Halloween sale, a victim of its own success

WHAT HAPPENED:

The Halloween sale resulted in a huge surge of activity, even entirely unprecedented, by the time it ended [midnight, Oct. 31] with multiple new orders showing up every hour in the last six or seven hours of [Halloween] and that settled down a few days later, to a somewhat normal level of activity by Nov. 5-6. Even Nov. 1-4 though saw highly elevated levels of activity AFTER the sale had ended – anywhere from 6-10 orders placed daily on top of the nearly 20 orders on the final sale day itself.

I managed, in short, nearly a thousand dollars in transactions in ONE WEEK. Sounds great, right?

No. It was largely a cataclysmic disaster.

The reason why is simple: I cannot fulfill more than 4 or 5 large orders per day. The time in a day to do more than that simply isn’t there – I’ve spent about a hundred hours working on turning around orders since the morning of Oct. 31st to the morning of Nov. 9. Like every waking hour. Only now – on Nov. 9, have I finally caught up on shipments.

So… about 50 orders from Oct. 31 to Nov. 6. Most fell several days behind on shipment, some painfully more than that. I opted for a first in, first out fulfillment pattern for the most part. Which meant, in general, nearly all orders were shipped late, especially those that were in or near to, the end of Oct. 31 or Nov. 1 timeframe. Lots of those took about a week or so to ship. Way beyond the ‘3 business dyas’ claim that has typically applied on the shop in the past.

As a result: About a dozen orders fully refunded, another 20 or so saw shipping upgrades to make up for lost time.

I have actually lost a bit at this time in all, in the wake of a sale that was supposedly a dramatic success with $900+ in orders, and a hundred or so hours of work on my end. It comes out to around -$.0.39 in net gain per hour worked. It’s entirely unsustainable. The last ten days, fielding upset messages regarding delays, printing large batches of things and packing and shipping. And I was not making money doing any of this. I lost money on a ten day stretch during which this stress consumed the entire ten days.

Shipping was another issue. I had set up an account on Stamps.com, but had issues integrating it with Etsy which meant tracking I saw had to be copied to customers, but perhaps more significantly, not only did buyers not immediatly see shipment had occurred, Etsy itself as a platform failed to see the fact as well, so as a reuslt of both this – widespread shiping delays and issues – and gaps/lags in communication, among other difficulties keeping up, I have lost ‘Star Seller’ designation on Etsy moving forward. Which is deserved, I get it.

I tried, I worked my butt off the last ten days, but even so… maybe not enough. Should I have gone without sleep? Maybe. But that’s not sustainable. Will I get a pile of mixed or negative ratings in the next few days? Likely. I understand why. I tried to communicate but did not always do that often enough given the sheer volume of messages. I tried to turn all the orders around but again, just too many in too short a timeframe.

SO WHAT WILL HAPPEN NOW:

-I’ve adjusted pricing upward on bookmarks, at least… the bookmarks that allow customization to be requested from me. Simply put, there are buyers who request a lot of Photoshop editing and various design ideas be pursued, in various directions, on bookmark designs before they choose a design they like and that moves forward. That sort of order always is more time consuming for me than a simple customer who says, “I have a design already, that I made myself, can you print it on some bookmarks?” So the two types of situations are now being made two separate listings, and the more difficult of the two is roughly $8 more expensive in general. The bookmarks had exploded from a completely unknown listing four months ago to – as of the past month – 45% of sale activity. So adjusting even this one thing will solve a lot.

-Aside from that one price increase in one of the two parts of a product split, all items in general besides tyhe bookmarks are 4% more expensive from here on out – another slight incremental price increase along with others over the last few years. Pricing increases, broadly, aren’t meant to punish buyers, but they do filter out a few of those who aren’t serious and allow me to keep up with the buyers who remain after that.

-I’ll be reducing the discounts on Thanksgiving/Christmas sales to minimum. Sales during holidays are always crazy and the 30% off or more across the board over Halloween caused a deranged mass of acitivity, Plans now: small sales on holidays, bigger sales during otherwise slow stretches, and a word of advice to buyers in general, is please DO NOT WAIT TO THE FINAL HOUR OF THE FINAL DAY OF EVERY SALE! That happened with the Halloween sale, people who ordered during the first four or five days of it usually got their orders deliverd on time, those who waited to the end right before it was over, saw massive delays because EVERYONE was doing the exact same thing. Basically I’d like to even out orders over time. So… watch for the bigger sales to occur here and there in times of 2024 when nothing whatsoever seemingly justifies them. Like, the stretches where no holidays are present, might see surprise discounts of 30-45% on things. But don’t be shocked or whatever, when the Thanksgiving and Christmas sales end up having milder discounts of 10-20%. It’s all some sort of attempt on my part to even out patterns of purchasing activity over the long term.

TLDR: Only place orders during the Thanksgiving/Christmas sales if you want things before Christmas. If the item is not time-sensitive, consider waiting to early 2024 as there will be deepr discounts during otherwise slow spans then. Definitely DO not wait til the end of sale events either. You might get caught up in a nightmare of the “Halloween 2023′ sort where your item arrives a week later than is initially estimated. THIS WILL BE A RISK PRIOR TO CHRISTMAS!

I’M NOT GIVING UP ON ETSY but am definitely learning – the hard way! – from mistakes!

I’m really sorry to everybody who saw their packages delayed. I am. Some of them haven’t even reached the buyers yet even if they are one the way now as of this morning or some other point over the past few days.

Revised sale planning:

Nov. 10-14, Pre-Thanksgiving sale – 10-25% off most items.

Nov. 22-Dec. 6, Pre-Christmas sale, 10-15% off most items.

Jan. 1-10, New Year’s sale, 20-40% off most items.

AGAIN, HERE’s the ETSY LINK:

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

Halloween Etsy sale active!

In acknowledgement of the fact that the October Halloween sale is going on, and that all Etsy items are temporarily 30+% off, I’ve updated the sale info page of this site accordingly:

Astonishing Etsy Bargains! (hornbostelproductions.com)

It seems to be a big deal somehow – 90 people, sometimes over a hundred, are showing up each day now that the sale’s begun. And yes, this sale event encompasses my birthday. I’m turning 37 this October. I’m getting old.

If you want this to be a good birthday for me, or a good Christmas for my family, or you just want to make me able to donate more to *actual* worthy causes, want to help with my launching of more completed projects (videos, video games, stock media packs, new print products, papercraft sets, whatever it is I’m doing or working on that’s going to make backing the shop worthwhile in your eyes, well, you can get some AWESOME discounts right now on a wide range of things you’ll love to have, while also helping me to further goals I care about and that will assist my family, friends, and the world.

MatthewLHornbostel – Etsy

Thanks so much, everyone!

Here are some greeting cards that are one of the many things on sale that’ve taken off suddenly like crazy despite the fact that I only released them very recently. These big, glossy greeting cards are currently a dollar each:

One dollar per card! Less for a three-pack! And I’ll include an envelope with any future cards in the mailer, a big one that can hold what is admittedly a larger than typical Christmas card.
Just released, nobody’s bought one yet, but these 6″ by 9″ sticker name tags (for trick or treaters) are on sale under $1 each. They can have whatever name[s] and text color you want, so easy stuff for tacking onto a candy container for people on the street to identify the name of your little ghost/goblin if that’s useful.
It astonishes me just how rapidly this listing took off. There are a dozen people with custom bookmarks in cart at the moment, on my Etsy shop. But not too hard to understand why. A lot of people want custom bookmarks and either have their own designs or want one put together. And at under $1 for a bookmark plus shipping, the current sale pricing on this listing is really hard to ignore. The prices even drop steadily from there as the number of copies rises, currently going under $0.40 per bookmark (!) with sufficient volume, during the sale.
Also, there’s a super-colorful preset batch of bookmarks, with my own archive of art paintings printed differently on front and back of eight. No customization but it’s under $1.50 during this sale – for a set of EIGHT of these art bookmarks.

The four above examples? They’re just a few of the 50+ active listings. Seriously, go look at the shop right now, it’s crazy how good the pricing is on everything for the rest of October 2023.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

A recently posted new painting. Acrylic on canvas. Mojave desert imaginary scene. On sale, 45% off. $15 + shipping.
The best ‘promotional boost’ package there, is now on sale at just $45. That bundle includes a shipment of 250 double-sided business cards with your design or a custom one built in Photoshop based on your input, hundreds of custom flyers, plus an online promotion to 75,000+ people via search and banner ads, from someone who actually has some experience in making that stuff work in finding people. I mean, you ran across my site, didn’t you? 😉

The stock media stuff has struggled out of the gate – there’s a scathing review of the video VFX pack which ultimately has been pulled off the shop to be redone completely at some point. The textures have some (far fewer, but some) issues as a collection too, but a HUGE update’s due to the collection within the next 20 days. An update that’s been in the works seemingly forever but… it involves over a hundred more materials and scattered enhancements to the first thousand textures in the collection which bring those up fully to modern standards. As PBR surfaces, they’ll just look better, which has to do with a ton of careful manual editing I’m doing, and some clever cutting-edge AI processes for upscaling and depth solving. As for the video (VFX) collection and that – the only negative review I have on my Etsy account out of 180+ total reviews… yeah, it’s true, many of those clips are pretty much unusable these days. Standard-def footage is useless to many video editors and is, as stated, blurry. Set aside the several ‘shaky’ clips that are not easily usable for that reason and the main issue is resolution/blurriness of the bulk of the material. You all, I spent a few hundred $ shooting all that stuff but much of it is years old. Like, in some cases, as old as 2011-2013. So yeah, the budget-range cameras of that era were not good enough to grab footage useful by modern standards. It’s why much of that stuff’s gone freeware at this point on https://matthornb.itch.io [the TACC2018 page] and I hope you don’t hold that older video material against me.

That said: I am working towards some modern 3d rendered physics-sim elements in 4k so hopefully when that is out it’ll make up for the flaws of the old stuff. Well, that and the texture and 3d asset pack updates inbound.

And I’m still working on a HornbostelVideos website update and it’s been slow in coming but I think I’ve got the design right this time. It’s a very tricky thing, setting up a video site that needs to not only hold close to a hundred videos with room to grow from there, but in a way that is intuitive to navigate AND has to be responsive, i.e it must read clearly even on a cheap phone screen that’s as little as 300-400 pixels wide. I’ve currently got the new design set up to look good on low res screens, medium res, and high res full-HD. I won’t advise you to watch on your phone, I’d prefer a good tablet or iPad or a desktop/laptop but people do watch stuff on phones and I have to be able to handle that!

News on numerous fronts will be posted here between now and the end of 2023. Keep an eye out for cool stuff. That’s all for now I guess.