I admit that I had no hardon going for the iPhone, despite being a regular Mac user. My wife was in technolust, though--yet at $500 for the basic 4GB unit and $600 for 8GB, a purchase wasn't going to be happening anytime soon. Of course, 'soon' is a relative term, isn't it?
Moreover, my wife mentioned to me in no uncertain terms that if I bought one for myself, that she'd immediately put the hammer down to me about my credit card responsibilities, that we shouldn't indulge ourselves, and that there was no way in Hell that she would allow me to keep it wthout knowing her dismay, ire, etc., well, you get it. So when I got the urge (and the cash) to go ahead and get one, I had a problem. What would be the solution?
Simple: I bought two iPhones.
One for her and one for me. If she insisted that it was an indulgence, the answer was simple--they'd both go back.
Like THAT would happen.
So now we both have the devices and we love them. Great fun, excellent manufacturing and engineering and all that. But--but--well, there's always a but: ATT service.
$20 for a data service package each month. OK, not too bad, but what about the folks who just want the iPhone, an iPod, and the cool factor? No such luck--you NEED the dataservice plan--even for voicemail! Yes, there's something called 'visual voicemail' that REQUIRES the data service package. Now, on balance, I wouldn't mind--and don't mind so much--paying the $20 data package service but to have to have the data service in tandem with basic voicemail services--it's kinda like...like blackmail.
Yah, blackmail. You can have the phone, you can have basic call and receive calls, but if you want voicemail, you gotta pay $20 a month. This. Fricking. SUCKS. It does NOTHING to ingratiate ATT with me, and I've been with the company for nearly ten years and have had increasingly more complaints about the company every year. Just little things, mind you--but now, with the iPhone now, well--if it weren't for the iPhone being tied to them, I'm not sure I'd stick with them at all. And just on general principles.
More and more it seems that large corporations are STICKING it to the consumer in little, inane, or horrific ways. I don't like the trend, not at all.
But the iPhone is pretty awesome, I must admit. Going online in the middle of the day to check email from work or for personal--to check movie listings? Directions to some address? You can do most anything electronic with this marvel, and it's SO COOL...
Chris
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Customer Service...what a bitch!
Oh, no gender implications in that. Really!
So, it turns out that a fellow who named himself after a famous comic book dog for his eBay moniker ID emails me, then phones me, to complain that of the several items that he had ordered, only one had arrived. Where were the other items? And having heard that my son was helping me to manage fulfillment, proceeded to question my son's reading ability, and then demand that the remaining items be shipped to him OVERNIGHT in a fevered cell phone message.
Now, I've been selling on eBay for a number of years now, and have been moderately successful at it. My sales have increased comfortably over the years, doubling at one point a couple of years ago, and now...this summer I'm finding that sales are getting close to doubling again. Which is great, though it puts demands on my time, and given that I have a regular full-time job to hold fast to, the increased business, while delightful, has also proven to be a bit stressful, as well. So, I hired my son to assist me in fulfillment each week. He gets paid a handy sum per hour in cash, and I'm freed up to do other things in my online business.
And along comes ol' 'Ace' here--complaining of my poor service, demanding immediate fulfillment, and in essence insulting my son for his poor performance. What would YOU do?
Yet...here's the capper: it wasn't my son. It was MY error, from the word go. All on me. I admit as much to my unhappy customer, still in a fairly calm manner tinged with only the barest measure of sarcasm (I AM a good writer, remember), and his response to me was that...
'If you bother to look at you paid invoices. You would see a multi sale. This
is what it looks like. There are NO EXCUSES....
and then...
'After reading an invoice I do not understand the "oversight"
PLEASE SEND ME THE OVERNIGHT CONFERMATION # & TRACKING #
The only book I did receive is 223...
'If I receive the comics on MONDAY it would have taken a MONTH to complete
the order. How is that reasonable. '.
Hmm. So, here's the thing. In most every way, it's completely understandable that he's upset, and that taking a month for all the items to arrive is certainly not reasonable. Points to him for all this. A mistake was made, and he bore the suffering of having to wait.
I'm going to send his books out to him on Monday and pay either Priority Mail (a week to deliver) or, if I'm feeling particularly generous and stupid at the same time, I may send them overnight. Which will be about $36 vs $9 for Priority Mail. I'm really undecided on this--but the 'thing' remains--
He was a total dick about it.
So--yeah, I'm going to OVERNIGHT the books to him, and only because under the circumstances it's the 'right' thing to do-- but the guy is STILL a dick and I'm going to remove him from ever ordering from me again on eBay. I don't need this aggravation, and prefer the multitude of my customers who, generally, are nice and patient with my occasional errors. Yeah, I'm not perfect and I tend to broadcast that fact to whomever will listen. And if I screw up, I'll go that extra few kilometers to make things right again--but I swear, if you start insulting my son, act like an asshole, and generally come across like a demanding !@#$, how far do you think that'll take you in this world? A series of pyrrhic victories as you browbeat your way through the world.
What remains is the issue of feedback. The guy's not happy, and his books are going to be way late, so I risk getting a pile of negative feedback from this fellow, ol'... 'Ace' as I call him, referring to his seeming attachment to Batman's faithful canine friend. Well, whatever. If he negs me, he negs me, and he runs the risk of my own ire should I choose to respond to his negs with my own.
Still, that's plainly NOT fair--and I don't play that game. The best I might feel compelled to do would give him some NEUTRALS, just for the attitude. That's probably not fair, either. Jeezis!!
Anyone know a good therapist?
So, it turns out that a fellow who named himself after a famous comic book dog for his eBay moniker ID emails me, then phones me, to complain that of the several items that he had ordered, only one had arrived. Where were the other items? And having heard that my son was helping me to manage fulfillment, proceeded to question my son's reading ability, and then demand that the remaining items be shipped to him OVERNIGHT in a fevered cell phone message.
Now, I've been selling on eBay for a number of years now, and have been moderately successful at it. My sales have increased comfortably over the years, doubling at one point a couple of years ago, and now...this summer I'm finding that sales are getting close to doubling again. Which is great, though it puts demands on my time, and given that I have a regular full-time job to hold fast to, the increased business, while delightful, has also proven to be a bit stressful, as well. So, I hired my son to assist me in fulfillment each week. He gets paid a handy sum per hour in cash, and I'm freed up to do other things in my online business.
And along comes ol' 'Ace' here--complaining of my poor service, demanding immediate fulfillment, and in essence insulting my son for his poor performance. What would YOU do?
Yet...here's the capper: it wasn't my son. It was MY error, from the word go. All on me. I admit as much to my unhappy customer, still in a fairly calm manner tinged with only the barest measure of sarcasm (I AM a good writer, remember), and his response to me was that...
'If you bother to look at you paid invoices. You would see a multi sale. This
is what it looks like. There are NO EXCUSES....
and then...
'After reading an invoice I do not understand the "oversight"
PLEASE SEND ME THE OVERNIGHT CONFERMATION # & TRACKING #
The only book I did receive is 223...
'If I receive the comics on MONDAY it would have taken a MONTH to complete
the order. How is that reasonable. '.
Hmm. So, here's the thing. In most every way, it's completely understandable that he's upset, and that taking a month for all the items to arrive is certainly not reasonable. Points to him for all this. A mistake was made, and he bore the suffering of having to wait.
I'm going to send his books out to him on Monday and pay either Priority Mail (a week to deliver) or, if I'm feeling particularly generous and stupid at the same time, I may send them overnight. Which will be about $36 vs $9 for Priority Mail. I'm really undecided on this--but the 'thing' remains--
He was a total dick about it.
So--yeah, I'm going to OVERNIGHT the books to him, and only because under the circumstances it's the 'right' thing to do-- but the guy is STILL a dick and I'm going to remove him from ever ordering from me again on eBay. I don't need this aggravation, and prefer the multitude of my customers who, generally, are nice and patient with my occasional errors. Yeah, I'm not perfect and I tend to broadcast that fact to whomever will listen. And if I screw up, I'll go that extra few kilometers to make things right again--but I swear, if you start insulting my son, act like an asshole, and generally come across like a demanding !@#$, how far do you think that'll take you in this world? A series of pyrrhic victories as you browbeat your way through the world.
What remains is the issue of feedback. The guy's not happy, and his books are going to be way late, so I risk getting a pile of negative feedback from this fellow, ol'... 'Ace' as I call him, referring to his seeming attachment to Batman's faithful canine friend. Well, whatever. If he negs me, he negs me, and he runs the risk of my own ire should I choose to respond to his negs with my own.
Still, that's plainly NOT fair--and I don't play that game. The best I might feel compelled to do would give him some NEUTRALS, just for the attitude. That's probably not fair, either. Jeezis!!
Anyone know a good therapist?
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Success, Failure, Fun
Jiminy, if ever I need to be reminded about things being relative, all one has to do is start to feel some joy and confidence in one's business successes and then talk to someone else--to quickly realize that when it comes to selling comic books, I'm only a small potato in the big patch.
Fact of the matter is, since I started selling on eBay some five or six years ago, my sales for the most part steadily, if irregularly, increased marginally each month. Hey, more sales is more money, and it is still qualified as 'fun' as far as I'm concerned. When I opened up my eBay store, sales remarkably became quite consistent and got punched up to what we'll call 'levels around the turn of the century'. (is this vague? it's supposed to be)
Now, every once in awhile, my sales would spike considerably into the future...say, the mid 35th century or so, and wow! Exciting! And manageable...every once in a century...or month. In January of this year, I started listing items on amazon just to increase my number of sales venues, and that proved to add a century or two to my sales experience. All well and good, but then, this summer, things just went berzerko such that even Rip Hunter, Time Master, would have felt the pressure.
Suddenly each month I'm adding close to a fricking EON to my monthly sales experience. I'm pushing into the 40th century AD, and even at times into the 50th century and beyond. Astounding--marvelous, and scary! And all when my regular day job is becoming a bit more demanding than it ever was before.
The result has been that my fulfillment has slowed down by a factor of up to a week at worst.
The good news is that my son is proving to be a very reliable worker in helping me do fulfillment; while he doesn't necessarily love the work that he's doing, he likes the 'paycheck' (I pay him cash for each hour worked), and I'm hoping that eventually I'll be able to set him loose 100% on fulfillment which will make him my 'numbah one son'.
I like having him work for me; it's nice to have him around while I do work in my comic book warehouse,
And so-- the eBay Toyo Days Comics experience continues on--with my 1st employee.
On a related note, considering that my sales have increased as they have, it's also correlated to an increase in my purchasing: I haven't been actively seeking out more inventory to buy from collectors, but it's been made available and one thing I have to do is take advantage of the opportunities to buy when I can. And I have--it's just that I have less time to process all that stuff.
Originally, my wife thought that the blog would be a useful selling tool; direct my cohort of regular customers to the blog so that they could see my thoughts on comic books and the like, but for me--personally, the blog isn't about selling. It's about observing my own life and successes...and failures...and where things don't even go south or north, but stay the same.
I enjoy it. Thanks for reading...all eleventeen of you.
Fact of the matter is, since I started selling on eBay some five or six years ago, my sales for the most part steadily, if irregularly, increased marginally each month. Hey, more sales is more money, and it is still qualified as 'fun' as far as I'm concerned. When I opened up my eBay store, sales remarkably became quite consistent and got punched up to what we'll call 'levels around the turn of the century'. (is this vague? it's supposed to be)
Now, every once in awhile, my sales would spike considerably into the future...say, the mid 35th century or so, and wow! Exciting! And manageable...every once in a century...or month. In January of this year, I started listing items on amazon just to increase my number of sales venues, and that proved to add a century or two to my sales experience. All well and good, but then, this summer, things just went berzerko such that even Rip Hunter, Time Master, would have felt the pressure.
Suddenly each month I'm adding close to a fricking EON to my monthly sales experience. I'm pushing into the 40th century AD, and even at times into the 50th century and beyond. Astounding--marvelous, and scary! And all when my regular day job is becoming a bit more demanding than it ever was before.
The result has been that my fulfillment has slowed down by a factor of up to a week at worst.
The good news is that my son is proving to be a very reliable worker in helping me do fulfillment; while he doesn't necessarily love the work that he's doing, he likes the 'paycheck' (I pay him cash for each hour worked), and I'm hoping that eventually I'll be able to set him loose 100% on fulfillment which will make him my 'numbah one son'.
I like having him work for me; it's nice to have him around while I do work in my comic book warehouse,
And so-- the eBay Toyo Days Comics experience continues on--with my 1st employee.
On a related note, considering that my sales have increased as they have, it's also correlated to an increase in my purchasing: I haven't been actively seeking out more inventory to buy from collectors, but it's been made available and one thing I have to do is take advantage of the opportunities to buy when I can. And I have--it's just that I have less time to process all that stuff.
Originally, my wife thought that the blog would be a useful selling tool; direct my cohort of regular customers to the blog so that they could see my thoughts on comic books and the like, but for me--personally, the blog isn't about selling. It's about observing my own life and successes...and failures...and where things don't even go south or north, but stay the same.
I enjoy it. Thanks for reading...all eleventeen of you.
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