On August 31st, I closed down the old shopping cart because my shopping-cart service was expiring.  However, the service wasn't cancelled, and a couple customers got into the old cart and placed orders.  And since more than half the items are still in the old cart, I decided to to buy three more months of the old shopping-cart service, so the old cart will remain open until the end of this year.  I am sorry for my last mailing, in which I said that the old cart would be closed – that was a false alarm.

August was a difficult month for me, which is why I didn't get more items transferred.  I held a sale and wasn't able to transfer items while I filled the orders.  Also, my mother's house was sold and I was busy selling her possessions.  Her house had to be sold to pay for the nursing home, where she was transferred last January.  My mother had dementia and was not aware of what was happening.  I say "had" because she died on August 23rd, and that was also a bit of a set-back to getting the items transferred.  During September, however, I can (mostly) focus on my business.

I'm sorry for the length of time it is taking me to get the items transferred to the new cart.  Having two shopping carts active has confused many of my customers.  However, it has hurt me even more – my sales are down 50%!

As I stated below, I am installing a new shopping cart.  Although the new shopping cart is more modern in most ways, it does not have a flexible shipping module.  Consequently, I settled on a flat-rate shipping arrangement.  The new flat-rate shipping rates will cost me money for orders under $110, so I moved the 10% discount from $56 to $100.  Since some customers have been asking for higher discounts than just 10%, I inserted an additional discount of 15% at the $200 level.  Overall, I expect this new arrangement to be revenue-neutral (meaning I won't make more money from it).  However, customers will pay more or less depending on their order totals.  U.S. customers who buy in the range of $30 to $49 will save money, as will customers who buy in the range of $100 to $110 (before discount), whereas customers who buy in the range of $56 to $100 will pay a few dollars more.  Customers who place orders between $110 and $200 will pay a few dollars more, but customers who place orders over $200 will pay considerably less.  So it all balances out.

From my perspective, this is a good arrangement because the flat shipping fees will eliminate a lot of work for me.  As it is now, I find myself issuing small shipping refunds on more than half the orders.  From now on, I won't have to issue any shipping refunds at all (since the shipping amount charged will always be correct).

Regarding the additional money that customers will pay between $56 and $100 (before discount), let me say this:  When I first opened my business, I charged a higher markup than I do now, so I could afford a 10% discount at $50 (and then later $56).  In the last five to six years, I gradually lowered my markup so that I was making less on each lot of beads.  I now feel that I can no longer give back 10% for just $56 worth of beads (although you will still get a small discount since the flat-rate shipping fee won't cover the entire cost of shipping).

As I announced below, I have started buying biodegradable packing supplies.  I am very pleased with them, and I want to encourage my customers to use them also.

Bubble mailers

The supplier of the bubble mailers is AAA Box Company at www.aaaboxman.com .  When you get there, click on Bubble Mailers in the left column, and you will then see a listing of various sizes.  The prices are a little higher than you'll find for regular bubble mailers, but the extra cost per shipment is very small (20 cents to 40 cents), and you can pass that cost on to your customers.  If you want the extra security of ordering on eBay, that seller uses the name "aaaboxman" on eBay.  To find his listings, use Advanced Search to do a search for his name.

I have only bought the 4" x 8" mailers so far, and they seem perfectly good.  The brand name of the mailers is Excel-Aire by Advance Excelsior Co.  I have done a search for Excel-Aire mailers on the internet.  All the sellers of those mailers describe them as biodegradable, so I don't think there is any deception going on.  According to the sales literature, the plastic used in these mailers is normal plastic, but a proprietary mixture is added to it which allows it to biodegrade in the presence of water and oxygen.  Ultimately, it turns back into oil and can be consumed by micro-organisms.  It won't, however, biodegrade while sitting on your shelf!

Packing tape

The supplier of the biodegradable tape is Find Tape at www.findtape.com .  The correct page is hard to find from their home page, so I will give it to you: 

http://www.findtape.com/product429/JVCC-CELLO-1-Cellophane-Carton-Sealing-Tape.aspx?cid=16&idx=29&tid=1&info=Packaging+Tape

This tape is not made of the special plastic mentioned above, but of cellulose (which is made from wood).  As I stated below, cellulose tape was used in the middle of the last century before plastic was invented.  For example, movie film was originally made on clear cellulose film (which is why the words "cellulose" and "celluloid" are often used when talking of the entertainment industry).  The tape looks yellow on the roll, but it goes on clear.  Surprisingly, cellulose tape is a lot like plastic tape, and it has advantages of its own.  It is strong and clear.  It feels like plastic, though it is a little more stretchy than plastic is.  When you apply it to a package, you have to be more careful to press down all the edges than you do with plastic tape.

Cellulose has one distinct advantage that I love:  If you have used plastic tape a lot, you have probably noticed that if the tape snaps back onto the roll, lifting it up again with your fingernails can be frustrating.  That isn't the case with cellulose tape.  First of all, it doesn't have a tendency to snap back onto the roll.  If it does, all you have to do is get your fingernail under one edge, and the tape comes right up in one piece (unlike plastic tape, which can shred).

To make sure the tape was made of cellulose, I burned some (it burned like paper).  I also burned some plastic tape, which melted.

What sizes to buy.  If you are mailing small packages or bubble mailers, the 1" wide tape is all you need.  2" tape is overkill for small packages.  Please note that the 2" tape takes more strength to pull off the roll than 2" plastic tape does, but the 1" tape comes off the roll very easily.

The cellulose tape comes on a cardboard core, so the core is biodegradable too.  However, each roll comes in a small clear bag which may be regular plastic (it could be cellulose too, but I'm not sure).  The tape is made in China.  There is an English company which makes a cellulose tape called Sell-o-Tape, but it is not available in the U.S.

Dispensers:  The core size of the tape is 3".  The desktop tape dispensers made for tape with a 3" core are all made from a heavy block of plastic, which kind of defeats the purpose of using cellulose tape.  Find Tape sells a metal hand dispenser, but I didn't find it convenient to use.  I purchased a molded plastic hand dispenser made by 3M; it works better than the metal hand dispenser, but it feels big in my hand (and it was ridiculously expensive).  Fortunately, the tape is fairly easy to use without a dispenser.  I'm still looking for the ideal dispenser (when I find it, I'll post it here).

After receiving a strongly worded complaint from a new customer, I have decided to upgrade my shopping cart.  Right now I am using a shopping cart service provided by another company, called Mal's e-Commerce.  The shopping cart is actually on Mal's site, which is why every time you put an item in your cart, you are taken to the shopping cart (so that the item can be recorded on Mal's site).  The new shopping cart will be a program installed on my own site.  Here are some differences you will see from the old cart to the new cart:

In keeping with my commitment to use all-biodegradable packing materials, I have just purchased my first cellulose tape.  Cellulose tape was used in the middle of the 20th century before plastic tape came along, and frankly, I don't know why they ever abandoned it.  It seems to work just as well as plastic tape.  Please note, however, that I still have almost a year's worth of plastic tape to use up.  By mid-2011, all the packing materials I use will be biodegradable.  (This doesn't include the ziplock baggies that I put the beads in.  It may be a long time before biodegradable ziplock bags are available.)

I have just purchased my first box of bubble mailers lined with biodegradable plastic.  It is a special kind of plastic which breaks down in the presence of water and is then eaten by micro-organisms.  It takes a year or two for the plastic to biodegrade, but that's much better than other kinds of plastic which take hundreds of years to degrade.  (I'm talking about the thin plastic wrap that bubble mailers are made from; thick plastic items may never biodegrade.)  I am going to actively seek out biodegradable packing materials, and eventually everything I use should be biodegradable.

There may be an increased cost to my customers as a consequence of using such items, but the cost should never exceed about 50 cents per package.

I have added the cost-per-bead to my baggie labels.  Thus, you will be able to see right on the baggie how much each bead costs, so you can compute the cost of your jewelry more easily.  It will take me a while to phase in the new labels, since most bead styles are already printed with the old labels.  The price given on the label won't include either discounts or shipping costs.  Thus, if you order less than $50 and don't get a discount, you'll have to factor in the cost of shipping.  If you order more than $56 and get a 10% discount, the discount and the shipping charge will pretty much cancel each other out.  However, if you order more than $100 and get a 10% discount plus free shipping, you'll have to reduce the cost-per-bead by about 12% to 16%, depending on how large your order was.

In the past, if the cost of a lot of 50 beads exceeded $6.00, I would sell that bead in lots of 25 instead.  I did that because I felt that asking my customers to pay $6.00 per lot was asking too much.  However, to cut back on my work, I will now sell all large beads in lots of 50 if the cost of one lot does not exceed about $6.50.  This will save me some work when filling orders.

Long-time customers have gotten accustomed to this:  I keep changing my mind about the way I want my home page to look.  I've just switched back to the colors I had before.  The beige/brown color scheme was just too complicated.  You can expect something entirely new within a couple months.

I often have things that I want to say here, but they aren't really appropriate for a news and announcement section, so I started a bead blog.  So far I am not using blogging software, but that will be added soon (so that readers can post comments).  You can find the blog here.  As is normal with blogs, the latest entries are on top.  I hope you enjoy it.

When I got my new computer and started using my monitor at a higher resolution (1024 x 768 instead of 800 x 600), the images on the site started to look too small to me.  Consequently, I have started posting new beads with larger pictures.  The images themselves will be zoomed in a little more, and the size of the thumbnails will be larger.  Here is an example:

(These are Premium beads; their price is not representative of what you will find on the site.)

The new style is on the left, and the old style is on the right.  In order to keep the images from loading more slowly in my customers' browsers, I am using more JPG compression, which means that the photo quality will be a bit lower – but not so much lower that you will notice.  (I have always used image-quality settings that were unnecessarily high.)

Also, please note that the hyperlinks will be moved.  To see the Detail page, you will need to click the title of the beads ("7x8mm pink/gold faceted rosebuds") instead of the picture.  To see the full-size image, you will click the picture.  This represents a substantial improvement because the full-size images can now be accessed from the color-grouped pages.  Please note that it will take me months to adjust the links on all the old bead styles, so the links on the site will not be consistent for a very long time.

I have always formatted the tables on this site to fit onto screens set at the 800 x 600 resolution.  Until recently, that was the resolution that I used myself.  But only 2% to 3% of users now use that low resolution.  Since getting my new computer, I have discovered that the tables don't look right for users with higher screen resolutions, so I will be increasing the width of all the tables on the site.

My web-publishing program has a page limitation in its navigation structure.  As a result, I'll have to eliminate the link at the bottom of the left column above ("Entire Catalogue") which allows customers to scroll through the bead pages one at a time.  I have this link for people with slow internet connections, but the limitation of my web-publishing program makes it impossible.  If this will affect you, please let me know.

Since I started my business seven years ago, I have focussed on buying and selling reasonably priced beads.  I have passed up many beautiful beads because they were too expensive.  There are many other bead-sellers who sell expensive beads one bead at a time, and I have always been a little contemptuous of those sellers.  However, I've decided that I want to carry some of those beads myself.  One of the things that has prompted me to make this change is that a customer put me in touch with a supplier that sells some of the most beautiful beads I have ever seen, but they cost two to four times what my usual suppliers charge for similar beads.  Consequently, I am going to start carrying some very expensive beads.  I will continue to carry the less-expensive beads, but I will add a section called "Premium Beads" where you'll find beads that cost 25¢ to $1.20 each.  (I'm talking about pressed beads, not lampwork beads.)

In addition to buying these high-priced beads, I am going to loosen my pocketbook and spend more for the regular beads.  Let me give you some examples:  If, in the past, I paid $40 to $50 per mass for a certain kind of bead, passing up beads that cost $70 or $80 per mass, I'll now buy the more-expensive beads if the colors are really nice.  Consequently, even some of the "regular" beads will be more expensive.

Please click here to see the beads I am thinking of buying.  Are they worth 25¢ to $1.20 each?

I have decided to raise my standard price for 20 polished window beads from $3.70 to $4.00 starting in July (that's an additional 1.5 cents per bead, not much!).  I have always taken a lower-than-normal markup on these beads, lower than the markup I give to the cheapest beads on the site.  However, I spend hours inspecting them individually, and I also cull about 15% of them as defective.  Furthermore, one of my suppliers has raised its prices on these beads, so my profit has been squeezed (happily, the other supplier has held the price steady for 6 years, but they may raise their prices too).  I apologize for this change, but I have no choice.  Please note that the dollar continues to be extremely weak again European currencies, so all sellers of imported goods are seeing very high wholesale prices.

Last January I started photographing beads to the same scale so that their sizes could be compared on-screen, but it didn't work out.  The 3mm and 4mm beads came out way too small in the photos, and the larger beads came out way too big.  I am still using the scale, but I have adjusted it slightly to increase the size of the small beads and decrease the size of the large beads.  This way, you'll be able to see the details of the small beads better, and the large beads will fit into the thumbnail photos better.  (Is that clear?)

Google Checkout is a payment-processing service similar to PayPal.  I have offered it as a payment option on this site for two or three years.  However, they are raising their rates in May, so I have cancelled my account with them as of April 19th.

The post office has come out with a new, small, flat-rate box which holds up to 3 lbs. of beads.  It costs the same as a flat-rate envelope, and it will be much easier for me to pack.  Also, I won't have to pay for a bubble liner.  Since the box is rigid, I've decided that it isn't necessary to pad the beads.  If it turns out that customers are getting broken beads, then I will use padding.  Some packages will continue to go out in flat-rate envelopes, since they can hold up to 4 lbs.

I am now making the photos to a uniform scale.  I am not doing it in the usual way, however, which would involve positioning the camera at a set distance from the beads and then reducing the pictures a set amount.  Rather, when I reduce a picture for the web, through trial and error I arrive at a size which shows the beads at the same size as other similar beads.  Thus, all 6mm beads will now be 30 pixels long in the pictures, 8mm beads will be 40 pixels long in the pictures, 10mm beads will be 50 pixels long in the pictures, etc.  4mm beads and 3mm beads will end up looking quite small in the pictures – but then, they are small.

Starting January 5th, every order that goes out will have a packing slip in it.  Previously, I included packing slips only in orders with a value of $50 or more.  Doing that saved me time and work.  Recently, however, I realized that customers need to know what should be in the package they are receiving.  To save on paper, I have developed a packing slip which fits on half a page.

I have increased the threshold for free shipping on international orders from $200 to $225.  I did this for a couple reasons.  First, it costs me more per $100 to ship an international order than a domestic order.  Second, my credit-card processing company charges me a higher interest rate on international orders, so I already lose a bit more money on international.  Raising the threshold just evens things out.

My plate is pretty full here in Rhode Island, so I'll be using more pictures provided by my suppliers when posting new beads.  I'll only do that if I feel that the pictures are accurate.  I apologize for not posting 30 new bead styles each month as I promised.  I'll try to post 30 new bead styles this month.

I am supporting Barack Obama for President, and I am very much against John McCain, who does not – despite his reputation – strike me as principled maverick.  Please click here to read my article on the subject.

It severely pains me to do this, but I've increased the threshold to get the 10% discount.  Previously, if you ordered $50 worth of beads, the cart would cut that to $45.  Now you must order $50 worth of beads after the discount is applied (that is, you have to order $55.56 worth of beads, and the cart will cut that to $50).  I have made this change to help pay for the new higher-priced payment processing system (see the next entry).  You can still get 10% off, but you just need to order a little more.  If you are totally steamed about this, feel free to let me know.

I have been using a regular PayPal business account to accept payments, but many customers had problems when using a credit card.  So I upgraded to a more-expensive service which should prove less problematic.  To pay for the new service, my prices will have to rise a very small amount, about 2%.  What that means is that about half the items will go up 10 cents.  If the price of a bead goes up more than that, it's because I am passing along a price increase from the supplier.  The weak dollar is driving the prices of imported items up, up, up.

I am increasing the price for the 12mm polished beads from $3.60 to $3.70 for 20 beads.  I've never really charged what these beads are worth, especially since I examine every bead individually.  I am probably the only beadseller who does that, and it takes a great deal of time.  Also, about 10% of the beads are discarded due to defects, so I am losing money on some of them.

China now has a thriving bead business.  For the most part, they have imitated the Czech styles, although they also offer some styles of their own.  Shipping from China is horrendously expensive, but the beads are cheaper overall, so it evens out (almost).  The first Chinese styles will appear on my site in a few weeks.  I will, of course, continue to carry Czech beads.

Starting two or three years ago, I resolved to mark each packet of defective beads with this legend:  "You paid a reduced price for these beads because some are defective."  But I have remembered to do that only about half the time.  Consequently, I've decided to dispense with the legend altogether.  If you receive defective beads, please go to the Detail page for that bead to see if you paid a reduced price.  If so, you have already been compensated for the defects.  If not, please contact me for a refund.

If a bead has cracks, but the cracks are hard to see, and the beads are not coming apart, I won't be reducing the price.  In the past I would always have reduced the price, but I've decided that it's enough for me to simply inform the customer.  Cracks are common in glass beads, but if the cracks really don't make a difference in the appearance, I don't see why I should lose any income!  If, however, the cracks are clearly visible, or if some beads are actually breaking, I'll reduce the price as I always have.

About 20% of the beads that I carry come loose from the supplier (instead of coming on hanks of strands).  If those beads are in the range of 7mm to 9mm, I will sell them in lots of 60 in addition to the usual lots of 50.  Beads which come from the supplier on strands of 25 or 50 will continue to be sold in lots of 50 only.  I may eventually choose to sell all 7mm to 9mm beads in lots of 60, but it will cause me a great deal of extra work, so it may never happen.  If I feel that I can do it without too much extra work, I will.

For those rosary-makers who end up with extra beads, I am wondering if they can't be made into matching bracelets.  Or perhaps you could occasionally make a "funky" rosary with multi-colored beads.  These are just suggestions, of course.  I am not Catholic, so I don't know how appropriate my ideas are.

Unfortunately, I have had to increase the minimum that an international customer spends to get free shipping from $150 to $200 (after discount).  There are two reasons for this:  first, the high expense of international shipments, and second, I pay higher credit-card and PayPal fees for international orders, so I actually make a little less money on them.  I apologize for this change.  I know that a $200 minimum is prohibitive, but it's the best I can do.