Last week I got an email from Naomi Dunford of Ittybiz. I always look forward to Naomi’s emails as they manage to make business fundamentals entertaining and they keep it short and to the point. This particular email was entitled “Why people hate your competitors” and it was about learning all the ways in which your competitors are pissing off their customers and then doing better. It really struck a chord with me because this is something I’ve been experiencing lately.
This year I’ve been selling my work at local craft fairs and I decided that this Christmas I would support my fellow artists and crafters by buying only handmade gifts for my friends and family. Many of the fairs I sell at are very heavily weighted towards jewellery so I had to go online to find gifts for the men in my life. Etsy and Folksy are both wonderful sites, with loads of unique and beautiful gifts, all of which are handmade.Folksy is just for British makers, but Etsy has handmade items from around the world. And others are supporting local makers too. Deborah Meaden has been running a campaign on Twitter to encourage the public to buy British made items to support the economy and has featured many Folksy sellers as part of that campaign.
But here’s where Naomi comes in. My experience of buying gifts from Etsy and Folksy has been fraught with irritation caused by sellers behaving in ways we simply wouldn’t tolerate from larger businesses. The two most problematic transactions involved hand printed t-shirts, bought for my brother and cousin.
The first t-shirt was ordered from a Folksy seller who did not include the measurements of the sizes on his listing. Already slightly irritated, I emailed him to ask if the sizes were unusually large or small and he said that they were standard sizes so I ordered a Medium in Blue (the shirt came in Black, White and a kind of Royal Blue). When the t-shirt arrived, it was Navy Blue (a colour not mentioned in the product description). It wasn’t as nice as the Royal Blue one so I contacted the seller and asked why he had sent me something other than what was shown in the listing. I had a few rather lengthy interactions with him and did not really get an answer but he agreed to send me another t-shirt, this time in Royal Blue. When it arrived, although it said Medium on the label, it was a full EIGHT INCHES larger than the Navy Blue shirt and looked like it would fit Hagrid with some room to spare. Fail.
Meanwhile, the second t-shirt order had not arrived, despite my having ordered it almost two weeks earlier, and I was getting a little nervous so I contacted the seller, this time on Etsy, to ask where it was. I received a response that completely astounded me. He advised me that the item was being produced in the US and would be shipped from there, taking approximately 1 to 3 weeks to arrive, perhaps longer if there were postal delays. Um……you mean the kind of postal delays we often have around Christmas???? Nowhere on his listing or in his shop policies did it mention 1 to 3 weeks as a delivery timeframe. It is currently a few days before Christmas and I have no idea whether the t-shirt will arrive in time, although I am incredibly relieved to hear that the seller is “optimistic.” Epic fail.
The reason I’m astonished by all of this is because I agonise about every policy I set on myEtsy shop. I worry about dispatch schedules and delivery timeframes. I analyze every piece of copy to make sure that it accurately reflects what the item is and what it is not. I photograph my work carefully and I offer refunds if an item is not what a customer expects. I worry constantly and I aim to delight my customers every time. I believe that, as I am a one person business, I need to work that much harder to earn the trust of those who buy from me. I have to be perfect, every time. And although I don’t believe that anyone buys art for the customer service, I do think that sometimes they don’t buy because of it.
I was frustrated by both of these sellers, not only because they inconvenienced me personally, but because every person they piss off is likely to question the professionalism of handmade sellers. And that makes life more difficult for me.
I was just about to resolve not to buy online from artist/makers any more. But then I remembered Naomi, and I remembered that every experience like this is an opportunity for me to do a better job. Every time I order from a small online seller and they make a mistake, I get an opportunity to not make that mistake. Because they’re often not as slick as the big guys, I get to see the lessons that the bigger retailers learned years ago, decades ago. Needless to say, I won’t be buying from these two sellers again, but I will continue to buy from businesses that are at my stage of development, those a bit more advanced, and those a lot more advanced. And I will continue to be irritated by small businesses (and large businesses) that behave unprofessionally. But I won’t ever be one of them.