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.

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Imminent New Year

It's that time of year again. 2009 is nearly over and 2010 will be beginning. It's time to take stock of the old year and set goals for the new.

I don't believe in New Years resolutions, they're broken so often it's become a routine joke for late night comics. Personally I think the reason they don't work is because they tend to be vague, lose weight or be more cheerful. They aren't concrete and are hard to hold on to. Instead I think you should set specific goals with a timeframe for completing them.

So take a little time to think back on what you've done with your business this year. What worked? What failed? What would you do differently?

Taking those things into consideration, what goals do you have? One of my goals is to put out an art book this year of my work. It's a really big project so I'm breaking it down into small jobs. First is to decide on the layout, what publishing I'll go with, what photos I'll need, and some other research, I want that done by the end of January.

Quick Tip #20 - Paying Yourself

This is an idea that came up on the Simple Dollar blog a few days ago and I thought it was really great and I plan to start doing this.

Set up a savings account (online banks like ING Direct are great for this because they have good interest rates) and deposit your earnings into that account. Then set up automatic transfers bi-monthy for a set amount of money and treat that as your paycheck. This makes it easier to grow the savings you may need for your business and provide a cushion for months where you earned less. As your business grows you can adjust the amount to pay yourself more.

Weekly Inspiration

Beautifully composed shot.

wedding band, originally uploaded by Stilosissima.

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Quick Tip #19 - Hacking Your Etsy Mini

MayBeeClothing has discovered a way to further customize the size of your Etsy Mini to have any number of rows and columns that you want for your website.

Weekly Inspiration

White on electric blue linen..., originally uploaded by émili.

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Quick Tip #18 - Google Product Search and Etsy

Etsy has been rolling out support for Google Product Search for sellers. In the past you had to upload your items yourself using the rss feed. However there is a slight problem with the new syndication, it will only upload items added, renewed, or edited after activating the service. This isn't all bad, it means that Etsy will be able to update by only uploading new items once things have started rolling but right now when most sellers have items that predate the change it's an annoyance.

Go to Great Panes blog has a great tip for mass editing of your products so they will all be uploaded.

Blog Handmade has a tutorial on how to filter visits from product search from regular google search results. Very useful to see how many visits you're getting from product search and compare it to other search engines.

Etsy Storque post on this feature.

Weekly Inspiration

Absolutely adorable.

Lavender filled elephant, originally uploaded by nauli.nauli.

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