Bluejacket Photo

I recently had my biggest sale yet on ETSY.  One of the items bought was a set of 4 note cards.  No problem.

Two of the cards the buyer wanted I didn’t have on hand.  Also no problem.  This is why I have a printer; my Lexmark 810 is up to the task of making cards, and I do say in my store description that special orders are welcome.  Plus, the customer said that she was in no great rush to get the order, as long as it was to her by Father’s Day (easily done;  she lives in town).

Then the fun starts.  I print out the two cards I don’t have, and realize that the two from my supplier are 5″x7″, but my blank cardstock is 5.5″x8.5″.  Cutting down the larger cards might have been the better choice, maybe, but I decided to print out the other two instead.

Then, after wrestling with positioning, etc, I get all four printed, dry them, inspect them and… They look like crap.  It takes me a moment to figure out why;  I printed my bright colorful photos on paper with a matte finish.  This worked just fine for my Christmas cards, but my landscapes, especially my sunset, were drab.

Back to Office Depot.  I grab their glossy (still 5.5×8.5) blank cards, and head home.  Wrestle with the printer (there are -four- places I have to over ride the printer driver to create a decently printed card), and voila’, ’tis done.

I’m not making as much money on this order as I’d hope, but hopefully the experience (and customer good will) will help in the future.

I also need to find some 5×7 card stock (I’m looking on the internet between pararaphs).  This 5.5×8.5 sort of screams “home made”, IMHO, and not necesarilly in a good way.

Here are the cards she ordered:

I sold a mouse pad last night…  All seems good, I check the buyers address in Pay Pal to make sure it matched the ETSY address.  Then I see that the postage paid was only $2.50, which seemed low.

I mail the package off, and sure enough, the post office charged me two bucks.  When you add the price of the packaging, that means I lost 50 cents in profit.  Since I don’t make much money on the  mouse pads anyway, that kinda hurts.

I check my postage set up in ETSY, and the price is correct there.  The only thing I can think of is that when I update the postage settings, the changes aren’t applied dynamically to items already listed.  Not how I would have set things up.

Needless to say, I’ve now verified that the correct prices are on my products.  I’ll have to go through this again when the rate hike goes into effect in May