Wednesday, February 4, 2009

First Sale!

I had my very first sale from my 1000 Markets shop. It's very exciting! =)

That is much faster turn around than when I first joined Etsy. My first sale there took several months and I've only been on 1000 Markets for a few weeks now.

If you are on 1000 Markets, what has your experience been with sales? I found it a bit overwhelming at first.

The e-mail notification of the sale arrived almost 12 hours after the initial sale. I hope that doesn't reflect badly on me. I didn't get the notice until this morning, but it arrived in my in-box last night around 10 p.m. The sale took place at 8 a.m. in the morning.

The other thing I'm used to is contacting people via e-mail after they make a purchase. But there's no e-mail address provided to me. Very sneaky! =) All communication is done via 1KM. And that is fine...it just took me a moment to figure it out.

So when you get a sale, you actually have to go into the website and "confirm" the order. This will send an e-mail to the customer. I wish they had a place to include a note to the customer. I needed to tell her something and had to use the "contact" button to send her a message through 1KM. So the customer got two e-mails instead of just one. It'd be nice if they made a spot for notes when you confirm.

Now I just need to make the items and get them ready to ship. Then I will click the shipped button, where I do have the opportunity to leave a note.

Something that I'm used to is printing shipping labels through Paypal, but since 1KM uses Amazon as a merchant processor I will have to go back to using USPS.com. Which is fine, but I felt a little more protected through Paypal. If a customer disputes something through their credit card (which was charged to Amazon) I don't know how protected I am. With paypal, if you used their shipping process and got delivery confirmation you were (supposedly) safer.

It's definitely a learning process, but having a sale so soon is incredibly encouraging to me and gives me more motivation to move more of my work to my 1000 Markets shop. =)

1 comment:

jana said...

Megan: You can still do your postage through PayPal. You go into the Merchant Services tab and click on Multi-Order Shipping. It brings up a screen where you can make a shipping label from scratch.

Congrats on your sale! I've been so lazy. I have tons of things made that I need to photograph and list, but my photos suck unless they're in natural light, and -8 degree weather doesn't exactly lend itself to photo ops.