Thingery Blog

It’s amazing how quickly things can sometimes snap around and go back to Before There Was Today’s Version Of The Future.

I had a particularly fruitful time fiddling with the site yesterday and when I put my weapons down last night I had that rare feeling I had accomplished something. Today there were four orders in the hopper, “about right” for a Tuesday, but one of them sort of challenges this physical anomaly of mine that isn’t actually cool with fourteen pound packages so I went slow and stuff and made really beautiful packages. I should take a picture of them and upload it and show it to you.

However, that might take forever because I am presently (composing offline and) using the MSN dial-up account I pay for but never use because of a baffling problem with the cable provider. Yes, that means they want money, but it’s a bizarre amount which would take three months to accumulate and I just spoke to them a month ago about the same kind of blip.

On that occasion, the guy said, “hmm, this is strange. You’ve been disconnected due to non-payment but your account is current. This never should have happened. We’re very sorry, I’ll reauthorize you to use the Internet.”

This time it went quite differently, and while I expected to actually PAY them a hundred and thirty-six bucks which is way-the-hell-too-much for a month’s worth of cable tv and Internet, I had to tell them “hmmm, I am not sure I have that much in the account I was just going to give you, I better think about that outrageous number because it’s so different from what the last rep from your place told me when he said we were current”.

So, anyway, this is not about them, they are obviously not on our side and I have turned to my handy-dandy MSN dial-up account I pay for every month and never use just in case something like this happens because I thought from the git-go the cable company seemed like ruthless insane bastards.

It is good for any of us to be reminded of where we came from I suppose.

Dial-up was good enough for me for my first six years or so, and that was where I built the fun exciting part of my sterling reputation we all see today. But over the past five years, especially in terms of supporting myself with my own site, I happen to notice things have changed. I probably haven’t used dial-up in a little over a year, and that was during some cable outage that didn’t last too long, but I have a LOT of trouble thinking about the impending week on low-speed.

A “typical” “serious” listing night for me at eBay means sending up around 40 big photos to my site and eBay close to simultaneously and all sorts of other whiz-bang file transfers to which I have become accustomed. I haven’t tried FTP over dial-up yet, but I can just imagine……..it took me a little over two minutes to log into my bank account.

So I may very well have to return to some “roots” and some primitive procedures just to keep juggling the balls.

Especially since the MSN access number is long distance. And until I can get at a telephone bill, I don’t know what’s smarter: long sessions or short bursts. We don’t have an “unlimited” plan. We DO have a plan that charges next to nothing for many long calls, but I sort of suspect there’s a connect charge of twenty cents or something so we don’t want me doing THAT a dozen times an hour for twelve hours a day if there is.

So already I’m back to one of the original guerilla tactics I used in the first place: offline preparation (from back in the days when I launched This Empire without even owning a computer).

Might make me smarter, and maybe I need to BE smarter. If your first impression is “ruthless insane bastards” and you don’t follow your instinct, maybe twice shy is appropriate.

You may notice, especially as I get more thorough about it, that the LP listings previewed and tracked in this blog include links to Amazon pages, usually to their mp3 download page for that particular album.

Of course, as many may surmise, these are sponsored links, and should you happen to buy something on the other side of them I am going to enjoy a 4.5% commission, and we might as well not kid around about that. I COULD kid around about 45 cents but I won’t.

I primarily thought it was kind of nifty how they preview the tracks on the album. They’re not complete tracks AND THEY MAY VERY WELL NOT BE THE ORIGINAL LP MIXES, but they’re “helpful” even if you’re me, An Expert, for remembering now-let’s-see-here, what album IS that anyway?

Be on the lookout for variations in track listings between the original LP’s and the modern downloads, and think about buying them both (grin).

For a little while Us Guys will have two sales running in September:

Labor Day Weekend, September 3-6, we will offer 20% off on items in the Thingery Store Retired eBay Things. That may be a good time to snag one of these relatively random Things because as we get just a snitch closer to the Hectic Holiday Chopping Season, they might be so retired after all.

From September 1-30, we will offer our regular monthly sale consisting of Longboxes at 25% off and probably hope to slide a few more listings into that category either just-in-time or as the sale is in progress.

Retired eBay Things is probably a bit of a misnomer- from time to time Us Guys will pull an item because we think it’s “too good” for eBay, and every once in a while eBay will tell US they don’t want something there. Some Things are seasonally cyclical and we might just want to store them someplace while continuing to offer them for sale.

Long boxes are relics of the past. When CD’s were first introduced they came in boxes about half the size of an LP cover, a practice which was discontinued after four or five years. It just so happened that at our store we kept them if we could, going to the point of asking customers for them. Unfortunately, at one point a number of them got taped or stapled to some wall, but even those were kept and moved by myself twice since the store closed. Highest prices seen for empty longboxes have been in the 80-90 range.

Those sell pretty well at eBay but we need to make room there for a new batch, and in the process we’re moving stuff to the Thingery.

Even though we’re still loading the store, we think we have some pretty good selection in these catetories, and if you’re shopping over Labor Day Weekend, thank you for thinking about us.

http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/feedback-removal.html#feedback

We will remove Feedback if the listing meets the requirements below and the seller receives a negative or neutral Feedback comment that refers to customs delays or customs fees.

Requirements

The following text, or very similar text, must be included in the listing. You can cut and paste this directly into your listing:
International Buyers – Please Note:

Import duties, taxes, and charges are not included in the item price or shipping cost. These charges are the buyer’s responsibility.

Please check with your country’s customs office to determine what these additional costs will be prior to bidding or buying.

This text must also be:

*

Free standing or apart from other text in the item description
*

In a font size no smaller than the majority of the other text in the item description
*

Prominently displayed in the upper half of the item description

You might also want to include the following information for potential buyers:

*

Customs fees are normally charged by the shipping company or collected when you pick the item up. These fees are not additional shipping charges.
*

We won’t under-value merchandise or mark the item as a gift on customs forms. Doing that is against U.S. and international laws.

This stuff is spawned under the larger topic:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/encouraging-illegal-activity.html

One of my greatest personal confusions has been cleared up. I wanted to change a color of something on a web page and needed the code for the color so I checked the first chart I Googled, which noted:

“Aqua” and “Cyan” produce the same color: 00FFFF
“Fuchsia” and “Magenta” produce the same color: FF00FF

I wasn’t looking up any of those colors, but “Fuchsia” and “Magenta” have long been bugaboos for me even though I used to collect stamps and “Magenta” has always been a legitimate word there.

If I can just figure out now what “Mauve” is the same as, I can go on to pondering bigger things about the Universe.

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Some provenance:

Rainy Day Music, Spencer, Iowa, was established in November of 1987 at the same location as the former Merrie Melody, an Iowa store of not enough reknown today. According to the file card I still have, we accepted the first Vulcan LP into our inventory March 25, 1988.

My further records are a little incomplete as we switched our inventory over to computers in 1991 and a lot of our sales and inventory data wasn’t preserved when those computers wore out.

I estimate my entire career sales at well under 25 copies of this record, but I am unsure of how many my predecessor Terry sold (he’s still around, I should ask him shouldn’t I?).

As far as that goes, Lyle’s still easy to find, and maybe I should ask HIM………

Anyway, the years passed, we stashed a few copies and one day in 2001 Lyle asked me to but a bootlegged copy of his record from a distributor in Germany over the Internet. That copy was twenty-five dollars, which inspired me to price the real McCoy at twenty-five dollars in my bins.

That copy went to Lyle at a price somewhat lower, as he needed one to give someone as a gift and he didn’t have any more copies of his own record.

Enter the modern era: My first eBay sale for a hundred dollars openly taunted bootleggers and dared them to obtain this nice fresh verifiable unplayed source material for their purposes and it didn’t take long before that deal was closed.

The two hundred dollar listing a year later didn’t take long either, and the three hundred dollar listing a year after that only waivered a little while.

I haven’t listed any since then.

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What Online Sellers Need to Know about New IRS Rules.

The Badge Of Compliance

I’m a top-rated seller again, as of a couple of days ago (we’re talking about at eBay).

A little history for the disinterested: I’ll have to guess at the very early part because I wasn’t there, but eBay has this fetish for displaying “reputation”, which was probably from the git-go a solution for assuring new Internet shoppers that they could shop somewhat wisely if not safely over this new medium.

By the time I got there, the Feedback Wars were full blown and you could hear I-got-screwed-at-eBay in every supermarket shopping aisle. That was because you couldn’t take feedback to the bank anyway and crooks have never cared what you say about them anyway.

Leaving out various tales in between, a new CEO came along and he proclaimed a couple of Impressive Missions: to chase away all the “flea market” stuff, and to beat up the sellers who were ruining everybody’s reputation.

After a bit of wrenching things around and turning everything upside down we evolved today’s scenario: sellers’ feedback is sort of window dressing and they have this chain around their neck called Detailed Seller Ratings (they’re stars).

There’s nothing wrong with my DSR’s at the moment-at last glance they were all 4.9 out of 5.0, and that USED to mean something.

Even though nobody ever instructed the people who dole out these stars on exactly what they mean, the EMPHASIS is now on how many 1 or 2 ratings I get over a period of time (out of 5 possible).

According to the top-rated formula, I can have 2 of these low ratings in my file (over a year? I’m honestly not sure).

Last June a fellow came along and bought a three dollar Thing that cost four dollars to ship and he summarily issued a 1 or 2 rating for my shipping costs (if they have the same impact, why even HAVE both 1′s and 2′s?). How do I know this? Well, it’s quite difficult to prove, but I have a very hands-on approach and I reviewed every transaction I had that month and this guy stood out like a sore thumb and when I examined all of the comments he gave various sellers, it was obvious he was posting behind “an attitude”.

Anyway, that was black mark #3 for me and away went my top-rated thing. These ratings “roll”, and the one before that one rolled off three days later, but the review period is monthly, and I’m “above average” for a month with a shooting star and average DSR’s of 4.9.

Who cares, right? It’s an icon, for God’s sake. Nobody pays attention to it.

Yeah, it’s an icon. And it ALSO is part of the “Best Match” formula, in which the venue decides which windows look the prettiest and which merchandise the shoppers see first. Does your mall do that? If you’re a store owner, would you rent from a landlord who does that?

I had a great test running, except it was a real life situation and not a test. I had attained top “searchability” at both eBay AND Amazon for a competitive little electronic toy and I was gleefully pumping out orders from both venues when I became above average at my original home.

Sales of that toy stopped, even though my “deal” on it remained the same and presumably as attractive as it was several days before when I was top-rated. Sales continued with vigor at Amazon, at a higher price.

Here’s what I don’t like about that crap:

Never mind that I doubt I ever deserve THE lowest rating in the shipping charges category when I charge a maximum of one dollar “and handling”, and never mind that the raters have no set of instructions to follow, I am marketing at a venue where my efforts and reputation can become irrelevant instantly if I go over some new metric by .02% (that’s 2 hundreths).

The venue is candid that the search results are not “pure”, and I have no idea how I’ll be treated in the advent of Platinum Power Sellers (or whatever they’re called), but even more insidiously than that, I have no idea when an unscrupulous competitor might knock my out of contention by arranging a couple of two-dollar purchases from me attached to the dreaded one’s and two’s detailed ratings.

Think that doesn’t happen?

That only doesn’t happen in ONE place as far as I’m concerned, and that’s my own site.

If eBay could add a layer of accountability to their DSR system, such as an additional set of questions that pop up if somebody chooses that 1 or 2 rating, maybe that’d help.

I doubt it though. They need to cast aside the entire Us vs. Them mentality. If you’re a seller, both the venue AND the buyers are threats.

Rock and a hard place and it costs a lot.

It would seem that in my zeal to overcome spammers and hackers and other bad guys that Us Guys recently made it impossible for anyone but ourselves to post in this blog, which really was not our intention.

That has probably been fixed.

If you’re a miscreant, I will still hunt you down with everything in my arsenal, and you still have to register to post and there’s still a small probationary period, but it IS possible now.

Apologies to the formerly affected-I understand why you weren’t piping up.

When I founded Rainy Day Music in 1987, I had this “idea” that the farthest I’d go toward using musical organization of any kind would be to alphabetize the stock by artist.

Of course, that concept didn’t last very long, but my theory was that categories were just really sheep-sorting gates for consumers who just “knew what they liked”, except for the part where they didn’t have a clue.

That lasted maybe until 1991 or so, at which time we installed the computers and their databases that ultimately sank the store (my opinion).

There was no way the music software was going to let me get away with failure to assign Duke Ellington a category, and just one at that.

By way of identification here, I’m a Deadhead, a fan of the Grateful Dead. It was the purchase of one of their albums that led to my accidental purchase of the business.

They can’t be categorized-they did lots of kinds of stuff. That’s one of the things I liked about them. But into “pop/rock” they went, at least as far as that database went.

Finally I managed to wear out the computers and returned to the index cards I still use today, but it was kind of late for that as far as the store was concerned. Nonetheless, those cards don’t have those stupid categories.

Try listing a record at eBay, though, without using a category. I dealt with it the best I could, usually calling EVERYTHING “classic rock-other” or some such nonsense, until I pulled records from eBay altogether because they don’t have the slightest clue about that business.

Enter the past few days-I finally figured out how to configure Zen Cart so I can peddle records. There’s a trick to that because Media Mail is involved, and Media Mail is nobody’s darling, and it’s always been a calculator bug-a-boo.

But I got it. And then I noticed Zen Cart has this nifty “extra” stuff designed for selling music products. I jump on it, since it’ll search by artist, label, and yup, you got it, genre.

So I’m back at it-is this “rock”, “pop”, “progressive”, “dance”, “crap”, or what? This time I’m responsible for loading the genres.

Oh please, it’s never going to go away.