Brand New Look

New theme for the blog is up and running. Sorry for any wonkiness earlier. Hope you like the new look.

Display Inspiration

A Friend of mine snapped this picture when out shopping because he knows I like cool displays.

I think the idea could be easily adapted to items other than glasses and dressed up even more. Say with silk flowers, shells, or fruit.

Weekly Inspiration

A Valentine from the DOG! , originally uploaded by She's Batty.

Submit your photos for consideration as a Weekly Inspiration by adding them to the Flickr Group.

Questions About Shipping

I was talking with Amy from Surlyramics on Twitter last night about the new Priority Mail price increase. I'm not planning to change my shipping prices right away and she's lowering them and switching from Priority to First Class on a trial basis.

So I decided to throw the question out there for readers: As a customer (not as a seller), do you want faster but more expensive shipping or cheaper and slower? Please vote in the poll and/or weigh in with a comment.



Edit: I forgot to add that I'll be writing the results post for this poll next Wednesday, January 13, so please pass this post along so we can get a larger sample size.

Priority Mail Rate Increase

Just a quick note today, Priority Mail rates went up yesterday here's a link to the new rate chart. It caught me by surprise, I know I had heard about it when it was announced a while ago but totally forgot. Prices for flat rate packages stayed the same but non-flat rate has changed. In particular for those who ship small lightweight items the rate is now no longer the same for anything under 1lb but varies by zone.

So if I ship on the east coast where I live I'm not paying more for shipping but I'll be paying up to $0.65 more for shipments to the furthest zones like California and Alaska. I'm going to wait a few weeks before deciding if I should raise my shipping prices, with the new variable rate I need to see what the average cost works out to be before making any decisions.

Rates for First Class and Parcel Post have not gone up nor has there been an announcement yet of any planned increase.

Quick Tip #21 - Pulling Paypal Data

One thing that has always frustrated me with Paypal is that while you can download a .csv file for all your transactions you can't do so for just a subset of them. For example I can filter my transactions to show only shipping but there's no way to download just that information. I found a work around.

Not to long ago Etsy put up some of their Seller Deals now most I don't care about but they had a link to a free online small business accounting tool called Outright. Now I do all my bookkeeping using Open Office and Mint so another tool wasn't much use to me but I wanted to check it out to see if maybe it would be useful. Honestly I'm not impressed with it's abilities as an accounting tool, you can't batch apply labels to transactions for example and it doesn't do it automatically for obvious one like USPS or Google Adwords like Mint does.

What it does do is be able to pull ALL your paypal transactions (many other accounting tools like Mint only pull a few months) and if you go to Reports you can select a specific transaction source like USPS set a date range and download a nice .csv for use in your spreadsheets.

Weekly Inspiration

I'm in The Etsy Voter! Please spread the word and support my MOD ART PATERN, originally uploaded by Arzu Musa.

Submit your photos for consideration as a Weekly Inspiration by adding them to the Flickr Group.