Weekly Update ~ Week 3

Ok, I'm going tell you right off that this post contains some bitchin (only because I'm frustrated), but it also contains some positive stuff too.

It has been a busy week business wise. Sales are picking up which is awesome. Today was even busy which is a little abnormal. It seems most of my customers shop during the daytime Monday - Friday (I think when they are supposed to be working).

With the increased sales comes a bit of increased frustration. It seems some people have a challenge with entering their credit card info correctly. I spent Thursday & Friday working with a lady who said my shopping cart wouldn't process her order. I have no idea why. I asked, but never received an answer as to what error she was receiving. She wanted to place the order by phone, which is fine too, however, I can't take phone calls while I'm at work. I tried to e-mail her at lunch, but wouldn't you know it she responded just after my lunch hour was over so I wasn't able to call her to finalize the order. She sent me a few more e-mails later in the day, but never provided me with her CC# info so I couldn't process the order. I guess I'll try again tomorrow to get her order. The bad part is that she needs the order by Wednesday. I have no idea if it can get processed in time since the order is being drop shipped by my supplier.

This isn't the first situation I've had with customers having a challenge with placing their order via my website. A few weeks ago I got a phone call from a customer stating their credit card kept being declined. I e-mailed her around lunch time to ask if the billing info she was entering in my shopping cart matched the info on file with her credit card company. She assured me it was. I think she tried 2 or 3 times again after that to place the order. I told her that I would have tech support check into it and call her back to take the order over the phone. Wouldn't you know it, my cc processing company who has always been easy to work with was extremely busy that day. My son had an doctor's appt. so I spent the whole afternoon (after leaving work)on my cell trying to contact my credit card company. I finally got through to them around 5:30 p.m. They said exactly what I expected. My customer wasn't entering in the correct billing info. I e-mailed my customer back and within 5 minutes got an e-mail stating she had just moved and had not updated her address with her cc company. Things happen with customers which is cool. My frustration is that because I work during the day I can't immediately respond to a customer if the need arises. I know I have lost orders because of it. That stresses me out.

I can't let the challenges get me down so now on to the good stuff. All of my customers seem to find me through Google. This week I'm paying to have a company validate my website. I went to a site that checks to see if your website validates. If it doesn't then certain search engine spiders might not be able to crawl your site. My home page had 124 errors. I tried to fix it myself, but I kept screwing up my homepage.

Gotta go for now. As I was writing this post, I had some more positive business stuff happen. I don't know what is going on exactly, but good things are happening. Been praying, chugging along with my marketing, and have some people spreading the word about my business. I guess it is all adding up to wonderful things for me.

OK, back to BITCHIN! BITCHIN big time!!! I'm sitting here writing my post when I hear an e-mail hit my business addy in box. I think I have another order. NOPE!! I have 1,708 "delivery failure notices" in my e-mail. Looks like someone is spoofing my e-mail addy. COOL! Now I'm up to 2,041 e-mails. And now it is 2,091. It is 11:00 pm. I've got to work tomorrow and I have a ton of e-mails to delete before I go to bed.

On the positive side, I usually can't sleep on Sunday nights anyway, so I won't notice any lack of sleep I have from deleting the ton of e-mails.