Day seven sales wise was much better than I expected it to be. The day was brutally hot and even though I am only writing this blog entry about 48 hours later, the day itself is just a blur. In the morning I came in, got the tent ready and spent some quality hours catching up on my reading. I get many magazines and I wait till this show and bring them in, reading what I find interesting, ripping out pages of stuff that I should look into deeper, and just skimming the rest. I get through about 5 a day this way, totally emptying my magazine basket next to my chair in the living room. Then they just all pile up and I wait until Chriskindlmarkt to do it all again.
The evening was fun because I had team KB there (K and her beau K), so the conversation was excellent, it was fun to work, and they both work so hard I just sort of get to relax, at least until I need to run a credit card. I think that is why my total sales for the day was sort of surprising, because I didn’t really have a hand in many of the sales so my internal calculator was off.
I did have my first credit card of the season be declined and it was one of those sales that your gut instinct thinks may not be the best decision. But the sale was small and I’ll try it again one more time before calling the customer to try and arrange alternate payment. It is tempting to just let it go because the work to get the money is probably not worth the amount of the sale, but it is the principle behind it so I’ll give it a go and see what I get.
Rejected cards are always depressing and I always rethink my processing. See I use an old fashioned knuckle buster manual imprinter to take a card imprint and to get a signature, plus phone and zip. Then when I get home I manually enter this into a terminal to get the charge to go through. I always take the chance of letting product leave the booth that isn’t really paid for yet. But I have so few cards get declined, and typically for such low dollar amounts, I can’t see to pay for the units where I can swipe it at the show and use WiFi or some other technology to send it in immediately. I mean, even if I never get this sale back, the loss is much, much less that I would pay for a spiffy terminal and the service associated with it. So I keep on going on and dealing with these small annoyances of being a small business owner trying to get by on the least amount of overhead possible.
Well, that’s it for the day, hot, hot, hot with lukewarm sales.
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