This one is not going to be upbeat. Not even a little bit. I’m feeling beat up, tired and ready to throw in the towel. Spring is in the air. It’s a beautiful April day with a high of 80º, but as the old song says “I wish it would rain.”
It’s an accumulation of several years of nothing seeming to go right. The business is floundering. I’ve spent thousands trying to put it back on track. After over a year, we finally completed the migration to BigCommerce last Wednesday. That was promptly followed by two days with no orders at all due to some errors in setting up and testing the payment methods. Then, once we got that fixed, the orders started trickling in. But, instead of seeing an increase over Yahoo, we are barely getting any orders at all.
Two days ago I called my marketing company to ask them to help me figure out why Google shopping was rejecting about 10% of my product feed. Of 200 products, only 180 were being accepted. They got back to me and told me “BTW, Google has rejected 100% of the feed, not 80%.” They told me what I needed to do to fix it, but that was two days ago and no word on whether Google has deemed to put my products back on-line.
Yesterday, I awoke to find out we could not process PayPal orders. Long story short, PayPal, in the middle of the night, sent an email telling me that one of the over 200 products I sell has been deemed in violation of their acceptable use policy. This is a product that is commonly sold in stores around the world (literally). It’s for sale on line at Walmart, Amazon and everywhere else. They refuse to tell me why they chose this product or why, after over two years of selling it, it is suddenly dangerous. They say the “limitation” of my account is permanent and I cannot appeal. And, by “limitation” they mean I cannot take payments or remove money from the account. In 180 days (or less) they say they will give me my money.
I believe in pre-birth planning. So, I’m sitting here thinking “What the hell were you thinking?” I don’t know, but I hope I planned a break in here coming up real soon.
