Well whats life without having challenges literally everywhere!
Shipping costs have skyrocketed with the price of fuel, the surcharges can hit 25-35% of the base shipping costs. of course this hurts ecommerce quite significantly because it adds an extra $10-15 on the price of each product. I am trying to be fair with pricing and absorb a few of the costs but this is money out of my pocket too. The other factor greatly affecting pricing is the USD to CAD exchange rate. This instantly adds 30% to the cost of every item which is painful compared to a few years ago when the Canadian Dollar was at par with the US dollar. Bottom line is a product that used to be a wholesale cost of $8 US (or $8CAD) which retailed for $16 CAD now costs us retailers $16-$18CAD and retails for $30. How have the costs doubled for a 30% exchange rate increase? shipping and inflation of course.
To help counteract these cost increases I have decided to list my products on eBay again, and try listing them on Amazon as well. My last go around with eBay went well until I had a return request in which I made an agreement with the customer that they would cover shipping costs but eBay decided that they knew best and without warning or any ability to fight it – refunded them the full amount including shipping both ways. Net result was a sale that was to net me $20 became a loss of $60. The entire reason for the return? The customer thought the model would be bigger… sorry but a 1:200 scale model of a Dash-8 will always be 1/200th of the size of a real Dash-8! Oh well lesson learnt… people can’t do math and I’d better state the approximate sizes for models on my listings! 🙂
Here’s the first few listings on eBay: Gemini 200 WestJet 737Max8, Gemini 200 USAF KC-135, Gemini 200 RCAF CC-177, Gemini 200 Air Canada Express CRJ200, and Gemini200 WestJet SAAB340B
You’ll probably notice prices are a bit higher on eBay – this is to counteract their fees (12.9% on the entire cost including shipping) and to counteract the increased return costs if I run into that issue again. It sucks raising prices like this but at least if you want to avoid them… my website is still here!
Speaking of website – I had some challenges there as well as my hosting provider tried to tell me that my websites were using too much resources so I need to upgrade my hosting to the next level… well that next level was triple the cost and when I looked at my resource usage I was not anywhere near the limits unless I was running updates which happened once every few weeks. Bottom line is it was just a money grab. Moved my websites onto another host and well the long story short – for a place that says they guarantee 100% up-time – my website was down more than it was up. After fighting with them for a month to resolve the issue they finally admitted they lied to me because they made the claim that my websites were not using too much RAM and the resource usage page was buggy when in reality it wasn’t buggy – their hosting software was causing the RAM usage to be triple what my old hosting was. They admitted this 1 week after the 30day money back guarantee was over…. well one dispute file with PayPal later and I had my money back and had to move to yet another hosting provider. If anyone has dealt with websites before, then you know how much of a hassle this was having to move it not once but twice!
Anyway – I am now back in the saddle to try and get this business growing again after being a little stale for the past year so stay tuned!