What's new? Well I'll tell you!

I've posted quite a few new handmade jewelry items in my etsy shop.  I plan to get more pieces photographed and posted to etsy next week if at all possible.  Unfortunately my ability to photograph items well is contingent on nice bright sunlight, which unfortunately the great city of Nashville has not seen much of lately.  Sunday promises to be sunny and bright (and more importantly not blisteringly cold) so I should have a good set up in the back yard with my white foam core and boxes of treasures.  I often wonder what the neighbors think I'm doing back there as I live on a corner so all of my backyard, amateur photography shenanigans are visible to every Joe Schmoe on the street!

I've also got some delightful vintage items up with more to come!  I've got some strange and lovely pieces in the hopper just waiting to be photographed and posted.

I am also delighted to announce that my very own Zazzle store is up and running.  There are for more designs available than what the screen shot shows here.

The perils of online selling

For those of you keeping score at home, I recently posted this lovely, vintage, silvertone cha-cha necklace for sale on my etsy vintage shop, Meretricious Vintage.  Almost immediately someone bought it, I was thrilled.  The strange thing was that they didn't pay for it. Today, I was going to their site to drop them a line reminding then that payment is past due, (it is etsy's policy that a buyer pay at the time of purchase) when I noticed that they have a 45% rating on the site.  45%!!!  How does it even get that low without etsy disabling the account?  It is obvious from large number of negative feedback comments that this is a habitual thing and should have been halted long ago.  This person obviously does this often, very often.

What I completely don't understand is, why?
Why would you click to buy something that you have no intention of paying for?  Why would you actively seek out screwing over people you have never met by falsely buying jewelry?  If you're short on cash and can't afford to buy it from me right now, contact me and I will make a custom listing and reserve it for you.  Really any communication about not being able to pay immediately for any reason should be a given.  I was just sure that this was the case before I saw the feedback page. (of which I sampled some of) At that point I didn't see any reason to pursue payment, I followed up the friendly reminder to the "buyer" that I had just sent almost immediately with this:

Upon reviewing your massive quantities of negative feedback for this exact problem, I will be contacting etsy to cancel the sale. I'm not really sure how someone with feedback that low is still allowed to maintain an account on this site, nor do I quite understand what it is that you're playing at ordering things and not paying for them. Please show some respect for the people who go out and pound the pavement & work hard in order to bring great vintage items (not to mention slaving away to make handmade) to people all over the world. Any future orders from you in my shop will immediately be canceled and I am requesting that due to a pattern of behavior that etsy disable your account.

And I have done just that and left yet more negative feedback to boot.  I would hope that etsy could put some sort of filter in place that once a user's feedback reaches a certain point that the account is at least flagged for review, if not immediately disabled.  I am not holding my breath that etsy will disable this account, they are notorious for letting things slide as long as possible, if they ever do anything at all.  Sure they're quick to jump on and disable people selling iPhones on their site but apparently flagrantly terrible business practices take a little more time to deal with.  We shall see how this scenario plays out.  The good news is that this beauty of a vintage necklace is available again for purchase by any legitimate etsy buyers!