Etsy Fun And Games

As you know if you've read my recent posts, I opened my Esty shop! After too many someday moments but that's for another post entirely.
I've been learning as I go and in some ways I've been completely winging it! Not in a bad way though, I am enjoying every moment of this experience, even the awkward mistake moments where I'm having to learn the hard way!
I see myself as a good seller, packaging orders well and nicely and sending them out on time and I hope being a good seller with communications.

But I, like everyone else am also human and I do make silly mistakes when I'm learning something new.
And like the weirdo I am, I want to let the world know of my mistakes! Mainly because I want other people to see that these things happen to everyone and because in some cases it's just damn funny!

So Etsy oops episode one is all about the postage and packaging costs!

To start with I want to highlight that even though I've had artwork sold all over the world in the past year, this has been through Redbubble who deal with the printing and sending themselves and I just take a backseat.
This is the first time that I've been completely involved in the entire process.

So when you put a listing up on Etsy you are asked to give postage and packing costs for the countries you're wanting to deliver to. So far so good right? I spent a good few hours trying to research this and kept seeing a website recommended on lots of forums so, I thought I'd use it to.
The prices were a lot less than I'd been expecting too, too good to be true...
So I listed all the prices and posted my items up for sale. All was good.

My first order came and I spent ages making it look pretty, wrapping it up in tissue paper and tying it with string and adding a nice tag... this was put in an envelope and off I went to the post office to post it when I looked to see if it counted as a small letter I found that due to my pretty packaging it was too big... So that ended in me having to rush home and take half of the packaging out to make it thin enough.
That wasn't so bad and I learned not to get too fancy with my packaging in future!

I then got my first overseas order which was amazing. I was so bouncy when the order came through, to think that my products were going further than my own country was just so incredible. I loved the idea of them flying all that way to make someone smile somewhere.
So again, I carefully packaged it avoiding the extra chunky additions and head off to the post office. Now back to this site with the too good to be true postage prices. I was expecting to pay around £1.40 so I went up to the till, got the packet weighed and was met with a postage cost of £2.25.
I should know not to trust the internet with important things!
So I payed the extra and left laughing to myself at my mistake until I realised that all of my overseas costs would be wrong and then I also realised I wasn't charging for packaging... I haven't laughed so much at myself in ages.

Once I got home I did some proper research and found the correct prices and amended them to include packaging costs (mere pennies but essential if I want to keep going!) and that was when the wackiest mistake popped up. I was scrolling through the prices which were mainly made up of £1.00 until I came to the Netherlands... £100.00 in total for postage. I'm sure I had a double take there until I realised I must've typed awkardly and pressed 0 too many times... Oh how I'm sorry to anyone in the Netherlands that saw that!
Luckily that too has been amended!

So yes. I have made a few hiccups over the past 23 days of owning a shop but I think that's to be expected, you can't expect to be perfect at something from the go after all!
I would also like to point out that my customers didn't suffer, if anything they had a sneaky discount s well done to my first few customers!
Hopefully that will be the last of the P&P hiccups and we can move on to something else... or you know, stop making silly mistakes with Etsy and go back to making them with my artwork... like spilling some extra ink on the page, something much more normal!

Although I'm now off to get address labels designed... lets hope I don't make a typo there!