I had to print labels for several bins full of packages these last couple of days, in several batches, and I had to do it through an atypical method for reasons pertaining to my business account status (which is again in the negative currently — see below, and the current queue/status post, and the detailed post explaining how this chargeback BS impacts your order, for more details if you care about why). So if you have been waiting a good bit beyond the published estimated turnaround times and wondering where your package is, you should be getting notification through one of a few different methods over the next few days if you haven’t already.
Please note: The date you get your notification will probably NOT be the actual label ship date; I am having to manually update the status and tracking in Shopify and in Paypal, and am trying to make sure the notification goes out through Paypal since that’s the tidiest way to manage tracking for Paypal payments, but you may get double or triple notification, delayed notification, and in the case of hiccups with various systems updating each other, no notification – but we are manually rechecking *everything* so nobody is going to fall through the cracks. This is all just going to take time.
I am really sorry; nobody could be more upset about all of this than I am. And my family knows that I will be here, working on getting caught up, on Christmas eve, and that I will be back here workign on getting caught up after Christmas dinner. If my little shop survives this disaster of a fiscal quarter – and it’s not clear at this point that it will — it will *not* be with my former customer and client base’s trust intact, and it’s going to take me a long time and a lot of work to earn that back. I’ve been skirting the edges of TMI for a while now in trying to keep y’all updated, but I’m at a turning point/crossroads/choose your metaphor in a whole lot of different areas of my life right now, much of it intertwined with family both immediate and extended and much of it involving some career/vocation/focus type of stuff, and I honestly cannot say what my life is going to look like a year from now. I have some big decisions to make pretty soon and some of them are likely going to involve some doors closing that can’t be reopened once I step through. A year ago, I was pretty sure that I at least knew where things would be headed with regards to Karma Zain Spiritual Supplies and what directions I wanted to go there; these last few months have made me uncertain about even that, now.
But I’m wasting time chewing on that here… I just say all this to convey that I haven’t just been lying around eating candy canes or stale candy corn or whatever while the orders piled up. I’ve never in my entire life been busier than I have these last few months, and I’m learning some hard lessons about priorities and about my own limits – at least I hope there are lessons here and I’m not just getting a big cosmic spanking from the universe! But I’ll get back to it, and for those of you that have been patiently waiting on me and haven’t given up, I appreciate you more than I can say and thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I hope I get a chance to make it up to you.
The details:
Once again, I had to obtain a personal loan in order to get labels shipped and printed, and once again, it’s because of disputes/chargebacks put in NOT by customers/clients who waited longer than the published turnaround (and there are *plenty* of those!) but by customers/clients who did not read the published info on turnaround time, didn’t follow the directions about how to inquire about an in-house/pending order or service, and/or didn’t follow the published procedures for requesting a cancellation or refund (in those cases where such are possible).
It’s really boggling my mind that credit card companies can legally do what they’re doing, but I’ve learned the hard way that PayPal’s seller protection policy is worth every ounce of hassle and hoop-jumping, and I retract every pissy thing I’ve ever said about how PayPal has handled disputes. I don’t see any way that I will ever, ever accept credit card payments through another processor again, as long as I’m in business. I’m hard pressed to imagine how I managed to attract so *many* of the wrong kind of customer in such a short period of time, and how such a high percentage of customers who checked out through the Shopify gateway can have failed to notice that little thing about the Terms of Service and Shipping/Handling… and how this happened now, when I have the clearest and most detailed info posted in the most places I’ve ever had it posted! It should actually be *impossible* to miss now! but I can wonder ’til the cows come home and it won’t make a difference to the bottom line. Lesson learned, and Sweet Baby Jesus has it been an expensive one.
Big Lucky Hoodoo 