. 

• Pay someone to do it.
  If you have a lot of money and not a lot of time, this is the way to go.  Be aware, though, that there are inherent communication issues between the geek-minded and the art-minded. Plus, you may have to wait in line behind other customers to get things on your site updated or changed.
• Do It Yourself the Website Way
  Time-consuming, and there are a lot of things involved, but you have total creative and content control and it’s less expensive in cash.
• Web Design Software
  WYSIWYG web design software is the easiest for most artists to use. WYSIWYG is What You See is What You Get. It’s not exactly true, but it’s relatively close. And it’s easy for the non-programming-minded compared to learning to code by hand. Trust me on that one. My first website was done in 1995 and I coded it by hand.
  
• Coffecup HTML Editor - It does HTML code AND WYSIWYG! If you go with a year prepaid at LunarPages.com , they give you this free. If you buy it yourself, it’s only $49 — Cheap for what you get.
• Dreamweaver - The Rolls Royce of WYSIWYG by far. This is what I use because I love the Library and Template Features and it updates links for me all over the site. The downside is that it has a jillion features you’ll probably never use, it runs like poop on an older pc, and it’s around $700.
• Another option is canned site designers offered by web hosts. I’ve never found one I liked, so I’m not keen on this option. It is one, though, so you might want to look into it.
• Domain Name
  You’ve GOT to have your own domain name. They’re so cheap now that it’s ludicrous to even consider not  having one. You can get one for $8.95 a year for .com domains, or less, at Godaddy.com. I’ve been using them for several years now as a domain name registrar and have never had a problem, which I can’t say for the other folks I’ve used in the past, including Network Solutions.
• Web Hosting
  Without reservation, I recommend LunarPages.com, where I host CrystalsandJewelry.com. They are rock solid, and you have to have that to do business online. I made the mistake of moving away from them once, and within 2 months I was back. No more of that.  I’m back and don’t expect I’ll go anywhere for the forseeable future.  And if you don’t trust my affiliate link above, just go straight to their home page at LunarPages.com. I don’t need the couple of bucks from affiliate sales nearly as much as you need good web hosting.

Are you tired of reading yet? hehehe This is just the tip of the jewelry website iceberg. I’ll be doing articles on your site’s theme or niche, e-commerce choices, marketing your website, and other tips on making jewelry websites for you in the near future. Join my newsletter email list or just pop back occasionally to find out when they’re available.

Sometimes life throws lessons at me. And sometimes I’m lucky enough to have them thrown at me gently. This is one of those times.

Many of you who have kept up with my blog or my site at all, know already that I’ve learned a ton from Eni Oken’s tutorials. Yep, I have no trouble admitting that. She’s great with them!  And some of my jewelry is quite obviously based on things I’ve learned from her. I’ve no trouble admitting that either. And I’d like to give her credit for those. I’d never have learned many techniques without her generosity in sharing techniques she’s figured out.

 BUT…

Where I’ve blown it recently is that I didn’t mention any of that on the page where that jewelry is shown and sold.  Using templates to get jewelry up quicker has bitten me on the you know what, as far as that goes.  I’ve been using templates without checking to make sure things like mentioning Eni’s work get mentioned. Argh! Yes, I know that I’ve been reeling lately with changes of bipolar disorder medications changes, but it’s still not good to miss something like that. It’s especially not good when all I have to do to fix it is make another template for when I have new jewelry along those lines.  It doesn’t make anyone feel good to blunder like that, and can make some folks think that I don’t appreciate and acknowledge Eni’s incredible help in learning everything. Or worse yet, some may believe I’m copying her exact jewelry. So I’m working to get all that fixed. It will take a little time, but it’s more than worth it. Although Eni doesn’t actually require any acknowledgment of using her tutorials, she’s a great person and deserves it. I just feel incredibly silly for not catching myself with my website templates. And I feel incredibly lucky that she’s not the type of person who would be nasty about it or worse, over my making such a silly mistake.

The lesson? Pay attention to website templates (or pages if you don’t use templates) when you put jewelry on the web. You may not be so lucky with your lesson.

And go visit Eni Oken’s site. She has a new tutorial up!  I’ve got it, and you may well see something based on it soon. Of couse, this time I’ll get it right on the jewelry page the first time.

If you don’t back up, you may crack up.  Having duplicates of all your business data is critical! And having back ups of your personal data is probably just as important to you. It is CRITICAL though to have back ups of your business data. Critical. CRITICAL! Got it?

This morning Chuck called to tell me his hard drive croaked. Ack! Don’t we all hate that! Yes, he hates it, too. By the time he called me, he had already been to the nearest computer store and bought a new hard drive and was getting ready to install it. Fortunately, Chuck is business savvy and has an external hard drive that all his business data is backed up on daily. So what data will he lose? None!  He’ll lose some time and money to replace the internal hard drive that croaked, but he won’t lose any important business information! Yay! And because he can put it all back together quickly, it will only cost a day or so of other work. Since he was totally caught up with shipping for CrystalsAndJewelry.com, that means that even orders that came in last night should ship out on time, or maybe a day late. If he’d had to try to rebuild all his business information, there’s no way that could have been the case. So let’s all give Chuck a big cheer. Yay!

If you’re going to do business of any kind in today’s world, it’s super super super important to make daily back ups of your business information.  Don’t be lulled into thinking things like, "Oh, my computer is new. It will be fine," or "I’ll get around to it one of these days."  Most people seem to like to learn the hard way that one day it won’t be fine, and if you haven’t gotten around to it you’ll be up a creek.  I learned the hard way myself.

Fortunately I got to learn the hard way about backing up my info long before I had my own jewelry business, back when I was a network admin. (Yes, I was a geekette once upon a time.) And boy have I been glad of it!  I have been the back up queen ever since. Currently all my business data is stored on a mirrord hard drive pair (a RAID), and three - yes 3!!! — back up hard drives. One of those back up hard drives is external so that in case of a fire I can grab it and run.  Plus, I make regular CD back ups.  Am I paranoid? Maybe. Maybe not.

When I moved up to  New York for a couple of years, of course my computer and business info moved with me. At the time, even Chuck thought I was a little over the top having all my information on three hard drives.  It turned out I was not the least bit over the top.  During the move, two of those hard drives were damaged!  So when I got there, I had lost 2 of my back ups, but I still had one complete copy of all my business information!  Yay for me! Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you have too many back ups either.

No matter how inconvenient or expensive it may seem, it’s MORE than worth it to back up your business information. These days, an external USB hard drive is cheap enough that most anyone can get one, and many have a one touch back up feature.  Or back up to CD’s, or secure web space. But back up your business data somewhere. If you don’t, it’s almost certain one day you’ll be sorry.

… if you have an online shop, there will occasionally be misunderstandings with customers. That’s life on the internet, and we’re all human, so all of us get confused or make mistakes occasionally.
For instance one misunderstand that happens on my site occasionally involves Express Mail. On the top of the terms page  button, which every purchaser has to visit in order to check out at CrystalsAndJewelry.com, it specifically says above the "Agree to Terms, Continue to Checkout",

"Please allow 3 days to one week before shipment for your order to be prepared, or longer for special orders or made to order items. If you need your item(s) for a special occasion or need a rush, contact me and I’ll try to help out. Thanks!"

Yet a couple of customers have thought that because they chose Express Mail, their orders would be rushed even though they did not contact me about them.  I felt bad about it, but I truly don’t understand why they believe that choosing Express Mail would negate the terms they agreed to.  I’m not even sure how to make it clearer than to say just how long it takes to get items out the door.

My suspicion is that, like many busy people, not everyone reads the terms carefully. And you know what, that’s going to happen. People are busier than ever in the 21st century here.  It’s human.

The question is, what do you do about it when your customer isn’t happy because they didn’t either read or fully understand the terms.  You’ve done exactly what you said you’d do. So it’s hard to take on the blame for that being a bad thing.  But do you want to have unhappy customers?  I don’t recommend it, and I sure don’t want to.   So I always try to look for the win-win situation.  And if I can’t find one of those, I modify my expectation of what I "win" out of the situation, and try to help out the customer as a first priority. Sometimes this may mean refunding someone for an order that I would be within my rights to refuse to refund. I still prefer for that the customer be happy, and sometimes what I "win" is just that. And that’s ok.

It bears thinking on what you’d like to happen when misunderstandings occur. That way you don’t have to come up with ideas in the middle of an actual misunderstanding!  It makes it a lot easier to already know what you really want to do.