|
About Shipping Times When I started my business in 2002, I was a young buck of 51. Now I am 70 and have multiple old-age health problems. Consequently, I don't work every day. Because of that, it takes me four to five days to get most orders in the mail. I wish I had better turn-around times. The covid-19 pandemic has made things worse, since I am not going out every day, but I am still striving to have all orders shipped in four to five days. The last wholesale order of beads that I placed was in late 2018. I have misplaced the battery charger for my camera, so some of those beads have not yet been posted. Once those beads are posted, that will be the end of the new beads. I am now mostly retired, and I expect to spend the next five years selling off my stock, at which time I will close the site. I had originally hoped to be in business until I turned 80, but fate had other ideas. Around 2012 the entire bead industry fell into a slump, and my sales dropped significantly. Then around 2015, Google stopped listing my site in searches. Now I get far fewer orders than I used to. Google's action was particularly galling. When I opened this site in early 2002, within only a couple months it was popping up in many Google searches. Around 2015, Google made changes to their search algorithms, and my site stopped appearing in searches altogether. My site was always a home-grown site, with no professional design or marketing. I never understood much about SEO (search-engine optimization). It would seem that Google made the decision to list only professionally designed sites. Apparently, Google also stopped listing sites that don't get a lot of visits. Because of the industry slump that started in 2012, traffic to this site was down, so Google started to de-list it. That resulted in my site going into a downward spiral of ever-decreasing sales. Google has apparently decided to be a king-maker, allowing some sites to have great success while others disappear from the face of the Earth. The way things stand now (in 2020), I still have a lot of beads on this site, and I will keep the site open until I have sold off most of the remaining stock. As time passes, I will increase the sale discount. There is a chance that I will remain in business after 2025. I may choose to carry a small selection of very special and expensive beads, but that hasn't been decided yet. It all depends on how my health is then. |