giftosphere.anoukhebert.com Blogging about my online business

Thanks to Marie-Julie, and to the comments from this blogger for making me discover the origin of the fork on this blog. The funny thing is that I had already been to this blog, but I didn’t remember until now.

On a more personal note…

I recently found old pictures of a child’s building blocks game I had bought approx. 7 years ago. I had taken the pictures because I couldn’t believe my own eyes…

My mother was a professional translator. She used to keep pictures and texts of extreme and funny translation errors for her own personal museum. Anyway, we were shopping one day, and we came upon this game that looked interesting for my boys.

It’s somewhat like “peanuts” that we put in with fragile objects into a shipping box, but it’s made of corn, and it sticks together when you put on a little water. It’s actually a great building game for children.

But the real fun started when we looked at the French side of the box. For those who don’t understand French, instead of writing “Hours of clean fun”, it actually says “Hours of fun spent cleaning”! Not only did they print a tag line that is the exact opposite of the original, but we should expect to spend hours of fun cleaning!

Duh!! Not exactly a winning sale’s argument with parents…

Anyway, we laughed ourselves to tears that afternoon. It was a memorable mother and daughter moment that I wanted to share with you

I hate to waste my time! What can I say, I’m a busy woman. And when I order something on the Internet, it’s because I don’t have the time (and patience) to go to the mall.

Last week, I ordered a new scale to weigh jewellery and other small items to sell on GiftOsphere.ca. In the shipping options, I could choose to have it shipped at the closest retailer’s location and pick it up for free, or have it shipped directly here for a certain fee. The closest retailers is actually at the local shopping center, so I could easily have decided to go and get it, but like I said, I’m busy and I have other things to do….

Unfortunately, the shipping service arrived when there was nobody in the office, so they left a message that I had to go and pick it up PERSONALLY at their warehouse in Boucherville – which is at the far end of a Montreal suburb, in an industrial park. Had I known in advance, I would have gone to the shopping center!

Talk about wasting time! This is EXACTLY why I chose Canada Posts as our primary shipping service for GiftOsphere.ca. Because whenever there is nobody to accept a delivery, the farthest place you have to go to get your package is at your local postal outlet.

This reminds me of a request I received a few months ago from a customer who had bought gifts for her grand-daughters living in another province. She was asking that we made sure to use Canada Posts (as mentioned on our website), because she didn’t want her daughter to have to go pick up the gifts on the other side of town if she wasn’t at home to receive them. I guess she was used to ordering online…

Every once in a while I receive a “suspicious” order.  I call it suspicious because there are some aspects of the order that look fishy… The first time it happened, I didn’t follow my instinct… but I should have. And I told myself it would not happen again.

When I tell people about that, they are always curious as to how I can tell which ones are fraudulent. Here is a fresh example, from last night. (You will understand that I blurred the more sensitive info, even if I doubt you could make anything out of it).

First clue: The buyer chooses a shipping service that almost costs more than the actual item he bought.

Second clue: the address is confusing. When you are “really” paying for something, you usually make sure you will receive it, right? In this case, Accra (Gh) is actually in Ghana, not Germany.

Another clue, which is of less import, but can add to the suspicion, the email address is at a public domain such as hotmail, gmail or yahoo, not at an identifiable location such as a workplace.

The first thing I do whenever this happens, is to check the invoice details on my online terminal, to check if the “invoice to” address is the same as the invoice shipping address of the credit card company. I also validate if CVV code is right (the 3 or 4 digits in the back of the credit card).

But first of all, here is an interesting thing: the buyer tried 3 different times before, without success, to make the purchase with different cards numbers.

In this case, no surprise: nothing corresponds.

Even though our bank systems are pretty secure, it is still note full proof. We can still get a credit card approval on stolen credit card numbers. The CVV validation is an additional security validation for online retailers, but it is not mandatory for the transaction to be approved by the issuing bank (but it is mandatory in my store!)

In Europe, they have a PIN number for their credit cards, and most retailers (online and offline) are equipped to process these. I wonder when our financial institutions will follow suit.

Last night, I met with other local online retailers from the Montreal area. This informal meeting was initiated by Cedric, from Terroirs Quebec, a website dedicated to slow food/local food producers. It really was nice to meet other independent online retailers, and share experiences on methods, workflows, recurring problems, and solutions. We realized that we are all more or less the same…

I also met with Valerie, from Clin d’Oeil Gourmet, and Nicolas, from Dites-Vert (Say-Green, not in English yet). These companies are somewhat competitors of mine, but it’s not as if the market was saturated yet… and besides, maybe we can help each other.

We left promising to meet again at least every trimester, and to invite any other independent online retailer that wishes to join us.

To be continued…