Dyed in Vermont Tie-Dyes

I'm trying a new  formate for the store.

I started out with selected patterns available in all sizes of T-shirts.

But then 5 years ago I realized that I had a huge amount of stock that was not up for sale.  There were boxes of clothing--seconds, patterns I wasn't offering, experiments, and many odd garments I'd bought as samples.

After Christmas that year I started photographing a bunch of that stock, and came up with the idea of the Tie-Dye Bazaar for selling indivdual items.  This worked out pretty well.  Many customers really liked being able to see a photo of the actual piece they were buying, and I started getting sales.

But right form the first there was a problem with having 2 parts in the store.  It was confusing and customers seemed to get stuck in one part of the store or the other.  I put cross links at the top of every page, but that only helped a little.

I even discontinued the Bazaar for a few months, but then I hit on the idea of having  a side bar with links to the different parts of the store hoping this would clear things up.  The side bar helped, but it was still confusing with 5 different sections in the store.  Sometimes the same product was being sold in two different places on the site in different formats.

Meanwhile I had really honed my system for photographing and cataloging individual items for the Bazaar.  First I photograph each item. Then each image is  straitened, croped, color corrected, and saved in 2 sizes.

I catalog the information for each item in a spread sheet, and the actual item is stacked in numerical order in a plastic container.  Information from the spread sheet is then combined with the image in a HTML file that can be read by a browser.This is complicated, but I have automated many of the steps.

Then we get to 2008, and I'm planning to move.  I realized that I can put all the Bazaar items up for sale as soon as I can move the containers into a house and get an internet connection. Ah Ha, I started moving some inventory to the Bazaar by grouping similar shirts of the same size together under one photograph.

Then, just days ago, I decided that I want to move all my inventory into the Bazaar so that it is all available for sale, folded in containers, ready to go!  I'm currently about half way through, and have decided to put the move off until November 8th, so that I can be pretty much ready for Christmas sales when I arrive.

I am a Victim of Fraud

Yes, I got scammed for about $2,500, but that is just the beginning of what it cost me.I’ve lost time just as I’m getting to ready to move, and gained a lot of stress and worry.  I’ve been researching credit card fraud, and found out quite a lot after the fact, and I’ve been looking at attitudes I had that made me easy pickin’s.

 

It’s kind of a dirty little secret of the credit card companies that when fraud takes place it is the Merchant who pays.  They make big deal of it that buyers don’t have to pay for fraudulent charges on their credit cards, but they don’t tell you that they will immediately take it out of the merchant’s bank account which may overdraw her account--with no notification—it’s called a Charge-Back.

You have some resources if this happens in the United States, but if it is a foreign country there is little chance of getting the money back.  I shipped these to Rabat Morocco, which was a mistake in itself.  I am no longer going to ship to any third world countries, and I’ll be more careful with all foreign orders.

 

Last Friday the credit card processing company took $2700 from my bank account and when I called they told me that $2000 was deducted as a reserve against future charge backs.  After I had gone through my usual denial, anger, exhaustion, acceptance cycle, I thought that maybe I was at the bottom.  They would take the charge backs out of the $2000 and give me the left over after a few months, right?  No, not right, it was their point of view that they didn’t know what might come in as disputed charges so any new charges would also come out of my account, and they would hold the $2000 as a reserve.

 

I also lost my Merchant Account which means that I can no longer process credit cards directly, and my customers will have to use PayPal or send checks through the mail which will lose some sales, take longer, and be more complicated.  Fortunately I have wonderfull customers who love my work and really want me to stay in business.

 

At first I felt some shame about it, and tormented myself with questions like “How stupid could I be?”, and “What was I thinking?”  But then I realized many people are taken in by fraud every day, and shame keeps them from talking about it which only helps the perpetrators.  So I decided I’d write about it, and maybe help someone else not go through this.

 

I’ve noticed an almost subconscious attitudes I had that made this possible.  First I’d never had a Charge-Back, and felt reassured that the credit card had gone through and been accepted. Subconsciously I thought that if the charge went through the card must be OK.  Now I know that they can yank that money right back out of your account.  I also didn’t realize that it could take 2-3 months before the first Charge-Back, giving me plenty of time to screw up in, or I should say, plenty of time to be defrauded in.

 

How it works.

 

The person who did this was very clever.  First I got an order that was legitimate.  About a month later I got another small order, but with Fed Ex Priority shipping of about $150.  I emailed him that I could ship it much more cheaply with US Post Office.  He wrote back that he doesn’t understand English very well and just wanted to go on holiday with his friends leading me to believe that he was just a rich kid.

 

A week or two later I got an order from another person in Rabat.  My business often grows in clusters.  I send a shirt to someone along with a thank you letter and a packet of business cards.  Their friends like the tie-dyes, and orders, and so on  The last order had seemed to go through alright so I sent it to him.  This kept growing with more people and repeat orders.  For a few orders I included notes about cheaper shipping, but got no response.

 

I had to start using Fed Ex online shipping, and ordered a supply of their free Fed Ex boxes to keep up. I thought I had a nice little cluster of customers until the first two Charge-Backs came in the mail and said,

 

“YOUR ACCOUNT HAS ALREADY BEEN DEBITED.”

 

I had thought that what he got out of it was the tie-dye shirts which he probably sold, and that he had put the sale on someone else’s credit card that he had stolen until just last night when I was researching to write this post.

 

He (they) is also the person contesting the charge on “his” account and that the charge backs go to him as well, and that was a kick in the butt. He is getting paid back for that expensive FedEx Shipping that I paid for.

 

My only recourse would be to file a fraud charge with my local police.  I’m considering it, but it seems to me that this guy probably moves around, and there is little chance of it having a real affect in Morocco.

 

I’m also working an insane amount of time just trying to actually make this move to Tennessee.  I am getting ready to have a sale starting this evening or tomorrow morning to make up for some of that money so we can move, and if I have to I will have another sale next weekend.