I’m curious if anyone else deals a lot with double orders? These are orders that are placed within a minute or so of each other. I think the gateway must time out, or a customer doesn’t get an email confirmation due their incorrect entry of an email address. Whatever the case, it happens a few times a week, and it’s frustrating. What I think what happens is that they either click the place order button once, or if it takes a little longer to process the order they back out of the window.
We don’t have the capability with our gateway to just refund the customer, we have to write a check and send it along. That’s a huge drawback to our gateway. I suspect I should check to see what else is out there. The other thing that seems to happen is that we’ll get a call from a customer saying they entered their card as a Visa instead of American Express for instance, and it goes through! It approves! This is true of bad addresses too! All approved in the past.

We also just had what I think is a bogus order from Australia. It was a large order for $800 and we can’t get in touch with them to validate it. I’m not sure what our next step is here. I think I need to initiate a refund with my gateway. The entire process of dealing with fraud is infuriating. Who pays the credit card processing fees? I think it’s me! About two years ago we got two of these massive orders in one day, and it took forever to resolved the issue.

A few months ago I took part in the the Breast Cancer 3 Day here in Michigan, and it was a fantastic experience. I really want to do it again, and Lee Ann wants to do it with me. Part of the 3 Day experience involves raising $2200.00 each for Susan G Komen.

Since our demographic is women over 50, and the issue of Breast Cancer is relevant to our market, we want to promote our walk through the site. We want our customers to play a part in our training, and help us choose a team name. We are hoping that once we start up our profile on the 3Day site that they’ll go in and financially give us their support.

So we’ll start this week by asking them to submit entries for a team name. Obviously we are going to ask them to join our SaleMail distribution list when they submit. (I’ve gotta ask!) and I’m really hoping this will create some buzz with the chapters. The winning woman will get a cool gift from the site.

Our next step is to launch a training diary in the blog. I’m also hoping this will create an ongoing response from our readers, although who knows because blogging for some readers seems painful. But the statistics speak for themselves, and ultimately, I need the blog to be read. We bloggers secretly love it when people take the time to respond to our blogs… hint, hint.

And finally we will have an ongoing link to our page at the 3 Day site where they can support us financially. This is what I’m concerned about. I don’t want to do anything that annoys my customers. I worry that this may rub some the wrong way, and here’s why: The Red Hat Society is not a charity organization. It’s sort of thought to be only a play based organization and a release from the charitable things that members do. Most members have their hands in charitable causes, but the tone of RHS is that “this isn’t one of them.. this is your release, and your opportunity to leave your responsibilites behind and enjoy and have fun”. Some people take issue with it, but it is what it is, and I understand it.

That being said, this is a goal that Lee Ann and I have, and it may touch people enough to take part. I’m curious what others think. I’m intending to roll this out in the next week or so. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving.. I’m heading back to Maine for my 20th high school reunion… speaking of having fun! Hope yours is equally as fun!

..and I was really making progress at growing them!

Things here in the land of red hats and purple clothing are sort of slow. I was really worried about it, but then I heard on the NBC Nightly news that retail all over is down. Blame it on the economy, or the warmed weather, maybe… I don’t think people feel like buying in the spirit of the holidays, when it’s warmer than normal outside. We had these really cool coats that our women would normally snatch up in the early Fall, but we sold very few since it was so balmy across the country.

I also have a real concern that the usefulness of our mailing list is waning. We are looking to launch a new campaign this week to encourage new visitors to sign up for our weekly campaign. We haven’t done this in over a year. We have a competition and give the women the option to get our weekly SaleMail. It’s pretty successful. By entering the competition, they put their name in for an outfit. We chose to wait a while to do it again since we noticed that if we do it too often, we just get a lot of the same people signing up, which is discouraging.

I’m biting my nails and honestly, I’m frustrated with the business right now. Frustrated that I can’t seem to get these great customers to blog for me, and frustrated that I can’t figure out why my great product isn’t moving like it did a year ago. Having your own business is like being on a rollercoaster..emotionally and financially. I am very pleased that we aren’t inventory heavy. If you’ve read my previous blog, we’ve sort of reorganized what we keep in stock, and successfully dropped some unnecessary baggage.

I am frustrated that I could work on this site all day and night, and still have more to do, with no apparent improvement in sales. Part of the deal of running your own ecomm, is that you can’t help but compusively check orders, compusively look through the site and make changes, and yes… compulsively chew on your nails waiting for the bold line of text in your email box saying “Order for Red Hats By You”.

Tomorrow is a new day, and it’s really late for me. I am not going to obsessively move my store departments around and redo navigation for at least another few weeks. I’m going shut my laptop down and put my brain to rest …I will stop biting my nails….tomorrow.

G’nite

I’m a good person, I swear. I hate it when people don’t like me. I hate being made to feel like I’ve been bad when I’m not.If I’ve been blacklisted… what did I do to deserve it?
So first let me say that I’m not sure if I have been. I cannot send my own salemail to my own “info@redhatsbyyou.com”. Is it possible that my web provider blacklisted it’s own dedicated server? You wouldn’t think it could be. And does my server do that blacklisting? I don’t think so, and so I did some research…

I went to Habeas (http://www.habeas.com) and had a free reputation check report run, and we have not been blacklisted..good news! But from all that I’ve read, all over the web, if you do get the bad report card, it’s virtually impossible to undo the mess. So the answer is prevention. We have a large list of email subscribers, and despite the fact that we are clear that we send out a weekly promo, we still get women who are get frustrated at our weekly email. They hit the spam button.. that spam button makes me furious!

Prevention, from what I can tell, involves having a simple opt out (ours could be better) in the email. It also seems important to have an email address confirmation. For instance, when you subscribe, you get an email asking you to confirm this subscription. I find these annoying, so I didn’t turn it on. I guess I need to! I am actually doing more of what I shouldn’t than I should! And yet somehow I’m ok.. so far anyway.

There’s much more to it than just that! And I’ve made it no secret that I need to upgrade my mailing list management software. I will be upgrading my server this weekend, so it’s time to make the changes. I need to pour through my own blog to see the recommendations by many readers over the past year. I have to admit that I really can’t stand making changes like that. I find that stuff difficult to do since I maintain my own server and feel like I am vastly underutilizing it.

ok, it’s time to go retrieve my kids from school. I’ve had Halloween candy staring me in the face all day. Halloween candy is haunting to a stay at home mom, …. “EAT, EAT!!! Before the kids come home….” I have to admit, I have been listening…