Whew! The last 48 hours around here have been a bit of a whirlwind! It has been fun, exciting and a little bit crazy. We are so grateful to all of you! We appreciate all of your kind e-mails and support so much.
We had considerably more sales than we had anticipated and will be hard at work getting everything shipped on out to you all although it may take a few days. We are sold out of quite a few items and are getting low on several others. Although we will be replenishing many of them it may be several weeks before they are back in stock. We also were excited to offer a huge CLEARANCE section that has items that are between 25% and 75% off their original prices.
Also, I thought I would take a few minutes to answer some of the questions we got today:
First, we had a couple of customers have trouble checking out. They were using Windows 7 so we are hoping that it was just some glitch with that and not our site although we are looking into it to see if there is anything we can do to make the checking out process easier for those of you using Windows 7. We have contacted our host and they have looked into it as well. So far we haven't been able to duplicate the problem so we are hoping they were just random isolated incidents but we will continue to look into it.
Second, we had some questions about our increase in shipping prices. This one has been both tricky and frustrating. The way our new site works is different than Etsy. Our shipping charges are based on the dollar amount you spend not the individual item or the amount of items you purchase. That makes it so that you can purchase one item, like a hat, and get charged the same amount as if you bought a tutu or several clearance items. Obviously this can be a bit frustrating if you are purchasing a small item like a hat or onesie versus if you are purchasing a sweatshirt or tutu. We are toying with a bunch of ways to fix this but haven't found a solution yet that works completely and doesn't cause new problems. We did increase the range for the most inexpensive shipping option to include all of the hats so the shipping prices on the hats have gone down! I have been absolutely thrilled with the transition to our new website. I thought we might have quite a bit more trouble with the switch-over so this one small thing doesn't seem too bad as long as we can eventually figure it out. Until we do we are going to leave things as they are, but please know we are trying our best to get this figured out so that we can charge less shipping on our smaller items, and at least for now the shipping on the hats is better.
Third, ahhh - international shipping. For the past two years this has been one of the single most frustrating things for us. When we first opened Dear Lillie we offered First Class International Shipping. We charged as little as $4 to ship to Canada and not a whole lot more to ship everywhere else. Then we started having packages get lost! When you ship International First Class the post office will give you a customs number but they really can't track it for you. This led to quite a few headaches trying to locate packages and if a customer said they didn't receive it we would always send them another one. I started dreading seeing an international address on an order because often it meant I would be sending out two of the same item to a customer and therefore was often losing money on those sales. Finally, after a particularly frustrating stretch of packages getting lost we decided to stop shipping first class and just ship using International Priority Mail. You can click here to see the pricing on that. Based on the weight of our packages and the destination it generally costs us between $21 and $39 to ship internationally. Because of that we charge $24.95. Even though that number seems ridiculous we still often end up losing money on the shipping of international packages. I know this is very frustrating for our international customers if you just want to purchase a $9.95 item you certainly don't want to spend $24.95 to have it shipped. We completely understand that and find it extremely frustrating as well. We want to be able to go back to shipping First Class but it just makes us so nervous after the experiences we have had with it. We love all of our wonderful international customers and want to make sure you are able to purchase what you want without the crazy shipping charges. Jason and I have been discussing it and if we do decide to offer that option again will let you all know.
Okay, enough on that! Fortunately shipping has really been the only issue we had today which is such a relief!
I had hoped to have a decorating post ready for today but thanks to Irene and not having power for almost five days I am quite a bit behind, as usual. So instead I thought I would share a couple pictures of Lillie. She had her first gymnastics class on Wednesday! I was so depressed because I didn't get to take her to it. Lola had an important doctor's appointment that morning and even though I tried to get Lillie into another time slot I wasn't able to. Instead good ol' Uncle Jason came to the rescue and brought her. She loved it so much that she didn't want to leave when it was over...(and thanks to that I don't know if Jason will ever want to take her again - haha). I, however, cannot wait to take her next week!
Here she is in her new little leotard and headband she stole from Dana:
No pictures, Mommy!
Along with bringing Lillie to gymnastics Jason has even been helping out with Lola. I was trying to shoot some product photos the other day which was hard with her in the Bjorn so he offered to take her. When she is really fussy putting her in the Bjorn is often the only way to calm her so he got stuck putting her in it. Now before you think, "Awwww, what a sweet uncle" let me just inform you he spent the entire time muttering, "this is NOT what I signed up for..." and "this was NOT in my job description." =)
I hope you all have a wonderful Friday and a fabulous Labor Day Weekend! And thanks again for making yesterday so exciting for us! We truly appreciate you all so much!
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