Technical Department calling . .

Telemarketing scam of the day - and boy, do I get some weird phone calls sometimes.  I have gotten 2 calls from this same man today. I just dumped the first one because it didn't make sense. But this afternoon I talked longer because it got me wondering.

He says he's calling from the "technical department" of Win-something about a problem with my Windows computer. I've been a Mac girl my whole life and there is no Windows computer here. Ever. This second call I made him tell me who he was actually calling and he had my name right. And he tells me that some bad things are being downloaded through Windows to my computer whenever I'm online.

I tell him that he's really confusing me since I don't have a Windows computer. And he's so insistent that his database cannot be incorrect and that there absolutely is somebody in my house using a Windows computer. I had to tell him that he's wrong and I don't have any idea where he gets his information. (It's quite clear that he's calling from a call center in India.) Both times, when I finally told him that I didn't have that type of computer he hangs up.  So I don't even get to find out if he's selling me something or what he's really calling me about.

What's this all mean, jelly bean? Was he going to have me download some kind of software bug over the phone to steal my identity? Anyone else get this kind of call?  Let me know in the comments below if you have had something like this happen to you, or if you know anything about this proposition.  

What the heck is the "Win-mumble" company anyway? I asked him twice and was going to ask him to spell it, but there was static in the line and communication was difficult.  Now I'm even more curious (and nervous) than before.

Do you feel a breeze too?

I can sooo relate to this photo right now.

I'm actively working on getting this little soap business up to snuff for the year 2014 in the online universe.  Can you believe I've never dipped my toes in Facebook?  Some of you will be totally all "OMG, how have you lived?" while others of you might be like I was (even last month) "what's the fuss all about? why can't you just face to face?"

Well if you're in business and you want to stay in business, it's no longer an option to opt out.  Like having a web page, you have to have a Facebook page.  

I have no idea really what I'm getting into.  Still trying to figure out the technicalities of uploading photos and getting all my settings in a row.  Which balloons from there into how to get my link straight in all my other online locations, and what do I post there and when and how and what is all the friends and likey stuff.  My head hurts.

I'm truly feeling a little exposed at the moment and vulnerable.  And like some stupid kid just instagrammed my ass all over the internets.  I'll be an expert in no time, I'm sure and will be guffawing about how long it took me to join the club.

So if you want to head over and have a laugh yourself.  Or fan me/follow me/like me, whatever the hell you're supposed to do . . . see ya at the cool kids table.

https://www.facebook.com/soapworks.studio

Credit Card Processing - Don't Call Me!

Warning:  Cranky vent post ahead.

I just got a telemarketing call from a credit card processor.  Did I know that they have these new super cheap rates and that my small business can have the same credit card processing rates as the big stores, like Walmart?

Why yes.  I did know that.  Because you called me yesterday.  Very same company.  And the day before that too.  Very same company.  Are you so hard up that you have to call the same list every. single. day.??

But I've gotten almost this exact same groundhog day telemarketing call several times each and every week for like a year now from a huge list of credit card processing companies.  I can't stand it any more.  I guess it doesn't matter that you are on the "Do Not Call" list.  This law applies to everyone else except credit card processors.  Oh, and that creepy robo woman who calls about once a month to steam my carpets.

Here's the longer version.  When they first starting calling, it was when the Durbin law or some blah-de-blah came into effect, and I actually did have the first company do an estimate and comparison of what I was currently paying.  And it was a lot less.  Sort of.  The rates were less, but I had to buy all new equipment to do it - at a substantial cost.  The next company was pretty much the same.  But I took those rates back to my current company, and they adjusted me down to lower rates all around.  And I was happy.  I like my little system right now.  It works great.  And when my machine breaks down or gets technologically obsolete (which could be three months from now, meh) then I would re-look at my options and find the best deal at that point.

Now?  I am not spending another minute listening to every single sales rep's schtick about how much cheaper (by a penny or two) they are to the next guy.  It's all such a math game anyway.  And it gives me a headache.

If you have not had a merchant account before, then you have no idea what a pain it all is.  These people are bankers.  Enough said.

Some have minimum fees.  Some have statement fees.  If you decide to go wireless, there are wireless fees.  There is a transaction fee for each transaction.  Plus there is a percentage rate for each card transaction - which of course, varies with each card.  A credit card is different from a debit card.  And a rewards card costs more.  A swiped card is the cheapest.  But when I do mail order or internet orders, and do not have the card in hand - only the number - that's a different rate altogether.  Then they make you buy a terminal.   If you're doing it only online, that's a whole different kind of fees.  Oy.

Of course, there's now the Square - one flat rate for every single swipe and the reader thingy is free if you have a smart phone.  But that doesn't help me much for my mail and internet orders.  And their rate is probably the highest of anything else I've seen.  So there is no need to pay more if it's only for my show sales.

I am quite sure there is something a little less expensive out there.  But I am not interested in spending a month of tedious hours trying to ferret it out from all the other deals out there.  It's not worth my time.  I'm good where I am.  The cheapest thing usually comes with it's own set of problems.  Like bad customer service.  Or going out of business suddenly.

The entire system is going to change in the next few years anyway.  The entire credit card system is being transitioned from having those magnetic strips on the back of the card where all the information is stored, to having a chip in them.  For security.  Apparently the chip is much harder to read and steal from than the current stripe type card.  So we'll all be getting new cards and merchants will have to get new equipment all over again.  There is a date by when it's required to be effective and I think it's some time in 2015, but don't want to look it up right now.   It will affect every single person with a card - and for every single card too.

But back to the telemarketing dilemma:  Caller ID doesn't help me at all over here.  They have regular phone numbers that just say 'Dallas, TX' or 'private number' - something ambiguous that I would never know is not a customer or other business type call.  In good faith I try to answer everything.

These people are really trying my patience.  What's the solution?  Are you hounded by telemarketing calls too?  Or do you have some gem of information about credit card processing that you'd like to share.  Let me know.  I'm all ears :)

Can't leave it alone

No that's not my cat. Just one of those "crazy cats sleeping" photos that people send other people who have cats. I started here because it's such a perfect butt-in-the-copier kind of photo. And I've done nothing but take photos all week. Erm, for the web site. Not my butt.

When I first started my work life right out of college I was a lowly secretary. And my best friend was the secretary at the desk next to me. Sometimes after we'd been out partying we would head back to the office (it was all walking distance in downtown San Francisco) and hang out in the copy room taking insane copier-photos of ourselves. Not butt shots - at least that I remember. Mostly crazy-face-pressed against the glass photos. Probably it was easier than finding a photo booth somewhere. And you just gotta immortalize all that fun. I digress. Way off track.

I've been obsessed with my web site this week. I can't stop messing with it. If you've visited in the last week or so, you have probably seen big changes. And it's not really done. I guess it never will be truly done.

One of my big goals this year was to really update it. Better design. Better photos. Better descriptions. Easier to navigate and find stuff. Just more usable and inviting in every way.

Today was a big photo day. We had a couple of two minute patches of sunshine, but it was dry. So I hauled a bunch of products out to take new pictures.

Here one of the new ones - a cuter look for the soap sacks. I did more vignette-style shots with stuff in the background. Group shots of things. And added 3 little bubble-type photos of products to the home page.

It's clear that I have no photography training, expensive equipment or special talent for styling. If you've been to Etsy or Pinterest, every single photo is like a million times better than what I had up there before. So my goal was to start working on my own. A little at a time. Just practicing. Each new and better photo I've uploaded to the site. Some items have had several different photos just in the last day or so. And they will stay until I can get an ever better one. For now, I'm just taking small steps in the right direction and teaching myself how.

There is no budget. No hiring of professionals. It's all DIY over here. If you've got feedback or opinions on any of the new stuff let me know. Good or bad, I'm all ears.

Vasa Park Holiday Gift Show

This week is the new holiday themed show at Vasa Park Ballroom on Lake Sammamish in Bellevue.

As I mentioned last month when we did the first fall one, this is not the same show as the one that had been there for years under Sue Van Gerpen. But if you're feeling nostalgic, there are some of the old vendors, and it's still the same rickety old place. But there are new crafters too, so new cool stuff to check out, and this time around it will be holiday and Christmas items. It's a boutique style show, which means there is a central cashier and artists are not generally "working" their own booths, except for a few folks who are taste-testing their treats or personalizing something.

We will be setting up the displays today. And it gets into full swing tomorrow. The deets:

Country Creations Home and Gift Show
Vasa Park Ballroom
3549 W Lk Sammamish Pkwy
Bellevue, WA

Dates: November 20-22
Hours: Thursday and Friday 10am to 7pm, Saturday 10am to 5pm

Link to directions: Vasa Park Resort

Might I also mention that I am having a love affair with Excel lately? I am. If you've been reading along, I'm totally not into math. But as a business person, owner, keeper of the bottom line, I have to have my finger on all those dreaded numbers. So I had a friend make me some Excel spreadsheets a few years back for the basic accounting stuff. And I've taught myself how to make new spreadsheets and work all the little shortcuts and stuff. Now I'm on fire. I've made little charts and graphs for so many things and it makes life so much easier. And my competitive streak loves to analyze all those little bottom lines. Mail orders versus shows. Sales at each show. Sales from month to month and year to year. Production of inventory.

It's pretty simple to set up really, and then when I get a free hour on a quiet evening, I can input my notes and see it all add itself up and report back. It usually makes me feel a lot better about all my hours slaving away in the studio lately. November is the toughest month of all as far as deadlines and intensity. So right about now I'm starting to feel sorry for myself and pooping out. Knowing exactly how I'm doing though makes it better.

I've been doing this for what? a dozen years now? And I'm finally figuring out what I'm doing. Or at least how much money I'm making doing what I'm doing. Slow learner :)

New Map

You probably haven't notice, but I added a new little widget thingamajiggy towards the bottom of the blog. It's under the the whole list of linky stuff on the right. It keeps track of where any visitors to the blog come from around the world and tracks them on a map.

It wasn't worth mentioning at first, of course, because I needed to have a few visitors log in first. I think it's been a week or so? I don't remember. But it's sorta exciting! I've got a bunch of people from around here. But there's others too - like Australia, someplace in the middle of the ocean off the coast of Africa (!?), the UK, a few Europe, one South America, and all over the US.

Anyway, just thought I'd mention it. I had almost forgotten to check it out again myself until this morning. Cool.

Web site update

Yesterday the site was down for the better part of the day. Not me, not my fault. The host server had problems or something. But it came back yesterday evening, and seems to be in working order today too.

I apologize for the inconvenience if you were trying to get through yesterday. And please give me a call if you are having any trouble at your end.

Ooops - Paypal

Dang. I'm a dork. Yesterday I was all hyped about adding Paypal as a payment option because it's more secure for the customer. And today I blabbed about it in the previous blog entry, making a biggie deal about it.

Aaaaaaand, later today, somebody tried to order using Paypal. Ooooooops. I forgot. I don't have taxes and shipping included in my shopping cart. For a bunch o' reasons, but the short story is that I use a flat rate chart instead of calculating shipping on each order by weight. It's a lot cheaper for the buyers, a lot easier for me, but not possible with the shopping cart. And taxes are a' gonna change, as I mentioned a few days back. Starting in July, Washington purchasers will pay the tax rate from where they live, instead of where I do business. The shopping cart on the website cannot work that way either. I only get to put in one tax rate. It won't think up all those other rates from every city and burg in the whole state. So again, I manually add those charges in as I process the order, and it doesn't appear when you check out.

So the Paypal idea is a bust. I wouldn't get the correct payment for those orders. I took it down.

But I've got my thinking cap on. I just don't know how to swing it yet.

I can't decide anything

If you've popped into the blog today, you may have seen one of like a gajillion different versions, with different styles, different colors, different photos for the heading. I am now certifiably nutso. I can't decide one single thing.

Should I go for all the cool colors and boxes? Or should I go plain and simple with a white background and black text? I've tried about 4 different pictures at the top, from funky, to cool design, to just pretty stuff. My head is spinning and I need lunch.

So, I'm just going to walk away for today. It's like this just for now. If you love it, let me know. If you stopped by and hated it, let me know. And like always, if you could care less, then just ignore the commotion.

I think it all starts with the picture up top. I want a new one, and need to figure that out first.

Pardon my dust while I do a little redecorating in here over the next few days.

A few news bits

In my slow plod to the finish line last week, I managed to teach myself a few new webmaster tricks. I'm starting to build a website for Collage, which we want to introduce any day now. But it's a collection of a whole bunch of people with their own ideas. And it takes time to get really super photos of every artist's work. So we're putting finishing touches on that this week. My hope is that it's done next week and we can start hooting and hollering about it.

But I figured out how to add the coding for maps in a web site. So I've added maps to my Shops section of my own site, which is a cool feature - and I hope, helpful for anybody who is interested in heading over to find one of the shops. All of them have the new spring stuff in them. Even D Avenue Nursery in Anacortes! Ruth had a rough time last year when her husband died suddenly, but her daughter has been helping get the place moving along, and they've added a little coffee counter in the gift shop, called Supreme Bean. It's still early for plants, but they are hoping that customers will stop in for quick visits even during the winter months - have a latte and pick up a little gift item (like a bar of breakfast soap, hint).

Product update: maybe somebody has wondered where in the heck the little lip balm tins have gone. Well, the story is that I have been carrying those little slider tins for years - but it's been a challenge to maintain a supplier for them. The first company I bought from went out of business. There was a small lapse and I found a new gal, but they were sort of expensive, far away and shipping was quite a bit of expense too. I continued to search for a better answer and finally found a (sort of) close by supplier who had much better prices. I kept going with them, but I was getting more disappointed with the quality - lots had loose lids or were dented.

So in late fall, I just decided not to re-order and try a whole new tin, packaging and look for the holidays. It was a bit of an experiment to see how that would go - everything from the process, to the look, to the cost, and how well they would be received. It was so-so and probably not long enough of an experiment. In the meantime, the supplier stopped carrying those sliding tins. Oh no, not again. The manufacturer had closed them out.

The last month has been a mix of searching high and low for the sliding tins, waiting to decide what I wanted to do, and just basically holding off on any decision for the moment while I worked through the big Spring newsletter push. The lip balms have been mysteriously absent.

Insert horn toot. I just found another supplier for the sliding tins. And they are even more local and reasonably priced. I have to work through a few leftover cases of old tins, and see if the new tins are going to be a bit better quality. But I've just ordered today and they haven't arrived yet. I'll do a little manfacturing mumbo jumbo here in the next few weeks - check it all out. And then I'm hoping to have the good old lip balms back in action by early March. Good? Yes? Anybody out there care at all? I haven't gotten frantic calls or complaints yet, so maybe you're still finishing up the eggnog stuff from November?

Fun with widgets

Wheeeeee! I've found a couple of new toys to play with. I've added new hot buttons to subscribe or bookmark the blog - see right. I saw them on other people's blogs and wanted them - sort of like coveting your friend's new cute shoes. I had to have a pair of my own. And it only took me an hour to figure out all the easy-as-pie, one-click-away, how to's, heh. I am so dang happy that Blogger has all these super easy for dummies new layouts and widget tools. Because all the html coding was kicking my butt.

I'll do a real post later with a cool pic - I got my brand spanking new camera last night. I just need to figure out that technology next. So much to play with today. Even though I'm in way over my head with trying to get ready for Anacortes this coming weekend. That's right, my biggest show of the summer is coming up this weekend, and I have about 10 bars of soap packaged as of this moment. I'll need to devote myself every waking minute to having enough little dressed up bars for the crowds in Anacortes. Plus more lip balm, labels on the sprays, pretty little gifts sets, gack. I'm already getting a stomach ache thinking about it. Ok, off to figure out how the battery fits in and try to capture some of the lovely.

Flogging the Blog

Hee! I was so hell-bent on those darn category labels for all my posts yesterday. It felt like I spent hours working out the major themes, backtracking through the last few months of posts and re-labelling them. And then it turns out that almost every single one of them has the same darn name - either A Day in the Life, or Shows and Festivals. Doh!

I guess it was a good exercise in order to see what the Sam Hill I'm jabbering away about on a daily basis. But it IS show season, and part of the business here is to inform the peeps of where I am and what is going on. And the daily life stuff? I guess that was the point of the whole blog anyway. To give anyone with a little time on their hands a glimpse into what it's like to live my life and try to make a living off the suds.

Now that I've got a little structure and purpose to the whole mess, the categories will expand and become more user friendly. Baby steps. It's coming along. I spent way more time messing with it than I should have yesterday. But yanno, once you get started, it gets a little obsessive.

And the Feed Burner icon is now available and ready for subscribing. If you already know what that is, skip this part. For those who are brand new, here's the down low in what I hope is the most basic language. A feed lets you "subscribe" to a number of blogs that you are interested in, compiling them in a list at their site (or your own email inbox), so that you have the one handy list instead of trying to rummage around your bookmarks on a regular basis and visit each one individually. The biggest benefit is for those blogs that are a little erratic or not daily, so that it lets you know when new content or a new blog entry has been posted. You check your list when you can and all the new stuff is waiting in one spot for you.

There are thousands of web feed programs, and you can use whichever one you are familiar with if you're already in that game. If this is new, but sounds pretty cool, then you can use the new "Feedburner" option. It's now part of the Google family, really user and browser friendly, interfaces seamlessly with my blogger account and just a click away for the easiest blog reading around. Questions - just give it a click and see in an instant what it looks like, the sign up takes seconds, and it's free, free, free.

I think I'm done fussing with the big stuff, but there will always be a little more tweaking. I like to change up the colors from time to time. Probably a new banner photo when I get time to play. More questions or comments? Just leave a note here or email me.