Nightmare on eBay...

Well, I had an experience on eBay, this morning, which can only be described as Kafkaesque.  I had to cancel a sale because global shipping rejected my customer’s address.  Fine, I thought.  When I tried to proceed, eBay gave me a message that I needed to cancel from the French site, since that is where the transaction originated.  So, I went there and dang!  It’s all in French!  I can’t read French!  Oh, it gets better.  I called eBay in the US and spoke to the nicest lady (with a foreign accent) and she told me I had to go to the German site.  I protested and said I was pretty sure I was supposed to go to the French site.  She insisted we visit the German site (ebay.de) together.  And so we did.  I logged in (either my computer or their site was really S L O W) and finally navigated to mein eBay.  Then, all of a sudden, the nice lady told me she was wrong – and we were supposed to be on the French site, after all.  So to ebay.fr and mon eBay we went. She instructed me to choose the first option for cancelling a sale which was non-payment by the customer.  That was not the reason for the cancellation, I said.  My customer made several attempts to pay, but global shipping insisted that she didn’t have a physical address.  My customer does, indeed, have a physical address.  She’s had many transactions and has 100% positive feedback (but I digress).  I said we needed to choose an option that didn’t make my customer look bad.  The nice lady with the foreign accent (who spoke neither German nor French) and I mutually agreed to use the second to last option to cancel.  That, at least, had the word internationale in it, so we guessed (and we were just guessing at this point) it might be closer to the truth of what happened.  Anyway, my sale was cancelled, finally, but the whole ordeal was like a nightmare!  To her credit, the eBay customer service rep (the nice lady) was a sweetheart and very patient.  And we did actually do a lot of giggling!  She was using foreign language dictionaries to translate words.  But I wonder why eBay doesn’t have instant translation between the sites…  That would have saved a lot of time and trouble, today.

Recent Etsy Sales

I sold four Santa dolls from my Etsy store the other day (YAY!).  It really took me by surprise as it has been so quiet in my little shoppe.  Fortunately, I had lots of packing material on hand.  I save and recycle the bubble wrap that protects my Life’s Abundance cat food shipment every month.

TAST 2014: Lock Stitch Variations

Two rows of single lock stitches are laced for the first sample, followed by a row of double lock stitches and a row of beaded double lock stitches.