Weekly Store Update: 2 October

For your chance to win, simply CLICK HERE to go to the sign in page and check it out. Our giveaway is open to everyone in the United States. The winner will be drawn on 22 October 2022 and contacted via the email address they provide. 

Don't forget to share this link with your family and friends - the more...the merrier! Thank you and Good Luck!

HERE COME THE SHIPPING RATE HIKES

Some things are eternal. Taxes, cooler Fall weather, arguments about how good Mage Knight actually is and... the United States Postal Service's end of year price hike. Known as Holiday Pricing, the USPS is raising prices across all of their domestic services. International pricing remains unchanged. 

The prices take effect from 3 October 2022 until 22 January 2023. Even with these price increases though, USPS remains an amazing option for items weighing in the 5-to-6-pound range and less - especially for customers who live close to us. 

Oh, while I'm thinking about USPS shipping rates, I wanted to let everyone know an internal process we don't tout anywhere on our webstore - but probably should. If a customer chooses Parcel Select when checking out, we will automatically upgrade them to Priority. The primary reason for this is, even though Parcel Select is usually the cheapest option, it also takes considerably longer to ship. In some cases, it's two to three weeks slower than Priority. We were facing dozens of unhappy customers complaining about the shipping timelines after they selected Parcel Select. We tried to explain that Parcel Select is just that much slower, but they still took it out on us. 

I initially thought about eliminating Parcel Select as a shipping option, but after some back and forth just developed that internal process of automatically upgrading to Priority. It's generally only a few dollars more, and in the end the customers are generally both unaware of what we did, and happy things are moving quickly. Ever since implementing this process the complaints have dropped away completely. Happy customers, happy life. 

PUTTING SOME MORE LIVE IN OUR LIVELIHOOD

Running a small store in today's environment is not easy. Well... to be fair, running it is pretty easy, keeping it profitable is where the difficulty lies. Customers have so many options available and the almost instant availability of so many games across so many platforms, it doesn't take much stumbling on our part to see customers move on. A few things popped up last week that impacted our livlihood in just that way. While we turned them around quickly, we're always unsure of just how impactful the issues really were. After all, we're fairly sure folks running into problems on our site generally just moved on. 

Both of the issues revolved around the webstore backend. In order for the webstore to operate we use a few dozen different software plugins all working "harmoniously" to keep everything going. Of the many issues inherent in this setup, each of these plugins is updated on its own schedule (since so many different companies are involved and each is on their own schedule) and some updates influence or impact other plugins. It's just the way these things work. 

We had an interesting situation where someone from D.C. put in an order for pickup. As we were prepping it, they wrote us back that they really need it shipped and would try again. In the meantime, I was running the store here, customers coming thru and all that. When I checked the computer again, I noted he hadn't reordered so did a few quick checks. Sure enough, for whatever reason, the District of Columbia had 'fallen out' of the available shipping locations during a recent software update. I have no idea how long it's been like that, but quicky fixed it and reached back out to the customer who then did dropped their order. Saved that one!

The second was a bit more dire. Early in the week we saw some strange PayPal codes on the backside of a few orders. I did some poking around and didn't see anything off and it seemed to clear on its own. Then, in the middle of the week about half of the PayPal orders were off. Many of them went thru, but others didn't. It was like some kind of disconnect between PayPal and our store, but with no rhyme or reason. I dug thru again, and this time saw something selected in the software options that I hadn't noticed was selected before. It's also something I know shouldn't be checked. I simply unchecked it and minutes later everything was humming along again as if nothing was ever wrong. This is also not the first time I noticed things checked or unchecked after software updates. Talk about messing with our livlihood! 

Let's just say I've gotten pretty good at running thru the plugins options in a live environment and how things 'should' work. I have also gotten pretty good at troubleshooting once things aren't working properly. It's definitely not something I expected running the store, but since we do have a webstore I guess it's only normal. It's just unfortunate how disconnected all the software plugins are and how they can really throw things off. I guess 'Do No Harm' is not an IT motto. Pity.  

BORED ONLINE... BOARD OFFLINE!

As we started discussing a few weeks ago, we have begun to sponsor the Board Online...Bored Offline channel. We'll start to talk about Baker and the gang's efforts here in this very newsletter and highlight the videos they are working on. Here's their logo: