I’ve been so swamped with Etsy orders some of them have been sent out pathetically late. So… of $600+ in sales this month, roughly $200 of that total will be refunded, more with orders that were over a day or two later than estimated.
This of course means all pay and profit for the month is now gone, in my attempts to resolve all the piled up complaints. The month has had well over 100 hours of Etsy work involved and I’ve earned nothing.
Upside: the buyers are generally all getting the items they ordered, even if later than is acceptable. And they get usually anywhere from 30-55% of their order value refunded in problem cases.
Downside: This consumed a lot of time and cash on my end so that now I cannot reasonably give family members a decent Christmas this year AND realistically release a debugged version of Vivid Minigolf in 2022, so that little indie game is being delayed. It is being pushed back to a projected release on Feb. 23, 2023. This lets me get that launch done right even if it is later than everyone was hoping.
I can still pledge this: HornbostelVideos.com and TriumphantArtists.com will be nicely overhauled before the end of 2022, among several other sites. And yes, I know, they were supposed to be ready in mid October. But the Etsy chaos has delayed a lot of things.
The weirdest note though here is that it seems the economy is tanking fast or something. I saw the sale activity was frenzied for the first 2/3 of October and after that just kind of… drop off a cliff the past week starting Oct. 23… which is very weird. Possibly ominous. Especially given that the Etsy shop is now set with everything 15% off or more, and yet I went full 180 from insanely overloaded with orders to suddenly wondering where everyone went as soon as the sale began.
And it isn’t like there have been a pile of bad reviews so far. I managed to resolve most complaints at least passably, and the total number of ratings has gone up 18% since the month began. They’ve been still all positive somehow.
I am really unsure what is going on here.
And if you’re wondering, delays were NOT just me overloaded with orders.
At one point the printer flat out stopped working for a while, and only printed the cyan and yellow. I tried a ton of easy, then increasingly weird long shot fixes until hitting on one that (thankfully) worked, involving temporarily dismantling some parts in the printer and using Q tips dipped in distilled water to scrub specific areas in the printer. That printer malfunction delayed a bunch of orders and is responsible for a substantial chunk of the current delays.
Otherwise, nothing extremely odd. Just a few shipping and packaging issues, including a damp package that had to be redone/reprinted at one point (got wet because USPS didn’t pick it up in a timely manner, it just sat there for hours on end and was damaged) occasional lag and freezes in Photoshop, and a ton of stress trying to clear out the (still partially present) backlog of orders.
Yes, I am pulling two all nighters this week and yes, I am finally almost caught up with every order that has been placed.
I’m really sorry about how all this has played out for everyone. I tried to handle this well but things did not work out in anything close to an ideal way and I apologize for all the terrible missteps I have made here.
Thanksgiving to Christmas:
15-20% off all printing services
40-50% off papercraft and handmade art on canvas
60-70% off digital products.
PLUS – extra 10% off orders above $35 WITH free shipping included too!
Or if the order is over $50 in value, the extra 10% savings grows to 15% (!) making this the best pricing on large orders in a LONG time. 35% off big print orders potentially!
I’ve run through a few tough challenges in October, order pileups and scattered delays, refunds, even fully replacing my printer. But now things are finally running smoothly again and I am so excited about how the future looks here. 🙂