Archive for November, 2008
Sometimes shipping early just isn’t enough
The oddest shipping experience I had involved a Daffy Duck tie a lady named Julia bought for her brother’s birthday.
As usual I packed it carefully in a box and printed up an official USPS label with the package id, upc code, etc.. The postman picked it up, and it was on it’s way from San Diego to Carmel California. It’s a 450 mile trip, within the same state. I sent the tracking number to Julia and fully expected to hear in a couple of days that the tie had arrived as expected. Guess again.
A week later I get an email from Julia. The tie has not arrived. I double checked the tracking, and there it was, sitting in Missouri! Now it’s been a long time since I sat in a geography class, but I had a hard time understanding that one…San Diego California to Carmel California, via Missouri.
Hmmmm.
I usually only have one of the items I sell. I specialize in collectibles, hard to find items and replacement china. It’s not as if I could say, oh, here, let me send you another one.
Fortunately Julia was very nice about the whole thing. We had several emails go back and forth and even chatted about our long ago days in Girl Scouts – that must have come up because it was the cookie time of year. I volunteer every year as the Service Unit coordinator and undoubtedly had cookies on the brain.
After a bit of prodding the package did finally get loose from Missouri and began to wend it’s way across the country. It arrived, safely, on March 9, a full 4 weeks after it had been mailed.
Julia’s brother loved his gift. She said “He’ll wear it while delivering his Powerpoint presentations. He says he’s deth-pic-able.”
If we had not been able to pry the package loose from that black hole in Missouri I would have of course refunded Julia every cent, but that would have been so unfortunate. Where else could she have found a tie like that that was no longer available in any store?
We do our best at A Night Owl’s Treasures to make sure your packages arrive safely and in a timely manner. We go through an astonishing amount of boxes, bubble wrap and packing peanuts. When you sell items that are no longer available in any store, anywhere, you have to be so careful when you pack and ship, because those items cannot be replaced. Professional packaging and labeling will get your items to you safely, and we sincerely hope, quickly
Finding Everything but the Ordinary
Where are you doing your online shopping? For many people one of the places they automatically go to is eBay. If you haven’t’ been there for a while you are going to notice something fairly quickly, eBay is not what it used to be.
Many buyers this year are finding that much of the old quirkiness and unique finds are missing. What happened? eBay has new management and they believe what people want is brand new, out of the box, thousands of the same item available buying experience. The problem is that in my experience people were shopping there for the unique and hard to find, not just the same old stuff you can pick up at any mall.
But why is that unique stuff hard to find on eBay these days? The smaller sellers like us have been priced out of the venue – the fees were just getting too high and we got tired of raising our prices to cover more and more fees.
Most of the sellers who left eBay are still selling, they are just scattered at several dozen other sites. I think I just heard some moans there…who wants to shop at dozens of sites to find one unique thing. Not me, that’s for sure! There is still an easy way to find your unique items, Google Product Search (also known as Google Shopping) http://www.google.com/products or Google Base http://www.google.com/base. Never heard of them? They are the greatest. They enable you to search all the best of the online stores. Stores submit information on their products to Google, often on a daily basis, so you can search thousands of stores at once. These searches will not pick up the inventory from all stores, because each store is responsible for giving Google their product information. If the store doesn’t submit a feed, they are not included. What is amazing is Google doesn’t even charge a fee for this service, to either the buyer or seller, which is perfect for smaller retailers like us.
Product Search is pretty straightforward, type in your search terms, and you get pages of what you want. Base is a little more sophisticated. There are dropdown boxes so you can narrow your search. They are both very useful.
What if you just want to browse, and don’t have a particular item in mind? We have our extensive inventory 
at a very nice new site, http://www.bonanzle.com. There are over 2000 other sellers of the unique that have opened up shop on the site, with more every day. The site is growing at the rate of over 1000 new users (buyer and new sellers) and 30,000 new items a week. Bonanzle’s motto is “Find Everything but the Ordinary”. You won’t find the Virgin Mary’s image burned into a piece of toast there, but there are plenty of other fun things to keep you happily browsing for a while.
Our booth is at http://www.bonanzle.com/booths/ANightOwl
Avoid the Holiday Lines!
The holiday season is upon us. For those of you with friends and family scattered around the country and world, that can only mean one thing, shipping.
Every year around this time shipping times slow from the sheer volume of packages. It used to be if you were just a little late you could bump up to the speedier service with not too much financial pain. Things are changing in shipping. Fuel costs are up, and shipping costs go up right along with them. UPS, USPS and FedEx are all going to raise rates again in early 2009. DHL is not going to ship within the United States anymore (they will continue to ship from the US to international addresses) so if you had used them for domestic shipping you are going to have to find another service.
What does this mean to you? It means you should plan ahead. The shipping companies are 
always trying to drill this into us, ship early, ship early, but based on the lines at post office year after year many are not heeding this advice.
There are a few things you can do to avoid this last minute hassle. After all, who wants to stand in line at the post office when you have cookie to bake, Christmas trees to trim, parties to go to, and children home on winter break?
Did you know that you can have either your postman or UPS come to your house to pick up your package? Its easy! If you have the packing supplies and an accurate scale you can go to http://www.ups.com or http://www.usps.com and schedule a pickup online. UPS charges a small fee, USPS offers the service for free if you are sending at least one Priority or Express package.
Another option is to send gift cards instead of gifts, be really careful about that this year though, as the economy tightens more brick and mortar stores will be closing up shop in the coming months. The first thing they do is stop accepting gift cards.
I have an even better idea – the most convenient method of all – shop online and have the store ship directly to the recipient. Many online stores offer gift wrapping services for a small fee. Small retailers like myself will wrap the items in pretty tissue paper and ribbon if we know it is a gift going direct, at no extra cost, and can pretty it up even more for a small fee. In the sometimes impersonal world of internet buying I know how important it can be to our customers that we give that little bit of extra customer service.
This winter everyone wants to save time, money and gas – buying your gifts online and having them shipped direct is the way to go!
Howdy Night Owls!
Welcome to A Night Owl’s Treasures Inc. 
Our new website is in the very first stages of construction, we are happy your are here and we certainly have plans to bring you back soon to see all of the treasures we have assembled.
For now, please check out our A Night Owl booth on http://bonanzle.com!
Featured Bonanzle Category of the Week – Bears!
Inventory for A Night Owl’s Treasures in category “Dolls & Bears”: RSS feed for ANightOwl’s items
 | Price: $11.99 Category: Bears Russ Shining Stars Honey Bear Plush Toy Name a Star Brown This cute 10.5 inch tall Honey Brown Bear is ever so soft and cuddly, but it is not just any stuffed animal. It is a Russ Shining Star. Shining Star Friends are plush animals created usi… |
 | Price: $11.99 Category: Bears Russ Shining Stars Brown Bear Plush Toy Name a Star Teddy This cute 10.5 inch tall Brown Bear is ever so soft and cuddly, but it is not just any stuffed animal. It is a Russ Shining Star. Shining Star Friends are plush animals created using the… |
 | Price: $12.99 Category: Bears The Wanda Witchy Boo bear is 9.5 inches tall and is brown with an orange which hat and a little sign around her neck that says I’ll be Witcha Wanda comes with an official Boyds stand in a dark mauve. Perfect for Halloween or wicca collections. Thi… |
 | Price: $22.99 Category: Bears The Sterling bear is 15.5 inches tall and is extremely soft dark brown fine plush and suede paw pads. This Boyds Bear is from the Head Bean Collection. He has a medallion around his neck which says 25th anniversary. From a collector of Boyd�s Be… |
 | Price: $15.99 Category: Bears The Smith Witter Jr 2004 Anniversary bear is 10 inches tall and is light brown with a tweedy ribbon. This Boyds Bear is from the Head Bean Collection. From a collector of Boyds Bears. Only displayed, never played with. Clean. Still has tag attach… |
 | Price: $5.99 Category: Bears The Lil Spout bear is 5.5 inches tall and is light brown with an orange ribbon. This Boyds Bear is from the Head Bean Collection. From a collector of Boyd’s Bears. Only displayed, never played with. Clean. Still has tag attached. … |
 | Price: $9.99 Category: Bears The Lil Bubba bear is 9 inches tall and is brown with a dark blue ribbon. This Boyds Bear is from the Head Bean Collection. From a collector of Boyd�s Bears. Only displayed, never played with. Clean. Still has tag attached. … |
 | Price: $11.99 Category: Bears The Heartley bear is 8 inches tall and is a very soft light brown plush with a red ribbon around his neck. This Boyds Bear is from the Head Bean Collection. From a collector of Boyds Bears. Only displayed, never played with. Clean. Still has tag … |
 | Price: $13.49 Category: Bears The Grover Q Beanster bear is 10.5 inches tall and is light brown with a dark blue ribbon around his neck. This Boyds Bear is from the Head Bean Collection. From a collector of Boyds Bears. Only displayed, never played with. Clean. Still has tag a… |
