The Trials and Tribulations of Selling E-Cigarettes
Let me start off my saying I’m sorry for taking so long for sending this message. I get emails and phone calls every day asking when is the next newsletter coming…and my answer has always been hopefully tomorrow or the day after. It was a truthful answer, but I never imagined it would take this long to send.
Anyway the reason it took this long was because as you can probably remember (if you were on the newsletter list last month) PayPal shut down our account in the middle of last month (and told us they don’t like e-cigarettes being sold through their service). Well…they were processing more than half of our transactions. A few days later I find out we’re almost at our monthly limit for credit card processing and then I realize, “We have a monthly limit?” So I talk to the credit card processor, send documents and a few weeks go by and nothing has happened, just emails back and forth where they keep telling me hopefully tomorrow. Throughout this time I tell myself and my wife we can’t hold any specials until this gets resolved because we get more sales when there are specials and it will push us over the limit and we’ll have to shut down until the next month. With a product like this you can’t just shut down all of a sudden because you will have a lot of people very mad at you.
Last week I looked at the numbers and saw we were dangerously close to hitting the limit again and we’re not even at the 15th of the month. I called the credit card processor and the same thing; submit more documents and it should be good in the next day or two. I didn’t see any movement from their end so I ended up signing up for a second merchant account. Early this week we hit our limit. So now I’m making frantic phone calls all over the place and everyone promising, tomorrow, tomorrow… We go over our limit by Tuesday but the credit card processor is still allowing transactions. Wednesday the same. Thursday so far so good. I get a phone call for the second merchant account and they said everything is approved and we’ll have the login information by Monday. Excellent, everything is going great. Then about 8 or 9PM last night shut down. One order failed and basically said we were shut down, the gateway is no longer able to process credit cards. I shut down the site with a note that the site will come back today or Monday. I fire a quick email to both merchant account reps thinking I wouldn’t get an answer until today and what do you know? I get an answer in like 15 – 20 minutes that the limit is upped to get us through the weekend. Five minutes later the site is back online, accepting orders again. Technically we were closed for 20 – 30 minutes yesterday.
Today I got things sorted for this weekend and by Monday one way or the other we should be good with an alternate processor. For you there will be no changes. Everything will look and feel exactly the same. It is a transparent change that can only really be seen on the back end (my end).
At around 9PM Eastern Standard Time we will be opening up a new section. It is the Clearance section. It will feature items on clearance, over stock and things like that. Basically like the name suggests it’s clearance items a place where you can get things cheaper than the rest of the site. Everything in there is available on a first come first served basis to keep things fair for everyone. You can find it here.
We got a new liquid flavor in RY4 as well as selecto cartridges in high, medium and low nicotine (no nicotine should be in some time next week). Selecto DSE901 passthroughs are back in stock and batteries for passthroughs are also in stock. We also have tons of carrying cases in stock and will be opening a carrying cases page. These things will probably go on the site over the weekend.
There’s probably other stuff I’m forgetting about, but I guess that will be saved for the next one.
Here’s a new coupon code ONEOH.
See you next time.
Thanks again for your continuing support.
David and Sandra