🎃 Big, BAD Etsy Buyers and how to PREVENT them - The Friday Bean Coffee Meet

turn mike down a little bit because it's actually quite guys listen hey listen okay don't be scared all right don't be scared but we've got a spooky in the back but please don't be scared he's not real okay he's and he's friendly but don't if anybody gets too scared let me know and i'll turn him off okay or you know i'll turn him around and then he'll just be a regular pumpkin guys happy friday i wasn't here last week um because i lost a sword fight with a bear and was stabbed in the eye yes actually it was a twig and we were doing yard work and i poked a hole in my eyeball and yes it is as unpleasant as it sounds and yes it's healed apparently eyes heal very fast but some of you if you were on my email list you probably received uh an email with a blacklight video that was actually my optometrist he was looking at my eye and he went oh whoa that's gnarly do you have a cell phone i was like yeah so he took my phone and took a picture and a video for it and i'm like here's the thing i'm a youtuber i said i i have to maintain like my presence on youtube and he's like no no this is great you'll have like a really cool story to tell and you can like tell them how how you poked a hole in your eye and they'll love you for it and i was like okay so that was uh email from you know recommended by optometrist well she said her pumpkin is a bit winky though it's because i poked it in the eye oh my pumpkin yeah this pumpkin is actually a picture of me last week an adult joke but sure yeah i got you i got you i'm just making sure that you caught that but i yeah but i said it's an actual picture of me getting my eye poked guys um today we're going to talk about bad etsy buyers and unfortunately because we are very very close to the holiday season we're more likely to see those difficult buyers but today we are going to talk about how to first prevent them because prevention is the best thing to do right we don't want to have them at all so we're going to talk about how to prevent them how to identify them and figure out if maybe the customer who sent you that kind of rude message is just this way with everybody uh and then we're going to talk about how to handle them so prevent identify and handle pit we're going to talk about how to pay pay your customer sounds inappropriate but it's not pit are you awake you seem tired i'm good i'm here she's he he just you're very quiet today he's been talking i don't know what that does i made one joke you didn't laugh i'm staying quiet the rest of the beam that's what it is oh poor mr moore feelings are hurt it's okay it's all right feelings are hurt oh we love you um but before we get into that there is a little bit of news some good news some crazy news some news that you might have wrong and some interesting news so first news you might have wrong facebook is not changing their name facebook is not changing their names if there's a direction facebook is changing their name if that sounds confusing facebook as the company as the overarching company of whatsapp instagram facebook the platform and everything else that they own is changing its name the umbrella corp the whatever yeah it's not the zombie one but right the umbrella corporation above it all is changing its name facebook the platform will stay the same well it's not going to stay the same it changes on like a daily basis now but the platform itself isn't changing the overall company that owns it is will be known from now until forever at least for now as meta so you will never have to say oh i need to go log in and check post my meta status however with that there's always the chance that they'll make a single platform that posts and interacts with everything called the metaverse so just be aware of that that probably will happen but we'll see yeah so any more posts in the handmade alpha community that say anything about facebook changing your name we're gonna do like the game of thrones like shame bell shame shame that's not what's happening it's you what it is is people reading like the news headlines and not actually opening the article so just always open the article always always there they are 99 of the time with any news article in your facebook feed is click bait whoa whoa whoa star let's show us those nails again oh they're press on um let's see we're too lazy to go to nail salons yeah who goes to a nail salon who has time for that i can make these last for like three weeks if i take care of them hello good morning hello good morning uh second little bit for everybody who markets on instagram very very good news for our instagram users you know how it used to be that in your instagram stories you had to have at least 10 000 followers to be able to put links in your story for the swipe up ain't no more ain't no more um they're slowly rolling it out because i don't have it yet but instagram's like ceo i think yeah somebody sure somebody bso some important instagram person announced two days ago i think that instagram will now have the option to put a link on your stories it won't be like the little swipe up option i don't think but it'll be more like when you go into your instagram stories and you can add like a countdown timer or a sticker or a mention uh we'll now have the option to add a link directly into our story so if you're posting a product photo you can actually put you know click here to buy it and that will be available i am so happy about that it is so past like so overdue you know because normally we have to be like oh visit lincoln bio to i don't know what their end goal with it is yet i don't know what their because platforms usually don't do something without an incentive so i'm not quite sure what the incentive is to doing this they said it's they said it's like popular demands i don't i believe anything that comes out of their mouths yeah we'll find out what the incentive is and when they release whatever thing that you have to pay for whatever whatever big platform takes advantage of it we'll find out yeah 10 000 followers is such a huge milestone to reach for such a useful tool yeah i always felt it was kind of silly yeah and i i keep i've been trying to reach 10 000 forever and i'm i'm not even to 5000 i mean it's very possible that it was something that bots could abuse easily and there might not have been a system that they found effective enough in place without hurting real people that were using the system they might have just developed some kind of countermeasure for bots just spamming links and things because obviously that's bots are the big threat to everything i mean you look at our freaking comment section but yeah that's that's most likely yeah what's going on with that what's this i just joined sorry i don't know why are we here that is the question what's what specifically the topic or what are we what are we we are we are human beings i am starla this is mark you are here at the friday bean we are live and we are talking about etsy we are humans we eat human food like hamburger and french we we uh we were just talking about instagram links and stories but um guys black friday's right around the corner uh i know i mentioned this every single week other than last week because my eye was popping out of my head but um black friday is going to be the biggest day on etsy it will be the day when there are more shoppers on the platform than any other day of the year if you knew that there was a lottery taking place tomorrow and you knew that there was a 50 chance that you would win i mean you know you might not win but there's a 50 chance that you would win would you not play the lottery that yeah absolutely it's worth the risk right i mean the odds could only be 50 50 if there was exactly one other person playing but yeah yeah but um you know you know what i mean it's it's a very high likelihood that you will see some results on black friday uh there are 56 50 something percent more shoppers on etsy this year than there were last year that's a lot that's a lot of people active buyers active buyers that is a lot so you want to make sure that you're optimizing for black friday even if you aren't hosting a sale because shoppers once they're in the moment they don't really care if something's on sale they're just shopping uh even if you're not in a country that celebrates black friday doesn't matter if you ship to the us or any of the other countries that are starting to kind of adapt to black friday like canada and the uk then you're going to want to plan for black friday and if you need help planning for black friday we already did all the hard work for you we are getting down to the wire though so you want to get the black friday toolbox that's linked down below in the video description um that's going to be full of all of my best resources videos i've got a 74 piece graphics pack that you can use for marketing graphics and that can be used in canva in photoshop in ipicy.com that comes with a video that teaches you how to use them there are training videos there is my double dip strategy which helped us to make between six to ten thousand dollars on black friday um there are so many really great resources in there and it's all free i only offer it during the fall leading up to black friday um so if you don't get that now then you're going to have to wait until next year to claim it because we put it back in handmade alpha academy speaking of which another thing that you're going to want to mark on your calendar is handmade auth academy will be opening on it'll be opening on december 1st through the 10th it is only a 10-day enrollment window we have over 600 students in haa and that is my step-by-step program that will teach you exactly a to z how to build and maintain and market your brand on etsy so that's uh december 1st yes that is december 1st and as always there is a 30 day no questions ask money back guarantee on that because we want to make sure that you actually are able to learn and that you enjoy it and if you don't enjoy it no hard feelings all you got to do is message him and we do do the free webinar just like every course however we do not do a giant sales pitch like you see in just about every other course thing we are extremely transparent with everything that we do um if you were there for the last year if you signed up last year you're aware of our process we communicate with everybody we're as transparent as we can be yeah um december 4th i think is the webinar um amber can you check a calendar real quick or could you check a calendar it's that saturday after enrollment opens i think i think it's december 4th if you guys want to write it down yeah yep december 4th december 4th don't do a last day scarcity webinar buy it before we don't do that crap yeah but that's going to be brand planet it's my most popular webinar that's going to teach you how to actually build an impressionable brand even if you don't plan to enroll in handmade alpha academy i still recommend you go to this one i only host it once a year and it was actually based on a live master class that i used can you not can you excuse me sir a live master class that i used to present when we were able to do in-person speaking events so all the alphas really enjoy that one um and that will be at noon eastern same time that we host the friday bean it'll just be on a saturday no amber it goes until the 10th yeah december december 1st that opens fourth is the webinar 10th is close yeah all right um go sign up for it and it ends the webinar is like legit useful information like even if you're not planning on buying the course just go and check it out it's good stuff oh yeah absolutely that is i mean i could sell it i could package that and sell it as its own course and probably make money off of it but it'll if it all goes well for those of you that buy in december we should be hopefully finished recording and editing the like remaster we're re remastering the course it's all the same material but we're wrapping everything to 4k improving the audio quality all that kind of stuff yeah that and that will be released in 2022. we wanted to do it this year but we fell behind um so and and people who enroll you'll get both versions if you want to go in and download the current ones you can do that and then you can go in and download the new ones when those are available as well so and amber and to answer your previous question yeah she can totally send something here that's totally fine yeah uh we did have one question before we continue on has anyone else set up their banner on the receipts and been successful i've been trying to to get the size they specifically but it's not showing up i wonder if i'm missing something silly i'm not sure offhand yeah feel free to post in the handmade alpha facebook community i wish he would stop messing with that bubbers has been especially bad this week he's been he had a big long piece of silver tinsel hanging from his butt yesterday and did a little tensile leader yes we tried it we try to keep that kind of stuff off of the floor we're not those we know that it's bad for him but this little dingleberry will find any little scrap all right so let's get started with the topic we want to make sure that we are preventing uh those nasty customers before they happen prevention is the best tactic over the holidays it is expected that we're going to see those nastier customers especially because for one customers are just kind of conditioned to how amazon treats customers they're conditioned to fast shipping they're conditioned to you know not be super nice because you know you guys have probably had negative customer service service experiences customers negative customer service negative customers negative customer service experiences in the past right um i think that we all have and yeah right over there yeah the visuals [Laughter] ruining my my jam here um we've all had those bad experiences so it we can't say that we don't understand our customers when we've all had those experiences too but today we're going to talk about how to kind of reframe those situations so that your customers hopefully will change their attitudes if they come at you with those kind of nasty attitudes but um first suggestion for my prevention tactic go to amazon and buy how to win friends and influence people by dale carnegie this is my pro tip uh if you want to ask for something for the holidays if you want something to read over the holiday break um i highly recommend you buy this book it was written in the 30s and it is still one of the best-selling like business books out there and it's not just good for business it's good for everyday life i read this book and it completely changed my communication skills it completely changed how i did customer service and it helped me with my public speaking that i did i highly recommend it it is something that i think that everybody should read but it will really help you to shape how you communicate with others and when things get stressful especially with your customers it's really really good to be able to walk away from those experiences not feeling angry uh we don't want to feel super duper stressed out by these situations especially when it's things that aren't our fault anytime you can relieve stress in business just go for it yeah anything that you can do whether that's whether that's reading something that can make you more efficient or like just tidying up your space just remove stress yeah right title here please yeah it's uh how to win friends oh my god amber's probably already doing it yeah not alienate people good god amber how to win friends and influence people yep by dale carnegie when friends and alienate people i'm sure that's a book yeah that's probably that's probably a book too um so that's my pro tip read that book really really good it's really fun um i enjoyed it and um dale carnegie you know you read a book from the 30s and you expect it to be a snore fest but it's very entertaining so um how does your phone auto correct alienate that's wonderful i love it i love it that's good this is funny it's been a fun stream so far i'm enjoying the halloween episode we don't have halloween everything is a little uh relaxed so it's uh just a little bit all right so second little bit for our prevention if you're taking if you're taking notes this is the prevention segment second second little bit for prevention is to put any important information about your product in your listing photos nobody's going to read your processing times nobody's going to read your policies nobody's going to read your descriptions if it is something that they need to know you have 10 listing photos go into canva and create a photo that has that information on it but don't create a giant photo with a million bullet points and a million words on it you want to keep it very very short and to the point because otherwise people still won't read it even if it is in the listening photos so break it up a little bit spread it throughout multiple photos keep it brief and try to not give them too much overwhelm if you need opinions if you create one of these photos and you need opinions feel free to post it in the free handmade alpha facebook community link down below most of the alphas in there already know are familiar with this so if you're new here you don't really have to say much just say you know here is my listing photo um with my you know product info what do you guys think of this and you'll get some great feedback there and the handmade alpha facebook community is obviously free so you can post there um just like i said make sure to keep it short um hi bubbers he's staying here for a minute if he keeps acting up he's gonna get locked upstairs he's chewing on power cables next thing that i want you to do and write this down because you need to plan to do this maybe this weekend i would say would be a great time to work on it is to make your worst case scenario plan i want you to sit and think of every horror story that you've ever heard about etsy buyers i want you to think of the worst thing that could happen to you what's the worst thing that could happen to one of your products it arrives shattered into a million pieces it disappears it gets it shows is delivered but is stolen off of somebody's porch uh it you know the the tracking says in transit but never updates um i want you to think of every single worst case scenario that could possibly happen to your product and then i want you to write a plan for how you'll deal with it i want you to have a plan for every single thing that way in the event that one of these things do happen over the holiday season he's going upstairs okay in the event that one of these things do happen over the holiday season you are able to say i have a plan i know exactly what to do because what we don't want is for a shopper to message you and say oh my package is missing you know what do i do and you say oh no that's not what a customer wants to hear and that is what is going to scare customers the very very most so we want to make sure that we have a plan in place you can also take that and put it in your policies uh if you can't fit it in your policies you can put it down in your faqs as well um just making sure you have a plan in place for those scenarios is going to help tremendously um and then sorry my eye is like bugging me for the first time in days and i don't know why did we have any more questions before we answer this etsy seller one of the end no does etsy ever side with the seller in a case do they have a customer service phone number for sellers two-part question one yes it depends on what the case is there's a million different things that could happen and for two they usually have a phone number you can contact as of right now they do not well no they've got a ch their chat is back in the bottom right here some people yeah in the bottom right hand corner of your screen you should have the chat option they brought it back for the holidays i think their uh phone number for the holidays has been shut down because people get a little derpy around the holidays so they don't have the support numbers in order to support that yeah um but yeah they do they side with sellers all the time absolutely absolutely um i would recommend uh doing their um their chat button if you have it that's a that's a live chat and as of yesterday it was there and working because amber was able to do it and then amber has oh cool amber just posted the link in the chat so that one will only work for people in the uk that's en your en-gb there's probably one that's en-us for us sellers as a matter of fact you're talking i'd test that out yeah no it looks like it's gb it's great britain will get support from me here okay see if he can get it to work doesn't look like it what's wrong keep talking all right um so worst case scenario plan and somebody in the chat deb said please ask us experienced sellers in the group what we do we've been there and can guide you in writing your worst case scenario plan yes that would be great if you guys could start a thread in the handmade alpha facebook community um just about like worst case scenarios and what you did that would be really really interesting if anybody has the time if any of our experienced sellers want to talk about like you know their worst case scenarios and how they deal with them that would be fantastic so feel free to do that uh next thing that you want to do for prevention is to use my ssar swipe files those stand for sales ship arrive review and those are included free inside the black friday toolbox which is linked down below if you don't already know what a swipe file is basically it is a copy and paste message that you send to a buyer throughout the transaction process these have already been approved by etsy i have confirmed we are allowed to send them you're going to send the first one after you see that an order has been placed in your shop basically just letting that customer know that you see that they've made a purchase um and that you know it will be arriving estimated or that you'll be shipping it you know and then whatever your date your estimated date is i'll ship it you know in the next three to four days this is really good in case they didn't read to see your processing time because this opens that door to door of communication and rather than them having to sit and wait in silence and not know when that order is going to actually ship they'll see it in that message and if they're like oh wait i need that by like next week then you can say oh i'm i'm so sorry it was in my it was in my listing there's no way that i can get it to you next week i have to customize it um if you still want it then i can go ahead and proceed with the order but if for any reason you want to cancel just let me know and i can cancel it and refund you before i start working on it it's better to cancel an order and refund it than to get a bad review so because nothing bad happens to you if you cancel an order that you know you cannot fulfill nothing bad is gonna happen as he doesn't down on you for that however if you get a bad review obviously that's going to hurt your uh overall customer and marketplace experience score and if you're working towards a star a star seller badge um it's going to impact that as well so sending that message just noticed you placed an order just wanted to let you know it's going to be shipping in this many days thanks for ordering if you have any questions feel free to message me uh ship which is the second message you're going to send that when you ship their order some sellers who don't you know have a high volume of sales will even take a picture of that order like packaged and be like here yes it looks really great um just wanted to let you know that i'm taking your package to the post office today or i have already taken your package to the post office in case you don't know how to track your order you can do it by doing this you could even send them their tracking number if you know that they're a difficult customer which will tell you how to identify that in just a few minutes but if you know that they're a difficult customer you could say here is your tracking number just in case you don't know how to find it but um if not you know here's how you locate your tracking number um it should arrive in this many days though with it being around the holidays uh we usually ask that you add a couple days onto the shipping time just because um you know mailing services are a little bit slower this is a great time to warn them about possible delays uh this is not included in my original essay or ssar swipe files that i am giving to you but feel free to write it in because this is a good time to kind of revise those for the holidays and add little things in or take things away that you don't want to put in there but i would let them know about the potential for delays when you message them to tell them that their order has shipped arrive that is the message that you are going to send them when you notice from their tracking that their order has arrived there is a really great tool with e-rank that will show you when all of your packages have arrived without having to go and click the individual tracking numbers i'll show you how to do that in just a few minutes basically this is how we're going to ask a customer for a positive review positive reviews are important for multiple reasons not just for you know showing that your shop is trustworthy to potential buyers but it's also going to help you to get your store seller badge it's going to help your overall standing in the marketplace because it increases your customer and marketplace experience score and it's going to help you rank higher in search this is going to help your seo it is one of the strongest things that you can do for your listings and their placement in search if you're noticing with uh you know your listings that you have very very bad visibility getting those good reviews is insanely important because it is going to put that product in front of more buyers etsy knows that if people are leaving a lot of five star reviews on a product the people really like that product therefore etsy is going to want to show that to more people so getting good reviews isn't just to make you feel good it actually helps the algorithm know which listings it should recommend to more people uh the arrive message you're going to send when you notice that the product has arrived to the customer and it says something like oh you know notice that your order arrived today just wanted to make sure that it arrived safely and if you don't know how to leave a review here is a helpful article from etsy that will teach you how to do so you're not asking them for review for a review you are telling them that if they don't know how here's how to do it because there are so many buyers on etsy who want to leave a review they just either forget or they don't know how to do it so these are all approved by etsy as he says that we are allowed to send these um i have personally verified that myself and the the last message is if they leave a review you can send them a quick message to thank them for that review and if you don't want to type all these out yourself i already have them done for you all you need to do is go in and tweak them and then you can either save them into your etsy snippets so that you don't have to copy and paste them every time or if you want to you can copy and paste them directly into your combos did we have any questions about those while we were talking non-stop for like 10 straight minutes yeah yeah we got quite a bit okay go ahead there's not there's not a lot of questions just a lot of statements um we were going in about actually i guess not amber had posted that i posted the us one don't they give you two days uh to give a bad review if you cancel an order um yes there are two days but if they didn't get in the order they're not it's not as likely that they're going to leave a bad review yeah they i mean it would just be a shop review right they can't leave a review for an item they don't receive um is it is it can you still leave an item review or is it just a shop no there's no such thing as a shop review it's it would be an item review that's what i was thinking i don't know why my brain was going that way but if that's but if it's something stupid and they never received the item and you did everything that you should do you can just contact etsy yeah they can't leave about yeah they can't leave a bad review if they were being about it yeah um question about the swipe files what if they don't answer after the first message i often wonder if i feel like i'm spamming them especially if they didn't write back no they likely won't they likely won't respond that it's it's good to know information and don't worry about spamming them you're not you're not spamming them with stuff like oh buy this we we have this now like i've never been upset to know when my order is gonna ship i've nev and we we have thousands and thousands of alphas who use these and who have received tons and tons and tons of reviews and it's not like a new thing we've been giving these to people since we started this yes it's not new and and we've never had a single complaint we had one and it was somebody who was just absolutely just an irrational customer out of thousands and thousands and thousands of people yeah i mean there's a lot of crappy people out there but just ignore them yeah just don't if that person places another order just cancel the order and don't work with that person anymore i know that sounds silly but it sometimes you got to do that i used to give customers an estimated date of arrival but after delays i stopped doing this yeah i wouldn't i honestly wouldn't do that no i wouldn't do estimated arrival i would do estimated ship yeah or process estimated processing time um i use etsy shipping and they send notices when the shipment is processed and when it's shipped so you're recommending messaging the buyer as well yeah because it's is it just email that they receive the thing from etsy or yeah so you're they're not receiving it in their etsy platform itself so that's it's kind of just doubling up not to mention that's from you that's personal from you you're not etsy yeah you're not a robot right most customers aren't gonna know that it's like a swipe file so and i mean obviously there's a lot of alphas but there aren't as many alphas as there are etsy sellers so don't feel like you're doing something that everyone else is doing because i've never i think once from a non-outfit that i receive something similar to what our swipe files are like usually it's just like a let me know when it gets there uh just about to help etsy no place to chat with the rap just general information yeah so for some people it works and for some people it doesn't it's seemingly very random we'll have it some days and won't have it other days i don't know what the deal is or what or if it's like time zone specific i don't know feel free to post uh in the handmade alpha facebook community uh and make like it would be cool to make like a full thread of etsy like email addresses to use that currently work phone numbers and links to get support yeah maybe we'll verify them and put them in a document no just sitting on there and complaining about etsy though i hate that crap we're not a complaint group yeah don't come in there to voice your complaints we'll shut that crap down quick yeah keep it positive happy happy happy happy where's the etsy snippets that you can save the swipe files to they're kind of hard to find i can never find them when i'm on etsy i always have to google setting up etsy snippets and then there is an actual article from etsy.com find that article and then that article will have the link that will uh show you how to set up the snippets because i can never remember how to set them up people love the personal messages yes they do they do hey i was wondering as a new seller i'm currently not collecting emails which i plan to but how could i offer previous customers a discount code without spamming them thank you you cannot collect their email addresses through purchase you cannot you cannot take someone who has purchased from you and stick them in an email list they have to opt into it themselves yes and you once they've placed an order there's no way to reach back out to them unfortunately you just have to start where you are now uh and you need to go through a platform such as mailchimp where they have to opt in you're not allowed to add them to your email list it's actually against the law yeah in almost every country yeah uh forgive me if this was already covered but what's your shipping cut-off date for us addresses this year um we have not covered this uh cutoff dates depending on what service you're using etsy just published add i would add a week on to what etsy and the mail services have have posted because they said like priority mail was like december 17th no way are packages priority mail gonna arrive that's at a minimum of a week if you're somewhere where it takes a really really long time for packages to get out i would add up to two yeah um december 1st is always what i set we use printful now so i'm we're just going to kind of go off of printful um but for our etsy shop for our jewelry we always did december 1st and even then i'm still getting delays on some people yeah yeah and if you live in a country where shipping to the u.s takes a really long time you might even want to do it further back than that um i actually just had a package come in from ukraine and it didn't really take that long i think it took a week from the time that they shipped it so that wasn't too bad but i know sometimes some stuff can get stuck in customs so yeah plan ahead plan accordingly yeah usps website cutoff dates are a joke they are they always absolutely are a joke and i don't know how they get away with it to be honest with you there's only a couple small things we'll get through here i messaged my customers in this manner from the beginning and they love it they're usually very pleasantly surprised to get a personal message from me yes um okay so we'll get into julie we'll get into yours as we get into the handle portion because we're not even halfway through the notes yet yeah so let's go ahead and let's go ahead and get back into it yeah um okay so next thing is um trying to see when customers orders have arrived so let me pull this up real quick um so quick question is it is it pii to show uh city and state but not name or address i don't know offhand but we shouldn't risk it okay that's fine all right go ahead and share share the screen you don't want to get up what you're going to pull up okay all right i i know you i i'll take i'll take face off there okay i know you right click the back of my hand okay all right so from erank.com which uh full disclosure mark and i work on the management team at erank.com however we do not get paid to recommend it right e-rank is our favorite tool for etsy sellers there is a free version what you're seeing is my pro version though uh when you're sending your ssar swipe files it can be a pain to see if orders have arrived because you're not going to want to go through every single order and click the tracking so what you're seeing here is mine and amber marie's um alpha shop that we use for testing purposes and for educational purposes um that way we're not really outing anybody's info here but what you're going to want to do is use the delivery status report okay under the shop tab you're going to want to use the delivery status report i would open it in a different tab and what this is going to do is it is going to show you where your orders are so you i'm not going to click on mine because i don't want you to see our customers information but you click view delivery status report it pulls that info from your shop and then you can just see without clicking all the tracking numbers what's in transit what's been delivered it is so useful because this is going to show you if there are any delays and that's going to allow you to message a customer in advance if for any reason you see that a package is taking a little bit longer you can be the first to reach out you should always be the first to reach out if you notice that there is a delay because this is going to keep them from sending you that nasty message saying where is my thing i ordered my thing you shipped it you know several days ago it still hasn't arrived where is my thing you will be able to message them and say hey i just wanted to let you know that i was taking a look at your tracking to see if your product arrived uh it looks like it's caught up in you know i don't know uh marshfield marshfield mo montana and uh and i just wanted to let you know that i i googled it and it seems that there's a sort facility there so it might just be stuck in transit it's probably gonna take a couple days longer than what had originally been estimated i'm going to keep an eye on it but i just wanted to make you aware that there is a little delay with your package but i am keeping an eye on it that means the world to your shoppers just so they know that you are paying attention if they message you and they're like oh you know my order hasn't arrived and you're like really it hasn't i don't know why you know you're showing that you have no control over what's happening showing them that you are paying attention is going to make them know that you are attentive so that is huge you can go ahead switch us back we're back all right um so those are our prevention tactics hopefully you've been writing these down if not be sure to write or write the replay watch the replay uh next thing that we want to do is if we get a message from a customer and that customer is being nasty this doesn't happen very often spam not important this doesn't happen very often in all of my years of being on etsy i've been on etsy for nine years across two different shops and i've worked with hundreds of shops this is a very rare occurrence but when it does it sticks out in your mind nobody likes to deal with a nasty customer and you will if you haven't you will eventually someday you probably will deal with a nasty customer and usually there are some warning signs right you get that message where the person is very impersonal they're talking to you like like you're a robot and have no feelings or they're just nasty from the start and you can just tell from their tone or they're trying to place an order in their nasty and you're afraid to even have them place that order because you're afraid that you're never going to be able to meet their expectations right it happens all the time there is now a tool uh there was previously a tool but now e-rank also has a tool yeah with a more or less offensive name to some people yes um that will help you to do that so if you want to hey amber do you mind if i um let's before you screen share amber do you mind if i use your etsy shop for this can you switch us back i didn't want you to do that yet you said can you so i s pop over to handmade alpha academy.com so i don't have to do a big search for amber's shop did i type it right i didn't look okay let's see amber no are you for real because i don't think you're for real not really asking for your permission to begin with let's see don't you need my username yes i do but i know what it is am i am i allowed to i checked last night to make sure that you haven't left any like reviews that have anything crazy and they're all appropriate and just very kind but can i use you we're very good at memorizing things okay she doesn't care he doesn't care okay so go ahead and uh switch us over okay are you signed in yeah yeah okay so i'm putting amber on the spot there i double checked it though there's there's nothing there um so with e-rank right on your actual dashboard now guys you are able to do a bad buyer check you don't have to go anywhere you can do it right here so what you want to do is you don't need their email you don't need anything but they're your username and the way that you find that is when they're either talking to you in a message or they've placed an order you click on their username and it will take you to this profile here if they have a shop you'll see their shop right here but what you want is the url right up at the top the tail end so hers is anna marie we copy it and then we paste it into the bad buyer check so let's see if amber's a bad buyer you can see all of the feedback that they have ever left on etsy and if you see that they have a ton of bad reviews that they only leave bad reviews it might be you can go ahead and increase this increases increases it might be a good idea for you to treat that customer with extra care um make sure that you're very very helpful make sure that you know if you see that they are complaining about order not arriving you're checking their tracking and you're updating them um or even just sending them their tracking number so they don't have to go look for it um if they are somebody who you can see only leaves bad reviews might be a good idea to just cancel that order um in fact i would even dare say and this is what anthony wolff said yesterday might even be a good idea to let etsy know that this customer seems to be someone who doesn't leave good reviews at all and they might be trying to scam for products this is a really really very common thing actually yeah people who will only leave bad reviews hoping that they're going to get free stuff which it blew my mind how many people with our previous shop were trying to get free stuff most of the time it's a charity case thing people saying that like i mean obviously sometimes people get serious illnesses but not not at the rate of people that would message our shop with their grandma who had cancer it was like and it was always the same stories it's like it's like they have a playbook for this kind of stuff so eventually you'll get these people too and even if it and you know even even if that isn't the case i mean there are pages that will teach you how to exploit you know etsy sellers or you know bully etsy sellers it's a talk for it wasn't there yeah there was some tick tock scam thing that was teaching people how to bully etsy sellers into uh you know basically giving you free things um which obviously if that happens and you have messages where they're saying like oh do this or i'll do this report the conversation to athlete blackmail yeah you etsy doesn't tolerate that if the customer yeah extortion if the customer is being nasty with you if they're cursing at you if they call you names immediately report the combo to etsy don't even reply to it etsy does not tolerate abuse and they will likely ban that user from the platform altogether and then you won't have to worry about them nor will any other etsy sellers but this is a really useful tool somebody had asked if this is available on the free version and i honestly can't remember can somebody i know one of you has a free e-right yeah somebody with a free hearing sign in and see if you can get to it yeah let us know i actually can't remember because we just added this tool and i see uh sharon said that i had no idea this report was on an e-rank yeah it's brand new this is a brand new thing okay so silly monkey asks a pretty decent question too yeah when you cancel an order because a cop customer left you bad feedback on their last order uh do you put this person do you put that as the reason for canceling when you cancel an order because um like what do you put as the reason if they've left you bad feedback in the past i would say for the reason um you know i'm i'm not sure if i'm going to be able to meet your expectations and i feel that maybe another seller might be more well-suited for your needs make it more it's a high-risk customer i mean you can you can really if reason doesn't necessarily matter as long as you're not rude about it yeah you could i mean if you wanted to be honest something like high-risk customer would probably even be okay i think that they see it i think yeah if they see it i mean just keep it appropriate but at the end of the day as long as you're not like insulting them or making fun of them though just fine saying that i'm i'm worried that my product isn't going to meet your expectations yeah it's available for free on your rank i just tried it awesome gotcha um yes it's in the free version one of my customers did that and etsy hadn't taken it down i was hoping she would get banned for threatening me but it just didn't happen then you need to continue getting with etsy yeah stay on them because not every person that works for etsy is going to be good at their job hey amber what's that abuse email abuse dash something might be just abuse at erank.com etsy.com i'm tired y'all etsy no it's it's longer what was it amber abuse dash something at you rank and then um let's see what do you tell someone who when you are canceling their order yeah that i i would just say that you either can't meet their expectations or you know you could you could even if you really needed to you could even say like oh i didn't realize that these were sold out or something like that right there i i know that it's a pain um uh i wouldn't necessarily go with that because that kind of comes off as seller negligence you had something listing so i wouldn't put that something was sold out when it wasn't unless it really was and then just try be as honest as you possibly can be yeah without saying anything insulting that's the best case scenario because if it does come down to you having to cover your butt in a case with etsy then you being honest will be the easiest you won't have to try to make up yeah that's job story so try to be as honest as possible without saying anything negative about the customer press dash and safety at etsy.com is the one that you can contact um continue we are good to continue so identifying a bad buyer treating them with care and if absolutely necessary canceling that order that just keep that as last resort though um because you will have to justify it and if that makes you uncomfortable then you want to make sure that you know there's actually a reason to cancel that order not just and if you are being threatened by a customer just like as an overall etsy is responsible for the safety of their buyers and their sellers so if you're being threatened and the person you're working with emailing directly isn't helping you just contact the the trust and safety thing again because etsy is responsible for that if they don't do something and you end up actually getting hurt by someone like they are responsible for not dealing with that from the get-go so if you're being threatened don't tolerate that immediately get with etsy yeah just felt like i needed to throw that out there all right so i'm gonna go ahead and answer julie's question before we get into the how to handle these difficult customers portion julie had said what has been your plan if a customer says that their package was stolen off of their porch or from their mailbox you need to message them and tell them that they need to file a police report and report it to their local facility you cannot control if something has been stolen from their porch they need to file a police report and if they're trying to scam you this is usually enough to scare them away yeah 99 of the time they immediately shut up yeah is that would be stolen property and it would be no different if someone come and stole came and stole the garden gnome out of their garden yeah once it's marked as delivered it's out of your hands yeah so i would let them know that they need to contact somebody now i will say that especially around the holidays a lot of times fedex and ups are really bad about this they will mark something as delivered that is still on the truck yes i have had it happen i have had things take almost a week after they were marked as delivered to show up at my house yeah because but what they'll do is as they're loading things on the truck they will mark them or they will scan them in as delivered and they're not delivered they're just on the truck out for delivery and however long that takes and you never know that truck could have had a breakdown that truck could have gotten receded due to weather like there's all different kinds of things that could happen after they load that thing on the truck maybe they maybe it's one of the fedexes that only works like monday through friday and they loaded on the truck on friday late in the day and then weather doesn't permit them to like continue driving on the roads and then they end up going back and then they don't go back out until monday then the package is four days late even though it's been marked as out for delivery or whatever so sometimes you just got to tell people to be patient take a look at the date take a look at what day it is try to try to come out look i mean you could even look at the weather being delivered and see if maybe weather could have delayed it like yeah there's all different kinds of things that you can do yeah but telling them to either you know first reach out to your carrier uh and then if you aren't able to find anything out by reaching out to your carrier and providing them with your tracking number to see if they can locate it then they need to file that report on their own um so but i do believe that in the uk you have to ensure that the product arrives i don't think that it is a choice if even if it is stolen off of a porch i do believe that in the uk products have to be received which is a big pain in the butt but keep in mind that if you are shipping to the uk um if you have to reship something that obviously isn't one of a kind if if it's an item that you can reship write it off as tax write-off you know it's it sucks when you have to do that but yeah i can so if you're dealing with a difficult customer you want to make sure that you are not going into defensive mode which i know can be hard it's hard to do it really is trust me i get it i recommend walking away for one hour before you type out your response if you're dealing with that bad customer um send your response to a friend yes hey does this come off as too aggressive send send it to a sensitive friend right now here's the thing most of the time a customer's objective isn't to be as mean to you as possible that's not their objective they just want to be heard they want their thing they want their thing so what i want all of you to do right now is think of somebody in your family that you love your spouse your child your dog your cat you like think of someone that you love very very much and you are going shopping for them for christmas okay you have found the perfect item for them for christmas you're really really excited um i will say that mr moore i am buying you i don't know a golden guitar pick and i'm so excited to give it to you i've i've found it and i've purchased it and it i've spent like all my my whole budget on your golden guitar pick right sure and then i see that my tracking has stopped updating okay i'm getting a little bit nervous now um so i'm waiting it out i'm waiting it out and then i see that it just never updates and then the date comes that i'm supposed to give it to him and it's never arrived and i don't have my product or my money and i'm very very upset and i contact the seller and i let them know and imagine they say to me well i shipped it so there's nothing i can do think about that for a minute think about you as the buyer put yourself in their shoes if you spent money on an item and it disappeared and you have no item and no money how are you going to feel you're going to be upset and you're especially going to be upset if that was just like oh no i don't know i don't know where it that's we want to make sure that we have a plan for when this happens yeah sometimes it sucks when we have to reship something or refund somebody but we need to make sure that we're not leaving a customer in that position and yes there are going to be times when customers are you know are rude with us it's gonna happen so we want to work on reframing the tone we want to shift the tone of the conversation if you get that message where a customer is panicking likely what they want is reassurance that you are actually going to help them because they might think that what they're going to get is a customer service representative especially if they're not familiar with etsy they don't think that you care they don't know that you care they don't think that you are actually going to do anything for them so if you get that nasty message you should act you know empathetic let them know that you're really concerned and that you are looking into it and that you are going to keep in communication with them and that you are going to help them and give them lists of things that that you are doing to help them oh you know i'm keeping an eye on your talking i here is a number for usps like maybe you see that they live in i don't know you you look up the town that they live in and you find their local usps and get the phone number oh i looked up your local usps number i recommend calling this number and checking be as helpful as you possibly can um and you know like i said they expect a robot typically if you respond in a tone that is concerned and they understand that you are not a robot that you are a person their tone will shift as well it really just takes you being polite and being a human for them to realize oh crap this is a person you know this is a real person who's actually going to help me um if you do send that message though i always recommend especially if you're feeling defensive or threatened or if you know the person has been rude to you um it is a good idea to have a friend proofread it like mark had said you're free to post it in the handmade alpha facebook community especially if the customer was extra nasty and you're really nervous about how to respond we that is one of the things that we do use the group for just make sure that if you're posting any screenshots you're blurring out the user's name we don't want to have anybody's name out on blast in the community or any other personal info or their address or anything like that so just make sure that you're censoring those otherwise they'll be deleted because that's not cool to do now there's also the chance of human error right everybody makes mistakes i did it so much during the holiday where i would like someone would order two identical items but i would i would see the order for the item but i didn't see the quantity and i would only send them one and then i would get that message like hey i ordered two of these that i only received one take accountability say oh my god i am so sorry i am so sorry that is all my fault i will make sure that i send you out another one immediately take accountability for error um and and most people don't have a hard time doing this but i think that where i see it the most is when for example if you sell mugs and you're just kind of bubble wrapping them and tossing them in a box and it arrives broken like yeah the likelihood of that you know arriving in one piece especially if you're a new seller you might just need to use that you know that feedback as a way to fix packaging in the future make sure that you're listening to these things make sure that you're taking notes that way you can adapt and evolve and change and get better so that things like this don't happen again but when these little issues occur you do want to make sure that you are taking accountability being empathetic and providing that help that they are looking for and then learn from those mistakes and use them to revise your policies as well you know this isn't just a shipping error type thing if for some reason you know you have somebody who gives you the wrong address and it arrives somewhere else and you know and they're out their money and their product and it's a big hassle for you might be a good idea to add into your policies like double check your address that way if it you know if you are ordering it's not being shipped to a previous address or something you want to make sure that you're able to do that ahead of time i would hate to uh i and i've had customers who have done that as well i've had customers who have messaged me and said it shipped to a previous address what do i do uh sometimes it can be redirected but it is a big pain in the butt to to intercept that package in transit um next little thing is something that i read somewhere a couple years ago and i always try to do it if there is an error that is my fault the the article had said to apologize three times in three different ways which means that you're not saying i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry you're apologizing by taking accountability so starting your message with oh i am so sorry that that happened um that is that is completely my mistake i apologize i am going to ship you out another one right away again apologies i will send you tracking right when i get it out very casual three apologies not you know two butt kissy we don't want to be too butt kissy with it no but it's really hard to be mad at somebody who apologizes three times and i think that that was the point it was i can't remember i can't remember where i heard it but it's something that i've always done apologizing three times in three different ways um and then when we do have those issues where we'll say like a package doesn't arrive or a package gets lost in transit or a package arrives broken once again what customers really want is for you to show that you have a plan in place and that you are there to help them and customers also like to have a little bit of control over the situation too so my very last tip that i recommend is have three options available that they can choose from if for some reason their package arrives broken you could send them a message that says oh i am so sorry um that that happened you know usps can be so rough with packages around this time of year i will send you out another one or or just say like here are three different options that you can choose from i can send you out a new package right away or uh if you if you can't wait anymore i can refund you or i would be more than happy to give you some you know in-store credit like try to give them a couple different options that they can choose from it could even just be two options i can send you another one or i can refund your order um if it's like just a simple mistake with the order you could say you know i can offer you a discount or i can you know ship you something else just whatever you are able to offer to them and it's gonna vary you know if you sell two thousand dollar coffee tables yeah unless you live in the uk you might not be able to just reship a two thousand dollar coffee table but whatever you are able to do for them try to give them the options to choose and everything that i've mentioned today you don't have to do all of them what i am giving you are best practices and suggestions so that you have the best possible chance of dealing with bad customers before it gets to the point where they are just leaving bad reviews and getting nasty prevention is the very very best thing that we can do but if we end up to the point where we have to handle a bad customer you also want to make sure that you're handling them very carefully so let's go ahead and uh get into questions you done yeah i had to show them the rare other kitty she is a rarity she doesn't like to does not like to be held much no she's not a very cuddly kitty no she is not is there someone on different payment tiers for the bad buyer search i don't i don't think the bad buyer search has a has a limit no i don't think so so we already kind of went through these let's see is that only for the pro version we only we already answered that and it's new no uh [Music] but won't they most likely leave a bad review since they didn't receive it or will etsy remove these reviews since it was delivered they can totally leave a bad review but if it was showed as delivered that's he actually will remove like most of the time they'll they'll side with you in fact i think they say that in their um in their seller handbook i think it's in the seller handbook that if it is marked as delivered that all you have to do is kind of provide the tracking if something was showed as delivered though and someone said that it was stolen i would do my very very best to still help them by like recommending the police report recommending that they file for the missing mail thing which you can do through most mail services i did it for i did it when i placed a like two hundred dollar bath and body works order last holiday season and uh it showed is delivered and um i had to go through like fedex and report that the package was stolen off of my porch and it turns out that the package was delivered to the porch across the street and they waited like three days to bring it over to me so it does not turn off your bath and body works yeah it was more than three days it was it was over a month and a half oh it sat over there for a month and a half inside their house so they decided to bring it over to us yeah i was uh furious sometimes our people deliver things over there and i just walk over there and take it off their porch i know that i know that super sketch but like if i got a 500 thing sitting on their porch i'm not gonna let them like take it and not give it to me because then yeah that's just a whole other i love that amazon takes the picture and shows like oh yeah that's i love that we've got new neighbors so i don't know how they'll the last one was like an elderly dude that never looked at his front door so it didn't matter but these are like young people so i don't know how they'll react when i show up on their porch and take something yeah the old guy was nice like i don't think he i think that it was just that he probably couldn't waddle across the street to put the package yeah it takes him like it took him like 10 minutes to get down to the end of the street to take his trash out so yeah uh if you're shipping to the uk keep an eye out when it arrives at customs because three times this year i've had things sit there for the max time be sent back and then i get the letter saying i need to pay i've had that happen here too where we've had an import fee on something and it just sat there for like three weeks and then i called uh i think it was chicago and they said yeah you've got like a 90 import fee thing and i was like that'd be really cool if you'd like send me a letter or call like call me or send me something see i keep that out i apologize and recommend uh they reach the carrier and file a police report if they're kind and do not seem like they're trying to scam me then i offer a small discount if they would like to reorder i mean sometimes you can't afford to send it we know some of you sell things that are so expensive to you that you can't afford to reship them yeah if you get a salty message it's best to turn off all screens for a while and process the emotions and let the adrenaline run through and come back with a clear head yeah go play some death metal and beat up an old tv with a baseball bat go to one of those smash rooms yeah white chapel just released a new album you could jam that beat some stuff up um i and you know we also should remember why we have negative emotions towards negative feedback when in a sea of positive things like if if you had a hundred compliments and one mean comment you are going to fixate on the one mean comment as a youtuber i sure do know that i just got a nasty comment yesterday from somebody who said will you just shut up and get to the point on what one of our videos suck it that's his response i don't care but um what the reason that we have those negative emotions in those seas of positive uh you know in when we have all that positivity and there's that one negative thing it just roots back to our reptilian brain where humans are meant to take social signals from others and it's why we have that sense of wanting to belong to a social group because you know primal humans lived in tribes and if you were the one human who was not being accepted you were the one who wasn't in the cave you were the one who didn't get to share the fire in the food and the mates you know and reproduce you were the odd man out who was shivering in the cold and that would not be optimal for your survival therefore we are already just kind of programmed to really really pay attention to feedback yes if we're not being accepted then we feel really really bad about it and our brain is trying to alert us that oh no we need to fit in we need to fit in um especially since negativity hits so hard when it's personal yeah so we want to make sure that we're also thinking about the fact that like this is an ancient irrational part of my brain that is causing me to feel this way and i know that that's hard i recommend reading the book predictably irrational by dan ariely if you would like to know more about all of the irrational stupid things that our brains do without our permission even when you read it and you become aware of those things you still can't change them because the brain is just it's like rings of a tree the part of the brain that developed first is in the center and then all around it are the parts of the brain that developed last and the part that's in the center is going to be both the strongest and the hardest to change okay this one's a little bit complicated i know there's a ship this is a shipping issue but how do you deal with a customer who upgraded their shipping and due to delays it didn't arrive on time so first off shipping times from the ship company or organization wherever you're from i guess are estimates they are not guarantees they are almost never a guarantee and if they are they're so expensive that your customer probably didn't pay for that um so you want to take that from there i get i get kind of angry on these ones yeah they they are estimates um don't make promises yeah do not make a promise if you made a promise it's on you if not then it's on the shipper yeah the actual shipping organization and they need to get with them about why it didn't arrive on time yeah tell them that i i paid for this for you i shipped it by the date that i was supposed to ship it i'm i'm very very sorry that they did not follow through but i did everything in my power to ensure that it arrived to you on time um i would recommend reaching directly out to usps about this because ultimately once the package leaves my hands it is in the hands of usp or ups usps fedex and let them take their frustrations out on the shipping provider because they're just gonna say there's nothing we could do about it um but better than be the punching bag than you because they've got like company insurance and psychiatric help yeah you don't need all that negativity in your life uh and you know make sure that you also say like the best possible like oh i need this by this day okay the best chance that we have it getting it to you by the state is by using you know this shipping method it cost this much but even then i still cannot guarantee especially this time of year yes be empathetic the power of saying sorry has saved me so much yes thank you for all this advice all the information is valuable especially how kindly you deal with various situations it's not easy no no it's it's it's never easy and like i mean you see how angry i am i've never boarded a customer like that but it it can be hard but it's a lot harder if you if you take it that way don't take things personally think of a time that you've been angry about some you've not received something or you've done something and the the outcome was like think to a time when you've felt the way that your customer probably feels and it helps you be a lot more empathetic than what they're expecting there's a difference between an angry customer and a rational customer an angry customer is just somebody who's pissed off that they didn't get their thing an irrational customer is probably somebody who's an immature jerk and treats everybody like that so obviously you have to handle them differently but try to be as empathetic as you can until it gets personal and then yeah report it to etsy if they start being nasty yeah once it gets personal then it's out of your hands give it to etsy and let them deal with it yep um let's see what if there's no data in the bad buyer search is there a new buyer to etsy well then they're a new buyer they're a new buyer they're you don't know if they're a threat or not yep i wouldn't go don't i wouldn't like take this as a thing where you go get paranoid about all your customers no because i mean look at it and maybe like maybe look at the shops that they're buying from too because i mean there's a lot of shops on etsy and a lot of them suck you never know if it was just seeing them yeah we never know if it was just somebody who continually buys from crappy shops and just continually gets crap products and leaves review like real reviews um so use use your adult judgment brain when it comes to that stuff but don't obsess about searching at every single oh yeah don't obsess over that use this if you've detected warning signs yeah don't make don't make this like a part of your process where you search every customer that places an order with you that's too much all right here's here's how i see it if if my daughter she's only nine now but when my daughter's a teenager if she shows up to the house and you know she's talking about her boyfriend jeff who has like i don't know he's got like prison tattoos or something he's getting an fbi background i might do a quick background check on him and jeff might be a great guy for all i know jeff might be phenomenal he might no he's not he might work at the local soup kitchen but if i work at the local soup it wouldn't that be like charity work yeah he might be he might be an outstanding guy he loves to help the community if she's in high school with a dupe with tattoos he's not a good guy i'm sorry i don't care what you're doing no tattoos prison tattoos prison tattoos he's got like four teardrops might just do a quick background check just to check you know warning signs warning signs but you know if joe shows up and joe i know oh i'm watching you too much yeah joe if joe seems like a really great guy except he kills everybody i'm dad so he's not a great guy yeah that's true i'm the sc i'm this guy i'm the nightmare dad you're gonna can't wait till she's a teenager i'm gonna be a nightmare dad ain't never gonna bring people here anyway dpd in the uk when i'll take pictures of the tracking of the parcel being delivered perfect wonderful what if we send the customers all those messages about each step of the order but they just ignore it uh but then they leave a nasty review even though everything was described in the messages they knew that's more evidence to cover your putt yeah you've done every single thing that you know to do and if the if the message says or if the review says anything about you not communicating you can report it to etsy because that's he will see that you were communicating the whole step of the way these are all good what if what if scenarios that i have never seen played out in person good what if scenarios though um but it can happen anything can happen it's the internet yeah but you'll know that you did everything that you could to prevent it and that this customer is unpleasable and then you'll know never to work with them again take as many precaution steps as you can but don't freak out about it like try your best not to release your personal address if you can people are weird yeah uh hermes uk takes pictures too a fun game on the local facebook groups is trying to work out whose house they've sent a picture of i'd be an upset boy usps will refund your shipping fees if priority email was not delivered on time there you go perfect thank you mike uh that's why i stopped offering usps priority got tired of it taking two weeks and dealing with frustrated customers if they specifically ask i'll do it but with tons of qualifiers yeah let them know just hey about that it takes a lot of energy out of you yes it does negativity ruins it man do and take you the time that you need to recover like meditate get side i mean take a therapist talk to a therapist once a month i know they're expensive but if you can afford it and like go talk to a therapist use some cbd if it's legal where you are cbd does wonders for tons of people now yeah and but you can go on a retreat take weekends off take a holiday break don't plan time for you yourself and your family go turn d i mean you could totally afford to take a break over the holidays and and if you're planning on enrolling in handmade alpha academy this holiday i did want to throw out a quick disclaimer it because it's opening on december 1st you don't have to start on december 1st it's only open for enrollment december 1st through the 10th but once you're in you're in for life because it's all pre-recorded you can start at any time and it's all self-paced most people who join december 1st don't start until january 1st as a new year's resolution thing i recommend everybody take if you can take just the the holiday week off i take the whole month of december off but if you can just take a week off do that you deserve that you deserve that time especially if you also work a day job uh and if you have kids you know take that time you you deserve it you deserve to not be stressed really hard for customers to get help from most of the carrier companies in the uk that will only deal with the sender we have a lot of people like that too um until it arrives at least royal mail will deliver or we'll deal with the recipient but yodel and hermes will just fob you off yeah i mean like here in the us somebody else had said something about things being left on the right yeah every day in my town facebook groups there's somebody posting a picture of their parcel on a random doorstep asking if anybody knows where it is i mean if it becomes a problem where you're like you're having to do that continuously with your packages you should probably get with the corporate version of whatever company is doing that i tell them that like hey my packages are on the wrong like your personal package is being delivered are being delivered to the wrong address all the time and then they'll have to deal with it because i mean it's their responsibility that you're ma until it gets to you you know like they're responsible for giving you your stuff i know they have all sorts of disclaimers and laws and stuff like that but there's there's ways through that kind of crap don't don't let people take advantage of you uh last year i offered them a little uh gift coming soon printable card in case it did not arrive my customers loved it and it's a just encased option yeah i love that the it's uh if so basically she's saying that if something is going to arrive like either not on time or there's a chance that it might not arrive do a little thing that they can print that they can stick in a box that's like a picture of the product you know and you know this this is coming soon here's your gift unfortunately it didn't arrive but it'll be here next week you know that that's an option as well hermes where i live usually delivers to the right number in a randomly selected street or just leaves things out in the street what in the world is going on with this hermes shipping company and why are you still using them ever yeah that sounds like something i would not be using no never that's awful i mean usp i've there's a lot of horror stories with usps and fedex like that too i mean i've watched people throw packages on places so uh interesting i've had several refunds last year and i've not had to do this for a while how do you deal with a customer that didn't read the description then leaves a bad review on the product for instance it's too small but sizes are written on there put your sizes into listing photos put your sizes in your listing photos and then also get with etsy because you've described what the product is you could also drop them a message and say hey you know i noticed that you left a bad review about the size of my product i put this information in my description and in my listing photos um if there is any way that i can make this more clear for future customers because i these bad reviews do affect my shop um i i just wanted to know if you have a suggestion on how i could you know improve my own shop so that this doesn't happen to anybody else in the future i would love i would just love some feedback um sometimes when you point out that they're just they just made a stupid they'll go and change their review you don't have to ask them to change their review but if you point out like hey i put it here and here if you have any suggestions on how i could have made it more clear so i can fix it once they realize that they're just dumb sometimes they'll go updated making someone feel stupid is a pretty good way to make them change but being polite about it being super nice [Music] there are 150 000 people in my town that's not a town yo that's a state no i'm just kidding we have that many people in a few cities around here oh yeah uh cbd gummies for the win i agree cbd is wonderful especially when you have an anxiety disorder uh how do you handle paypal and credit card chargebacks that's not gonna happen on etsy on etsy that's not gonna happen um there's at the paypal sucks paypal there's not really anything you can do about it that really sucks uh we've had it happen to us and it's very unfortunate but paypal almost always sides with the customers even when you have terms of service in place we know that because we have terms of service in place and it happens um you must be selling from a website and that's why we're etsy coaches because there are crazy complications there's there's a lot of stuff where sometimes you can't help it i mean we've even had a couple of stinkers with handmade alpha academy that have refunded broke our terms of service and the banks because they were in the uk still wouldn't honor our terms of service we could have sued but we're not those kind of people so yeah paypal paypal almost always sides with the buyer though even if even when they lie so i mean we've had i think five people so far and i've only had one case where they didn't side with us yeah so yeah uh usps priorities really work for me i've had no problems with it even though last year or even through last year i only use uh priority mail but never use their small medium large size packages those packages are a ripoff pricing yeah yeah it depends on what you're shipping though because if you can get like if you have a heavy thing and you don't have a way to package it yourself using the their specific mailers can save money it's you get it uh this is from my experience as a customer i wouldn't inflict that on my own customers i would just refund and replace and take the company to the task myself yeah tax write-offs guys loss things the products lost things that disappeared things that that got broken you can write those off yes that's all in business ask your we're not tax professionals ask your task account your tax accountant yeah always always ask your accountant yes same thing with the cbd we're not doctors so disclaimer disclaimers i guess just in case somebody just goes and like eats oh i'll say we need garments and just eats a whole thing sits on their porch just tweaking out for a week don't do that we're not doctors take everything we say with the girls what would happen if you ate a whole bag of cbd would you just be really really mellow i mean they're probably sugar-free so you'd probably get diarrhea oh yeah don't eat bunch of sugar-free gummy bears if you didn't know they uh they're kind of a mild laxative your body doesn't know how to process them no i just don't how do you handle customers who want to change their address after you've already submitted their order to your pod company it depends on your pod i think you would need to try to get that it depends on what process or where it is along with your pod company um i would see if you can stop the order from being produced but if it's already in production you might be able to contact the pod and just have them change the address you're the shipper like with a lot of things i've had issues where like i've accidentally put in like an old address or something and it's usually the shipper that has to contact the shipping company so just contact them and if it's through fedex and they've already shipped it or ups you might be able to contact them and have them redirect it to it because you're the actual pod you know the pod company would be the shipper so either way you're going to have to get with the pod and think yeah contact them directly see if they can intercept it anyway uh didn't etsy recently test where they let some buyers leave private feedback for sellers i'd hope they'd make this a permanent rollout but i've not seen it for a while i like the idea yeah but i mean they could do that anyway through the regular messaging system it's kind of redundant but it it puts the idea in their head to do it i guess i was just reminded um and i i was only reminded because i put um my own name into uh e-rank bad buyer check and i did your your etsy username as well you can look back like years and years ago we used to as sellers be able to rate our buyers and i only know that because if you look at some old old old etsy users in the bad buyer check you can see where they were like a plus customer you know smooth transformations i usually remember that like ebay you remember ebay does that etsy used to do that i wish why i love that as an idea being able to rate buyers why can't we do that because some people suck some people really suck that would be so great we shouldn't remember to rate this shop that i just bought these panels from too yeah i need to remember to do that we shop on etsy too i like etsy as a platform especially you people in ukraine i don't know what it is with y'all and woodworking but keep it up yeah everything would work everything from the ukraine all very well thought out and it's cheap i don't know how you how you do it uh let's see your suggestions about sizes and the listing photos is great uh now i put that in all my items i've made them in canva and it looks really pretty but it gives more of a chance to be professional awesome uh you have to consider the time they spent chasing down loss packages versus the money lost with refunding yeah you think you're chasing off customers with a judgmental ish what do you mean by judgmental ish by being judgmental judgmental how yeah what do you specifically mean i happen to my son he no longer eats any kind of gummy bears that used to be a thing on youtube where people would eat like a whole one pound bag of gummy bears and try not to crap their pants i don't know why it was like a thing for like a year on youtube where people are like eating gummy bears and going to the movies like like why why the internet used to be a much more weird place before censorship happened hi you don't remember that no you don't or the people eating crayons and then taking pictures of the aftermath move along sir does anybody remember the internet like 10 years ago it was an awful place of debauchery move along depop lets you rate buyers ooh well yeah and reverb does too and etsy owns deep poppy airbnb uh somebody priscilla had just commented that yeah they and it's a public and a private review we should we should ask etsy if we can have that back i want that feature back i want it back we are not asking you to go and spam etsy to require that feature back that's against the law so when that is not what we are saying disclaimer but if they ever have a survey where they say we would like ideas then do whatever you want do whatever you want i saw in my group recently that there was a buyer who asked to have his order cancelled the next day he then said yeah i buy identical items from two different shops and whoever ships first gets the sale i get a refund on the slow one it's just business no i hate the term it's just business it's something that scalpers use a lot too it's not just if you have to say that then you're lying to yourself yeah so and amber i amber shared that with me as well um if that were the case that convo needs to be reported directly to etsy because that user should be banned from etsy for doing that that is so not it's not okay and in some places could probably get you in trouble yes there's a lot of people saying that kind of stuff with scalping and saying oh it's just capitalism and now the government's looking at limiting prices on things so if you have to say that then it's something that's going to catch somebody's attention eventually and get you in trouble so don't do it quick question settler left a one star review the butt head uh but they said they didn't receive the order as uh it is marked as delivered contact etsy and they refuse to take the review down thoughts uh etsy i believe it they say that they as long as it showed as delivered it that they'll remove the review i'm pretty sure that it's in etsy's seller handbook or policy somewhere uh if i were you i would keep at it i would maybe drop them another another message and say like hey this was received um and at the same time you know if they said that they if they didn't receive their order did you do the things that we talked about previously did you tell them that it showed as delivered they need to contact their their shipping company uh maybe it was stolen they should probably file a police report like did you go through those steps with them um if it's been a while then obviously you can't just go back like two months later and drop them that message but um i might try to reach out to etsy again say like hey i'm work i'm trying to work towards my star seller badge and you know this happened kiss that butt he's that empty butt don't kiss through butt kiss that if you budge is it better to use variations multiple items on one listing or multiple listings one item per listing or shop score we have a video about this already uh if you go back through my videos there is one episode of the friday bean called how to reel in etsy buyers and it has a picture of me fishing on the thumbnail uh that will talk about the seo benefits of fishing for view that will that will talk about the seo benefits of either having one listing with a bunch of variations or having a lot of different listings and what occasion you should you know use for each of those options but that's like a full in-depth video so i would recommend going in and watching that uh and the question kind of continued what helps more selling one listing multiple times getting reviews possibly getting best seller rank for it or having multiple listings sell well and get their own reviews all those those individual listings won't sell as many times as if they were combined these aren't things none of these work better they work together yes one gear by itself is not going to make the clock work you've got to have all the gears working together so what you just mentioned are a lot of little gears that are all going to work together um like i said watch that video and it should explain a little bit more you should also maybe um watch my um seven factors that contribute to rank on etsy there are two videos one is a friday bean episode it's very long but there's also a very short video on uh on my channel as well but it talks about those seven factors that contribute to rank uh thank you for that it's just business from work that one grinds my dears yeah if you if you have to say anything that a super villain says before he shoots somebody when you're not then you're not doing something right you know in your heart you're doing something wrong that's the same with that's the same with us selling h.a.a there's so many different like tactics that people used to selling thing to sell things to people and we used to do that crap and it made us feel like crap that's why we don't do it anymore we tell you this is how we make our living we give you free info and then we sell you our thing once a year you're fully aware of that it's it's it's people pretending that the audience doesn't know you're not stupid we hate when people because not only are we are we like alienating half of our audience we're making all the people that would potentially buy not buy we're being honest with you as transparent as we can oh and the thing is like the gu we followed the gurus and did what the gurus told us to do and they said you won't be successful unless you do all these sketchy things guess what we've been doing it for about two years now the right way the way we want to do it and we've been doing way better than when we were being jerks about it well not jerks but when we were using every sales tactic in the book just be authentic and it should open it should be that way with your guys's businesses too just be authentic and and people tend to prefer being authentic a whole lot more i don't know what that person said but thank you for getting rid of them amber oh thank you for hiding them too maybe i missed this but how do you cancel an order after they've placed it in a nice way yeah we did already cover that a couple times yeah just send them a message and let them know that you were worried that you're not going to be able to meet their expectations and then cancel it let's see the fishing video is so useful i frequently suggest it when that topic comes up thank you yeah that's one of my most popular ones and one that i recommend the most um and i can never remember the name i know it's something about reeling in the etsy buyers and picture of me fishing uh let's see yes they said this happens but they live in a complex and people steal packages i was like not really something i can control yeah it's not like you can be like then move even though that's like the most logical answer that you could give them obviously we live in a we live in a society so like if they bought a wreath on etsy and then the wreath got stolen off of their front door like right goodness and people are just people and people are just people we live in a society that's all you have to say maybe i missed okay i've already read that uh not a question but both thanks if you for the past videos and the toolbox i've gotten very creative with my marketing and posts because of your videos we want you guys to succeed uh i mentioned gears in my video this week and i have just finished another on it it's a great metaphor yes everything working together they were hitting on your wife oh that's so sweet i don't mind that's fine makes me feel good uh just don't just don't um if you all have any last-minute questions there's one more question on here if anybody has any last minute questions feel free to go ahead and get those in because it's lunch time for us and we are going to go get lunch oh and also with handmade alpha academy opening december 1st if you guys have questions about it ask us those before enrollment opens that way you have time to think about your decision we don't want so typically what you see are spring of course upon you tactics where you don't have time to think because when someone wants you to make a high purchase like high price choice to buy they don't want you to have time to think they just want you to act right um but that leads to for one buyer regret for two it makes you make that decision before you've had time to think it over and decide if it's right for you so what we want to do over the next few weeks is make sure that you guys have the opportunity to ask us questions to make sure that it is right for you if you're interested in joining it is expensive but the reason that it is expensive is for one we made it with our own two hands and it took us a lot of time and it's very expensive to maintain the second reason is that free items tend to not get acted upon when you invest your money into a program you are more likely to follow through the same with college it's an investment yes and most of our alphas who have actually completed the program have made their money back very quickly we can't promise that you're going to make your money back obviously promise you anything it's up to you we know the info works exactly so that's that's the difference between like it's not just a bunch of crap that's thrown together this is stuff that we've used hundreds of people is used now and it we know for a fact that it works it's up to you to put in the effort and the thing is sometimes your product is too out there we're not that we can't guarantee that it's going to work for everyone but we help you identify if it is too weird that way you can shift you know you can make something else um but a couple little quick things you as long as you guys are on our waiting list or you're on our email list uh there's a handmade alpha academy waiting list down below opting into that does not obligate you to buy but it ensures that you get a huge discount please make sure that you use the discount link when it opens and that's not just a live thing that we're just using to make you buy it the the full price page is publicly available to purchase we have people purchase the full price yeah i don't want you to right well that's that's for when like those random people find us on google and they find the program um but for our youtube subscribers for those on the email list we got we give you guys the discount um yeah if anything it's more of a prevention tactic that way it's only people that we know that we can trust and people that know us buy it we only want to be able to help people that know us and trust in our process if you don't trust us then don't buy it exactly we don't it's no skin off my back i don't care exactly and as always like we said at the beginning uh we do have a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee i know that there are a lot of people a lot of courses that require you to submit homework and don't do that you send me an email after you've bought the course within 30 days and i will refund you no questions asked i usually say you know if you want to leave any feedback you can do so here i cancel it i send you your money back and if you have like a family emergency or something like that sometimes i'll even go beyond 30 days it just depends on the circumstances yep we're people we love you yes y'all plan on opening your jewelry business again uh at this point i'm just gonna go ahead and say probably not yeah i'm you know art by star lamor was really really special to me it's where i got my start however since doing art by starla moore i've taken on youtube the handmade alpha academy and i also am a manager at e-rank we have the alpha dap shop so that i'm still selling on etsy i'm a data analyst at e-rank as well yeah can you imagine also me running an etsy shop shipping things at the scale that i was it's impossible we don't have the time for it i went to school for teaching i'm a teacher i will always sell on etsy i will always make sure that i've got an etsy shop running so that i can stay relevant so that i can do research uh my jewelry shop not sure if i'm ever gonna reopen it again probably not if we do it'll be a limited release kind of thing yeah throwback throwback kind of thing more high cost items and less of them but we don't have the time to ship all that stuff yeah that's why we're we've switched to print on demand because it's easier we want to have a way to validate the fact that we still know what etsy is as a platform that is why we also have the alpha adapt shop we need to be able to stay up to date there are a lot of coaches that will sell you things that have no experience or prior experience but no current experience and things we will never permanently leave etsy as a platform that wouldn't make us honest as people that are core sellers for the etsy platform that would be silly um but the jewelry business is just too much like with black friday it's usually two hours consistent or two hours two weeks consistently sitting behind desks shipping orders i and she does not have time to sit behind a desk doing something else for two weeks we just don't yeah so unfortunately and thankfully working for e-rank we are able to stay ahead of the loop even more than we were as sellers because we get information before anybody else does yeah so and not only are her and amber still doing things we're obviously we're close friends with amber um we work with her we have the alpha adapt shop i do the data analysis i can see anything that you're doing on the e-rank platform i can build trends and things off based off of what any seller does on the e-rank platform so yes we're staying relevant we promise uh is there a or no i skipped one how do we contact you with those questions about haa you can either post them here we do these live streams every friday that we can we usually do a friday being on haa or at least allow people to ask so you can do that or if they're questions that are a little bit more personal and you don't want to ask them here feel free to email us over at starlighthandmadealphacademy.com a little closer to launch just because we pay a little more attention to that inbox around that time it's so full of spam we i mean i'm not even kidding we get probably 10 to 15 influencer emails a day and that's just influencer emails not customer emails so we we get to that inbox like once or twice every couple of weeks but then when aha enrollment comes around we have a lot of questions that roll into that inbox so um if you want to answer or ask them here anybody feel free to post them in here well we'll answer questions at any time we can do live streams until two we've got 15 more minutes that we can do this so feel free and the email is i'll type it in here um miranda had said is there a community aspect to aha other than the free facebook group yes that's another facebook group yes handmade alpha academy student campus group which is only for enrolled students uh within that community we also do alpha of the year where every year we do a contest where alphas can submit a video basically talking about how their shop has grown since joining and then we vote for the alpha of the year and then we send them an astronomically expensive prize uh this year we sent wes was our winner he won a nikon nikon camera with the lenses and everything else a dslr with the bag and all the lenses and everything um we tried to do a prize like at like around eight hundred dollars or more for our alpha of the year yeah after shipping and everything's done it's usually somewhere in the ballpark of twelve to thirteen hundred dollars but it depends on the year price of things goes up and down but we try to do like a business tool type thing so there's that but you also get to mastermind with people like amber um you know and you can ask questions to alphas who are i mean we have so many six-figure alphas in haa yeah it's it's similar to the current community but it's people that have have and are taking the course it's nice too because every year or every season when we open ha all the new students come in and they all have questions and a lot of them are repeat questions but there's also a lot of unique questions that come in and it can help you continue to build your business over time yeah and what's really cool is a lot of like our our higher volume more advanced sellers that that you can learn from they're not even in the public group because they get sick of the monotony and you know like the newbie questions they actually hang out just in the student campus so that they can actually work with people who are working through the same program that they worked through i've decided to leave facebook is there another way to connect to the aja community as of right now this would technically be the only place that you could connect to the community we're working on a discord but if you don't like facebook the discord is probably going to be a little bit less policed than facebook was so yeah you can also um you if you still have like your facebook business page and you just took your personal account off you can technically join the community just as your your business page and if you're if the only thing that you've joined the only group that you've joined is your business page um all you'll see is haa community posts in your feed so that can be helpful as well if you don't want to see like the junk on facebook i'm working on the discord i want to make sure that i can get bot stuff set up properly and make sure that everything is set up in a way that is the most secure that i can because that's also where we're going to stream our alphas after dark stuff yeah we're not going to stream those on youtube anymore i don't think uh yeah i'm a bad student so i just show i'm really just slow at learning but what i have learned so far has been really helpful we're getting a lot of praise in here thorn apple said they haven't they haven't even completed it and they've already made their money back we hear that a lot yeah we hear that quite a bit most people make it like halfway through and then they're already swamped they're already swamped like wes he was our last outfit of the year he he hasn't been live streaming weeks because he's so freaking busy so i hope you're doing well out there wes if you watch this after i hope you're doing well bud uh does uh do any of the updates for the academy apply to those who appreciate yeah always any updates that we apply to the course like i said next spring-ish we should be updating the course to just kind of compile a lot of the update videos and stuff that we've done into like master videos and we're actually talking about splitting the videos into smaller ones potentially that way there's more action steps and it's easier for you guys to you don't have to watch like 45 minute long videos it can be like three 15 minute long videos with more action steps but we're also updating the audio and updating everything hopefully to 4k if we have the storage space for it but it's like 16 hours of content same content just better production better production quality and easier to follow hopefully but anything we add to haa you guys get for life you don't ever pay for anything else other than your enrollment that's all that's all you have to pay for we don't have hidden costs or anything and i'm also potentially looking at doing some micro courses in the future for some more techy stuff but i'm not gonna i'm not gonna delve into that yeah just little quick things little little quick things that will be included for haa students and possibly available individually i'm just looking at apple apple crumbleston i love that username uh do you think there will be another massive shipping delay this halloween or this holiday season yes i mean i would go with a yes there's already cargo ships that are still stuck like on the coast of california that have i haven't had anything get delayed so far this year it's only october it's and it's but yeah so i would plan for a yes and hope for a no going through aha in january to see what the but shut up amber let's see what the buzz is about you've been a student forever you go through it anytime you want wonderful thanks my last group imploded and i'm missing business friends i talked to my husband last night and i'll be joining this year well we'll love to see it are you able to set up a business page without a personal facebook i also want out of facebook but want to stay in the groups i'm in i mean if that's literally what you want to do create a new facebook don't add anybody make a burner account yeah make a burner account make make your facebook and just don't add anyone block i mean add a couple of family members if that's what you want sick set your privacy settings to only friends or just totally privatize your your facebook profile that nobody can add you like there's all kinds of stuff that you can do out of curiosity have you had any major changes to haa since creating the course you do to customer reviews etsy updates etc that's the updates yes etsy and mailchimp yes uh the mailchimp modules needed to be updated there are um update videos in there when we re-record we'll be taking those update videos and just smashing them into the long video um and the seo video because we started working for e-rank and we learned more cool stuff so we were able to add to it we also have added uh tons of new bonuses there's a new graphics vault that's full of um like several hundred different graphics that you can download uh there's a new holiday resource guide that we added last year that has all of my holiday resources year round um god what was the other big one there was another really big bonus and i can't remember what it was i can't remember there's a bunch of bonuses but yeah there's about there's a bunch of bonuses and we'll be adding more we haven't added anything based on customer feedback other than when someone like for example with the mailchimp thing we had people who would notice that something had changed before we noticed well we want things to be user friendly and mailchimp as in like the interface itself change like mailchimp didn't change but the way that it looked changed and a few people were getting confused in the videos because it looked different and we don't want you guys to have to go digging to figure things out on yourself so we'll be we'll be updating all of that the menu and mailchimp used to be at the top and then they moved it to the side and that just threw everybody off that well not everybody it threw it quite people off they're like where is that where did it go uh if you guys ever did a live streaming course i'd take that just saying okay so like i hate streaming i like the process of live streaming i hate everything that it hit like there is a screen here light here light here light here camera microphone streaming stream deck stream deck you want to hold it up show them how you control everything without switching it yeah it's all tangled up it's all tangled up in my wires it's a stream deck it's got push a button it's got it make sure you're pushing right bye and we're back yeah so this little thing just switches and you can do all kinds of stuff with got it set up to like switch my volume and all different kinds of stuff streaming really isn't isn't that hard but i mean and if it's more of like personality type thing uh it just comes with practice you you get more comfortable with it the more you do it doesn't mean i'm good at it because i'm definitely not go watch our very first tech friday q a with me and him and it's awful it's so bad it's so bad you get comfortable over time that's that's one question that we used to get a lot like how do you get comfortable like live streaming on stuff how do you get like there's no you just do it there is no secret to it yeah do it there's no book that will make it happen you just have to do it like if you're it's so bad that you can't get over it you live in a legal state then like medicaid i guess like i better really either get used to it or don't do it sober that's like medicate meditate uh no i can't say that that's the outfits after dark street we love you guys uh we're still 140 there were a lot of people we had almost 200 people in this live stream all right guys little bits of news if you joined us late there's exciting things with social media you guys need to know these things so don't leave yet um yes first of all just a little tidbit for everybody who sees all your friends panicking that facebook is changing their name facebook's not changing their name the umbrella company that owns facebook and instagram and whatsapp meta the metaverse there it's changing to meta but when you log into facebook it will still say facebook uh second thing is that instagram stories are now gonna have links so when you're posting photos in your instagram stories over the holidays you can actually link your etsy listing to it uh that hasn't rolled out for everybody yet but it should be rolling out before the holiday so keep an eye eye out for it it will be located where you can add like stickers and things to your instagram stories it'll be somewhere in there uh next thing is black friday's right around the corner regardless of if you plan to host a sale if you're in the us or not if you ship to the us you want to make sure that you are optimizing for black friday because there are over 50 percent more shoppers this year on etsy than there were last year that means that it's going to be crazy not to mention historically black friday is the day when etsy sees the most shoppers on the platform at the same time black friday is where it's at yo it is so black friday toolbox is linked down below that is completely free it is full of video trainings it has a graphics pack with 74 holiday graphics that are royalty free i made them myself so that you won't see them anywhere else um there are cheat sheets there's a full checklist that tells you when what to do and what days to do it to get ready for black friday and my double dip strategy video which has in the past helped me to make between six thousand to ten thousand dollars on black friday weekend so that is why friday alone black friday weekend we've made a lot more than that yeah um so that's probably the most valuable thing um but it's all compiled into one area and by signing up for the black friday toolbox you'll also get an invitation to our black friday lifeline live stream that we do every year where if you have any last minute black friday setup questions if you just need help um more personalized help we will actually be doing a free coaching call as well um i think the week before black friday or maybe the maybe the week before that i can't remember what day it is but that's for that would be the weekend amber is here that she gets here it's not the week she's here it's the week before she gets here yeah so yeah waffles do you got oh no there was another one uh do you use mail fold does it require the same terms of service as email no no i use uh mailchimp you guys have a video explaining what all is covered in haa or who it is best for so two things we do a live stream usually the week before it opens our friday bean will usually be aja questions and whatnot and then at the end of her webinar it's not this one oh you're not doing that on this one no okay but when we've totally cut that out so then we'll be doing it on our no it's also in the on the enrollment page every every single thing that i teach the full curriculum uh the full there's nine modules and there are usually three to five lessons per module everything that's in every single lesson is laid out on the enrollment page we teach uh building your business mindset uh branding your business which not just branding but psychology branding yes uh target customer target market building to make sure that you're actually building a a target customer and doing everything that you can to appeal to them uh social media and building a email list and funnel um which we don't teach here for legal reasons yeah um for anybody who doesn't already have their etsy shop open we teach all of that uh photography editing your listing photos um we teach customer service we teach seo you also get one year of e-rank pro which is the most they're the best plan for e-rank you get an e-rank pro membership that i pay for out of pocket like i actually buy that for you um we teach you pricing we teach you packaging we teach you uh the psychology of packaging and things that are more likely to get you positive reviews based on mit case studies um we teach you color psychology we teach you how to build a fanatical fan club for your brand to actually make people like crazy about your business the way that like people are crazy about like yeezys and stuff um we teach you how to build your audience by hosting giveaways and then there's like a whole bonuses vault that teaches you a bunch of other stuff so yeah there's there's a lot in h.a there is a lot there but it's not all scattered it's like step one you do this it's in order step two you do this step three you do this it's a road map and it's mainly targeted at the new to like beginner eater in beginner intermediate seller however it is a good refresher or pop-up kind of course for those of you that are experienced we've had plenty of experience like paula oh yeah we've had tons of people that were making like 50 or 60 000 that came in and were able to like fix the little gaps in what they weren't doing and be able to get their businesses over six figures so it's up to you we're again this is just all part of transparency we know who the course is for it works best for beginner and intermediates but it also works for those of you that are maybe already making a living off of it and if the if you if you you know just need to like fill in those gaps the price of the course likely isn't a huge obstacle to you anyway so if you want to pop in and not to mention there's out there yeah there's a refund policy and we don't yeah if you if you end up wanting to just pop in and look around you can do that yeah exactly uh my daughter and i have three shops between us would we be able to do ha together yeah that's totally totally fine yup totally fine you don't link your shop to handmade alpha academy in any capacity it is entirely its own thing streaming at any time there's no dates there's it's it's all unlocked from the get-go you like if there's something that you absolutely like oh the thought of this is stupid you can just skip it totally fine i prefer you wouldn't because you might i would rather you go along because if you ask a question it's in the and it's in the course then we're just going to tell you to go watch that part [Laughter] and if it's confusing then we'll help you yeah uh i would i wouldn't be able to edit all of my ums and swearing i usually swear a lot you know believe it or not that's a lot easier to get over than you think i have the same problem believe it or not sometimes they slip out here if you've been listening for long enough you've heard a few of my things slip i don't think i've ever gotten sales on black friday despite running a discount every year people only buy myself full price before or after not complaining yeah some let us know what this year is like for you though let us know in after this black friday if you make sales with the like more than 50 more shoppers i'm curious uh i tell my family h.a is my business psychology and marketing course i mean that's basically what it is that's awesome do you guys call me your coach to your family do you say yeah my coach that just sounds so weird to me it feels weird in which fyi was not taught in art school you know honestly some of the best complaints that are complaints best complaints the best things that we've heard about haa are from people that have like business degrees and they say that they learned more about running their etsy business there than they ever would have learned business degree a business degree teaches you how to work for somebody else's business haa teaches you how to start a business yes being an entrepreneur is a very like learned thing yeah because it's it's in the time period you can't you can't build a college course off of something that's happening continuously and changing continuously they're going to teach you history and like all that kind of stuff i have a hard time dealing with customers that are dead silent i'm working on painting someone wanted in two weeks who constantly takes four days to approve and now we're in week three and they've ghosted me that's gonna happen that's why a lot of people including us stop taking custom orders yep i always ask for payment up front and if they stop communicating then stop working until you hear from them do you need lots of computer skills uh to learn your course no not necessarily but please have an actual computer or mac yeah um you i mean not really because i tell you click by click what to do click here click here if you don't know how to like open a file on your computer yes or upload something to the internet it might be a little bit hard but i'm assuming that you probably know how to do those things yeah if you know how to get onto etsy and sign up then you're probably okay um i mean we have everyone and i know some people would like to get mad when i say this we have people all the way from their 20s all the way up into their 80s and aja we have people of all age groups and if it's something where like like technology absolutely cripples you and it's so confusing that like it just ruins your day then this probably isn't for you anyway but uh if you're if you know the basics and you still have issues then you can always reach out to me after you've bought the course i provide tech support for all of the stuff if something confuses you i'll do my best to he's geek squad i am i am an absolute dork so that's one of the bonuses is mark's tech guide he recommends like all the tech that that we like and he updates it every year based on the newest attack like the best new phone and sometimes tech doesn't change so it doesn't get updated that just kind of happens cameras haven't really changed for like three years other than the naming schemes for them um also another thing that we didn't mention along with the tech stuff it doesn't require you to really buy anything else the only other cost that you'll have with the course will be mailchimp once your audience is big enough to require it but at that point a domain email which is five dollars domain email yeah sorry apologies five dollars a month if you want to do the domain email which you i think you need for mailchimp to ensure that your messages go through but the only thing for verification yeah the only thing that you have to pay for which is e-rank pro we pay for for you for a year for a year yeah yes yep whether you do the one-time payment or the yearly or the six-month enrollment plan yeah it doesn't matter if you're doing one time or not it doesn't matter we pay out of pocket for that i actually just sent anthony the payment for the last one like two weeks ago yeah that's pretty much all the questions that we have we had a lot of good questions about aha believe it or not usually when we do these live streams we don't get a single question i'm glad that you guys are asking questions yeah because we have we get a lot of these questions that we still will in our email every year i would rather answer them here because then everybody right everybody knows these it adds to that transparency thing that we're trying to do selling a course comes off as really scummy to a lot of people and i it's unfortunate because a lot of scummy coaches are out there oh god yes we don't want to be those people to you yeah always look for a refund guarantee and then if they have one look over it and see what it actually is because sometimes they say that they guarantee a refund but then they like oh we need to see proof that you tried you have to fill out this document no what they're trying to do is make it as hard as possible for you to get a refund never ever ever enroll in any programs that have a something that you have to do in order they're not confident in their product enough to give it to you with no questions asked yeah exactly we're confident enough that when and the thing is sometimes it's not they don't want to give it to you if it's like something happens in your life and that's what i don't like like sometimes stuff yeah like oh i just signed up for the course and then like my dad got in a car accident and they just got all that like stuff life happens and we don't want life to be and the same thing is like getting a loan please don't get alone to buy our course no like don't don't sell we've had people try to sell their car like don't don't do if it's too expensive for you what i this is the thing that i tell people every year the the six month payment plan costs more than paying upfront if you cannot afford it save what the six month payment plan would be 199 a month for the discount people every month for the next six months until the next enrollment if you don't need to use that money then you can take the one-time payment and pay for it if you needed to use that money then you couldn't afford it right so so just do that we don't want anyone to struggle on our behalf period absolutely people do that people are weird people are you say that oh my god oh my god yeah people are strange man yeah in public i know it's been a while since you've been able to but go out in public people are weird we get well here's the thing as course creators we get people who message us and tell us about uh what other courses did to them so we get the worse horror stories and there have been times where i've made like passive aggressive posts on instagram and stuff where i've been like i really hate it when i hear this and i like know that like these programs and i know what they are but i just can't mention like there's no way that i can't say anything i couldn't say anything we don't want to blast people either that's not what we're that's not what we're here for we're not targeting anybody specific i've i am personally in like how many i'm in like five or six different courses right now that i've just got like lifetime memberships too and then i've got a bunch of micro courses that i take on like udemy and he's got some courses where he can't even post in the communities because the people like the community members are so toxic toxic people are toxic and there's like no group moderation we don't tolerate that no desperate time desperate measures yeah unfortunately but enough of that negative crap aja is going to open on the first it's going to be december 1st and it's going to be great and we're going to have a lot of new students and we're going to love it i look forward to all the new questions and seeing all the new products i like seeing all the different we have a lot of dudes in there now which is awesome which is cool like we've got people in every community we've got people in the trans community and we've got we've got so much support and love all over the place and that's another thing too about our groups we don't put up a bullcrap we don't put all the you go into a lot of course groups and people are just negative negative but we don't put up with that we kick them crappers out of there yeah we've even we've got like how many 18 plus sellers do we have now as well quite a few and we're going to be hopefully i don't know when we're going to be doing it but once we get the discord full running that's probably what we're going to do alphas after dark because we can be a little more open with what we say we can show things we can do things that are a little more inappropriate without risk of like our whole livelihood on youtube going away yeah because if you sell you know if you sell 18 plus products you should also be able to get help it's not it's not fair that there's no help out there youtube is not a place for you youtube is but youtube doesn't like it and we can't risk it so once we get that set up we'll be doing 14 plus live streams which is fun for some of you who want to just come see us online because we throw we take the filter off we take the filter off and talk how we want to talk we get freaky not really not really we don't do that on camera oh nasty but we love you guys uh we'll see we're not doing anything up until next friday right no i don't think so but please be safe over halloween make sure your kiddos are safe make sure they're wearing their reflective stuff i know you guys know all this all right more people are going to be out compared to the year prior because it's their first halloween since covet so just keep an eye on your kiddos yeah weirdos out there i always worry about the weirdos going out and messing with the kids when people have to spend a year inside a lot more people turn into weirdos so there's a few more weirdos than there were in 2019 so just keep an eye on your kiddos stay safe please don't drink and drive please i lost my best friend to a drunk driver please don't drink and drive be safe have fun though uber exists if you want to get trashed halloween is the holiday for it get an uber we will not be we're taking hobbies trick-or-treating because we're responsible adults [Laughter] until we get up all right guys have a

Channel: Starla Moore

Views: 2,541

Keywords: etsy tips for beginners, etsy tips and tricks, the friday bean, handmade alphas, starla moore, get more etsy sales, etsy earn money, start a home business, home based business, starting your own business, grow my etsy shop, etsy holiday prep, erank for etsy, etsy black friday, etsy black friday sale, get more sales on etsy, make more money on etsy, how to make money on etsy, etsy christmas, etsy reviews, etsy bad review, etsy bad customer, bad etsy shoppers

Id: F01nb3K55yg

Length: 128min 4sec (7684 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021