Ch- Ch- Ch- Changes

If you’ve purchased a class or pattern from me via my website over the past few days, you may have noticed some changes to the way it looks.  I made a change to the service I’m using for my web sales, and I want you to know it was done with a good deal of thought. 

Like any small business owner, I have to make a lot of decisions about what services will help me best do what I do; There’s often a balancing act going on between the services that make things easier (or even possible), and how much they cost.

Someone asked me recently what’s the best way to buy from a designer — Ravelry vs. their own website vs. other options — and the real response is, that may be different for every designer. Every sales channel takes a cut that can vary depending on your volume and plan you have in place with them; Paypal or whichever payment system you use also takes a cut. Unless you’re handing your cash directly to the designer, they’re paying percentages here and there that may add up to ten percent of the sale — and I’m not talking about the sales tax. This is the case with any online business; we all have to deal with it, and for the most part, I’m grateful that various options exist to allow me to sell online. It’s appropriate that I have to pay for those services. But I do sometimes wish they took a little less.

My initial sales site was set up through Payhip, which is a really good option if you’re selling virtual products like I do. In fact, all of my products — both the patterns and the classes — are virtual products, from the perspective of how the sales work. But Payhip takes a comparatively high percentage on the sale. About six months ago I switched to a different, quite well-known service that takes less of a cut from each sale. There was a learning curve, to be sure, but the new service offered a few options that Payhip didn’t have at the time, including the ability to easily embed my products directly onto my website.

I liked the way that looked, and the way it allowed my customers to make purchases without ever having to leave my website. 

But as I used it I discovered some downsides over time. It was very tricky for me to track the sales of specific classes. (If you’ve taken a virtual class from me through my own website, you’ll know that I reach out to everyone via email shortly before class to make sure you’ve got the Zoom link; pulling up the email of everyone who registered for a particular class was a lot more difficult on the new system.) 

But the more concerning thing was that some of you reached out to let me know that you weren’t able to find the downloads of your patterns or class instructions. It was very occasional, just a few times… and I’m really glad that those who had problems reached out to let me know about it. A system has to be able to functionally serve its intended purpose, and this one was not — at least not all the time and not for everyone. 

So I decided to bite the bullet and switch everything back to Payhip. That’s where my shop is now, and hopefully for quite a long time to come. It’s not quite as perfectly integrated with my website, in the sense that it’s visually different from the rest of my website, but it’s secure, and works really, really well. The folks at Payhip are adding more functionality all the time, so it may someday look like a seamless part of deviousknitter.com. But in the meantime, the important thing is that it’s dependable, and you’ll get the classes and patterns you paid for without any issues.

And that dependability for my customers is something that, it turns out, was worth paying a bit more for.

I hope you’ll have a seamless experience the next time you buy a class or pattern from me. And please, if you don’t…reach out and let me know.