Identifying issues
On Monday I took a deep breath and plunged into Etsy. It was a slow business. I'm quite impressed with myself that I still managed to make five pairs of earrings that day.
To be fair, that wasn't entirely Etsy's fault, although there is quite a lot of electronic paperwork; there was also the fact that I looked at my earring photos and thought "those could be greatly improved". For a start, if you're showing little earrings it makes sense to show the pair, but for big ones with small beady detail, one earring per photo is enough; so first of all I had to crop. Then most of them looked a bit dim, so I needed to adjust the brightness and contrast (for those who have never done photo processing, I should explain that if you up the brightness it tends to take the contrast down, so you need to up the contrast as well to compensate, usually by around 90% of the amount you up the brightness). And then they all needed labelling with their unique identifiers, so that I know exactly which pair of earrings someone wants to buy. I will be putting those in drop-down lists once I get to the point where I can edit my listings, but they have this weird bug at the moment so that if you try to put anything like that in while you're setting up the listing, you get an error. So you have to set it up first and then edit it to allow for things like lists of choices.
The way you do it is that you set up the listings first; I have three at the moment, one for each style of earrings I'm selling (the fractals, the hexagons, and the 1920s flapper style). Each listing allows up to 10 photos plus a video. I have no idea how you make a video, and, in any case, I'm not quite sure how one would work for earrings; so what it boils down to is that I can offer 10 pairs of earrings in each style I sell, plus the opportunity to order custom pairs. That makes it very easy to decide when I need to design a new style! If the shop's full, design new style, make a few pairs, and create new listing. And it will get full, initially, because it will take a while for people to start finding it. However, the more listings I have, the more likely the shop is to be found, and after a bit it should reach an equilibrium point.
You may be wondering why I'm not sharing the link. Well... that is because we are not quite open yet; and there is a reason for that. They want you to verify your identity, which is fair enough. I have no problem at all with that in principle. It's just the way they do it I have some issues with.
They said they needed a photo of my government-issued ID (which, for most people, is a passport or a driving licence, but I neither drive nor travel abroad, so I have a CitizenCard which functions just as well) plus a selfie. OK, I thought, that's easy. I already have a photo of my ID which I had to take for something else, and the selfie is no problem. I have a webcam. So I dug out the photo of the ID, grinned at the webcam, and got this:
For the curious, I really do look an awful lot like my late father. Anyway, so here was I with these two photos, but I couldn't see where to upload them. That was odd.
And then I realised. You can't upload them. What you're supposed to do is to let the website take photos on the spot using your webcam. Which would have been fine... if I could have got the webcam to talk to the site, which I could not for the life of me. I even went firkling around in the Firefox camera permissions settings to try to sort it out manually, but it wouldn't have it. (And, indeed, what are you supposed to do if you don't have a webcam at all? This laptop doesn't have one built in. I have a separate one which sits on top of the screen during the day, and, at night, rather typically of me, sits on top of a 1000 m spool of white sewing thread which lives on the desk behind the laptop.)
So I struggled for a little while, and then sent them a support request (with the photos attached). The next morning, I found I'd had a reply. They do, in fact, have somewhere you can upload identity photos; they just don't tell you about it until you're stuck. And so I had to go there and upload the photo of my ID (not the selfie, for some reason), even though I'd already sent them both the photos as attachments. Oh, well, OK - maybe they can't upload them themselves for some even more arcane reason? I don't know. But I am very keen to start selling my earrings online, so off I went to this upload page...
...where it informed me that the name on my ID had to match the name on my bank account.
Is this an American thing? That is, in the USA, does everything you have need to display your name in exactly the same form? Because the name on my ID is first name plus surname, while the name on my bank account is title plus initials plus surname. And that is really not uncommon in this country (in fact, I'd say it was more common than not).
Fortunately, they did allow you to leave a comment with your file upload, so I explained the situation, mentioned that it was normal for this kind of thing to be the case in the UK, and told them I had no wish to open a second bank account showing my name as it appears on my CitizenCard, because what is the point of having two bank accounts? So I'm very much hoping they'll go "oh, right, yes, this happens in the UK" and it'll all be fine. But American companies do tend to be pretty bad at comprehending the fact that things are done differently elsewhere. It's why they have a habit of asking you for a zip code.
Oh well. Watch this space. By this time on Friday I hope to be able to share with you an elegant and finely crafted link (to quote Kaja Foglio) by means of which you can go and ogle all my lovely earrings, including quite a few pairs you haven't seen yet. (After some consideration I shall be charging £23 a pair on Etsy, not £20, because I really daren't send them out without tracking; while I'm sure the vast majority of customers will be honest, there is always the odd one. It wouldn't matter so much if I could mass-produce these things, but that's very much not the case.)
And if you don't get that, then at the very least you'll get an anecdote!
