Online selling snafu, looking for suggestions

[GEP]

1 hour ago, Roberta12 said:

Mea, I think you said your customer base is on FB.  You could do exactly the same thing with fb.  List items individually, with price and shipping, message me directly, send an invoice through whomever and done.  I did that a little when I first started selling my work.  It may be time to revisit that model.  Just for those few things at the end of the year.  Hmmmm. got me thinking!

I think I have more serious customers on FB than IG. But I’m not sure FB is the right place to hold a sale either. My best customers are on my email list. I can think of some who I doubt are using social media at all. One of my marketing principles is to give email subscribers the best access. Right now, I’m trying to work out how to do this on my own webpage. 

[Callie Beller Diesel]

Update: Once I got my item listings made, I did a quick and dirty update just to test a few things. I chose one of the items in my shop and put it in my cart, and then asked my husband to buy the same item from his phone. He bought the item successfully. So using the Weebly/square integration won’t solve the problem of products being snaffled by another shopper, unfortunately.
Some things I noted along the way:

- Weebly mentioned at some point that I could integrate my shop on my Facebook page, although I did not follow the prompt to explore that any further.  My brain is too fried. 
 

-Notifications of sales and actions on refunds are prompt on the shopper’s end. I need to look into how to polish the look of automated customer emails in the morning, as the default is quite bland. 
 

- I got an autoresponder from Square saying the refund from my shop’s perspective may take up to 5 days to process, and if the funds aren’t available in my Square account, the bank account Square is attached to will be debited. 

-The back end of the order fulfillment page in the shop is nice! I haven’t fully explored all off the shipping fulfilment functions, but so far I like what I see. 

[liambesaw]

55 minutes ago, Callie Beller Diesel said:

Update: Once I got my item listings made, I did a quick and dirty update just to test a few things. I chose one of the items in my shop and put it in my cart, and then asked my husband to buy the same item from his phone. He bought the item successfully. So using the Weebly/square integration won’t solve the problem of products being snaffled by another shopper, unfortunately.
Some things I noted along the way:

- Weebly mentioned at some point that I could integrate my shop on my Facebook page, although I did not follow the prompt to explore that any further.  My brain is too fried. 
 

-Notifications of sales and actions on refunds are prompt on the shopper’s end. I need to look into how to polish the look of automated customer emails in the morning, as the default is quite bland. 
 

- I got an autoresponder from Square saying the refund from my shop’s perspective may take up to 5 days to process, and if the funds aren’t available in my Square account, the bank account Square is attached to will be debited. 

-The back end of the order fulfillment page in the shop is nice! I haven’t fully explored all off the shipping fulfilment functions, but so far I like what I see. 

But were you able to both check out and buy the same item?

[Callie Beller Diesel]

@liambesaw That I didn’t test. You can track inventory, but I don’t know if the system acts as a governor. I’ll get ahold of weebly today and ask. 

[GEP]

Thanks for the update @Callie Beller Diesel. Your shop page looks really nice, clean and simple!

[Callie Beller Diesel]

Ok! I have just endured 35 minutes of “Here Comes the Sun” for the common good. Here are some more results. 
 

@GEP  I got ahold of Weebly tech support and described the situation where multiple people had purchased the same item. He said he couldn’t speak about Big Cartel, but if you want to avoid a similar situation on Weebly, you simply turn the inventory tracking on for your item and set it to 1. After that item sells, you can’t oversell it, unlike the in-person inventory monitoring for Square. If you do not have the inventory tracking turned on in Weebly, you can oversell things. My helpful tech person also said that placing an item in the cart does not reserve it in any way: it is a first come first served race to the checkout. In Weebly there’s also a spot where you can choose to turn on the shopping cart feature so that people can buy multiple items, or turn it off so that when you click to buy, you go directly to checkout for that one item. This might prevent similar issues related to speed in the future. 
 

Other things of note: you can turn on an ability to collect your customer’s emails. It will only collect them in Weebly’s native email marketing program, although you can export the names you collect there to a Mailchimp or other account. It should be noted that if you’re emailing anyone outside the US, you should not be emailing them unless they’ve opted in to your list according to various Canadian and European email laws. 

[GEP]

1 hour ago, Callie Beller Diesel said:

After that item sells, you can’t oversell it, unlike the in-person inventory monitoring for Square. If you do not have the inventory tracking turned on in Weebly, you can oversell things. My helpful tech person also said that placing an item in the cart does not reserve it in any way: it is a first come first served race to the checkout.

Thanks, but this is still the same situation I’m facing at BigCartel. I think what you said earlier is probably true, the infrastructure for solving this problem is not worth developing for merchants like us.

[Mark C.]

I think square is better thought out all the way around. I use them for all my merchant services for many years now and and it been a joy. Great record keeping as well.

Is BigCartel named after those Big Drug Cartels in the 80s?? or just smaller  lesser thugs??

[GEP]

I heard back from all four of the customers who got caught in the snafu. Three of them were very understanding and said they would try again next time. The fourth one (who was still nice about it) asked if I would consider selling her a mug online when they were back in stock. I really didn't want to do it, because I need to spend my time in production mode for a show that's coming up in February.  I have no pots now, and this is a big show. But after thinking about it for a few days, I decided that I did owe her a chance to buy a mug. These customers made a lot of effort (they logged into my online sale at 10am on the dot, tried to make a purchase as fast as possible, and through no fault of their own they got nothing), and I owed them some of my effort. I contacted them all and made a offer. They all got a slightly different offer, depending on what they tried to buy, and other circumstances. 

The other reason I need to make things right for these customers now is because I've decided not to have an Online Sale anymore. I cannot control how many people will get caught in this snafu, and I cannot afford that. I only had 10 items to sell online anyways, so I only made a very small number of people happy, while being a big disappointment to four. It doesn't affect me much in terms of revenue. Until one of the online store platforms offers a solution to this problem, I'm going to bow out. 

[akilspots]

honestly being able to set a timed hold on items when they go in a cart is the best solution to this. 

someone puts it in a cart and the products description changes to say something to the effect of "this item is in another customers cart for x minutes" 
if the person with it in their cart doesnt checkout in that time then it's released.

would be simple for any shopping platform to implement this on an item by item basis. 

* I built e-commerce sites for 10+ years.