Personal Diary

I like my gadgets (as most people know) so recently ordered myself a new flash for my D-SLR, I say recently very loosely as I’m slightly annoyed!

I’ve been a customer of the company I ordered it from for several years, they’ve not always been the quickest to deliver (particularly with my EEE PC as I had one of the first into the country!), but generally I’ve been happy with them – so happy that I became an affiliate of theirs. Not so much to make some cash, but when I did refer people to a product they were selling I’d earn something from it – something I was happy to do…

Now I’m not so sure!

I ordered on: 28/04/2010 17:45 and immediately received my confirmation email:

“… expected to be delivered within 2-5 working days. Please note that in most cases, delivery is faster than stated as we want you to start enjoying your purchase as soon as possible.”

Great I thought, today is Wednesday, I could have it by Friday at their minimum, most likely Saturday though which would be really handy for the bank holiday weekend so I could play with it whilst we were visiting family, and as they say I’ll be able to enjoy my product as soon as possible!

Saturday arrived and there was still no sign of anything, so I logged into their website -

“Status: Processing”.

Processing? What’s that all about? You’ve had the order for at least two whole working days and nothing has happened with it!? We live in an “instant” world these days. Amazon are probably partly to blame they get things to you like lightning, heck I think they’d teleport them if they had the chance!

I thought I’d ring their customer services line and check on the status of the order, hmmm closed on weekends, and this is a bank holiday weekend! Right then that will be a job for Tuesday, but it will probably turn up on Tuesday and although I haven’t had it over the weekend at least it will be here for the wedding the following weekend!

I submitted an email support enquiry anyway, and was surprised to find them working on bank holiday Monday:

“I can confirm your order has been received and is progressing through our system as normal. The stock allocation process will begin shortly, if not already.”

I replied, telling them I really needed it for Friday – it was of the utmost importance.

Tuesday arrived and I got a response,

“There has been a slight delay with the order however all appears to be on track.

Under the present conditions, your order is expected to be dispatched within the next two days. A dispatch confirmation email will be forthcoming as well with the tracking information once the order has been shipped.”

Hmmm… I couldn’t really complain could I? Much as they say they’ll get it to you quicker than their quoted delivery time, Thursday would still put them inside their 2-5 working days (even excluding the bank holiday where they appeared to be working!).

Wednesday arrived, status? You guessed it “Processing”. I emailed and rang! They assured me they were looking at my order right now and it would either go out that day or the following,  Thursday… Hang on I’m supposed to have it by Thursday! At least if they dispatch it with Royal Mail it will be next day before 12 so I’ll have it Friday lunchtime – before I head off to this wedding mid-afternoon.

It’s now 12:00 Friday… I’m packing up the car, and I have a notice from their couriers… Not the couriers fault I know, but they’re coming from Gloucester…

“Your order is out for delivery today and is due to be delivered between 16:39-17:39.”

Argggh! That’s it then – it will be next week!

Like I say, maybe our expectations of mail order have been raised in recent years with companies raising the bar quite regularly.

I was listening to an interesting podcast this week on SmallBizPod, it was an interview with Brad Burton of 4 Networking – and he quite rightly says:

“People buy from people before they buy products or services.”

He’s right, maybe next time I’ll pay a little more for the product and order it from Amazon (or even, perish the thought… go somewhere to buy it in person!), as I know what kind of service I’ll get from them! Maybe I just expect too much!

I was “slightly annoyed” when I started this rant, I’ve got to the end of it and realised exactly how annoyed I am!!! Hmmm I think I ought to chill out a little before getting the car!

Sorry, I simply couldn’t resist the title having watched this epic video on YouTube today!

The author of this video clearly thinks that traceroute tells you how many people are looking at a site! Worryingly this continues to the point where he tells you that less than twenty people are currently viewing google.com (if that’s the case they’ve seriously lost some popularity!!).

The funniest part is that he does all this with so much authority.

For those that don’t know (and that’s fine so long as you’re not broadcasting the fact by pretending you do know, and being wrong), tracert (or traceroute) is used to determine all the IP addresses you pass through on your way to a server, usually there are a few “hops” within your own ISP, followed by some across the internet and then a few in the server’s datacenter, before hitting the server itself.

We use traceroute to check that packets of data are getting through to a particular server and if any of those packets are taking considerably longer than others, essentially it’s a diagnostic tool – NOT a way to view the amount of people logging on to Google!

I don’t like the stuff – I make no secret about that… OK I do – but only for photo’s, everything else about it I thoroughly dislike!

We’ve had almost a week of it now and I have some observations…

1. This country will never, ever, be prepared for this. Even people from countries that are used to digging their cars out of four feet of snow say it’s difficult in this country because we are just SO unprepared.
2. By law in many countries you have to clear your path and pavement in front of your home and business, doing this would reduce the risk of people slipping on pavements (they don’t grit them, so if you’ve driven to work on wonderfully gritted roads you fall over getting out of your car!).
3. Weathermen either don’t know how to react when reporting a high of –1, so they either act sarcastic or smug! Neither are appropriate – where’s that “Barbecue Summer” you promised?
4. Stockpiling helps nobody (except yourselves!) and if it thaws you’ll go out again and it will all go out of date – what a waste of money!
5. Britain does still have a sense of community and combined whinging seems to get neighbours talking!

Rant over – I’ll leave you with a photo of an igloo I found on my way home the other morning…

It usually is!

As usual, I’m always on the look out for a bit of a business opportunity and when one appears I give it serious thought, so last week when I spotted a website for sale for £995 I asked for further details.

The website in question was an information site in many ways, with Google Adsense Ads, Amazon links and Clickbank links… Sounds just the sort of thing I’m interested in and when I found out it had been making close to £2000 in the last six Months that really grabbed my interest!

I’m the sort of person that likes to mitigate as much risk as possible, and having just read Theo Paphitis biography this week I was determined to make sure this was the right deal for me! A few questions later and the seller had produced me a nice little spreadsheet that suggested he had only ever spent £200 on advertising… £2000 in six months, I’m very interested – so I asked him for some proof of those numbers.

At this time the price dropped to £695, great! I enquired about escrow and asked for the proofs I required… The seller agreed to escrow payments and provided me with a Word document of his bank statement – how very trusting.

I went a little further and did some research on the domain name, it appeared to only have been registered a month ago! The explanation for this was that he had just renewed it… I hate to say it but owning a hosting company the alarm bells started to ring!

I’ve asked for screenshots of Google/Amazon or access to the account (I’d accept doing it over VNC or Netmeeting) it’s not forthcoming, I’ve gone back to the bank statement this morning and noticed it includes very few other transactions than the one I’m interested in (does this guy spend no money?). The seller can’t produce statistics on visitors for me…

It’s a shame as I was genuinely interested, and would have been interested if it was making a lot less too…
(Oh and it’s £500 now!)

I realise it’s been quiet here again for some time (at least on the writing front)– I’ve not had much to write about…. I’ve been super busy getting myself all sorted out!

The hosting business is about to become a limited company, I’ve gone part time at work, I’ve demolished my Mum’s garden and somewhere in the midst of that I’ve found time to book a holiday!

I’ve got a busy couple of weeks until we’re away so don’t expect too much (see what I’m doing, apologising before I don’t post!) until my accounts are out of the way – I’m automating lots more this year to try to stay on top of them (he says very hopefully!).

The automation has taught me a lot though – I maybe ought to look for other people that need their Quickbooks life simplifying!

On that note – I have a list as long as your arm to start and I want to settle down with a beer this evening – so I shall catch up with you all soon…

This is rather an unusual post for me, normally I don’t tend to blog about this sort of stuff (generally because it goes swimmingly!).

photo credit: Andres Rueda

As many of you know I run my own company and we’re in the proceeds of moving everything over to a limited company (for a variety of reasons but it’s just started to get a bit bigger than we expected!). This is great news and means we’re doing really well however I’ve hit a pretty major stumbling block today.

We’re in recession (or just coming out of it, depending on who you believe!), but it’s note really affected my business. If anything it’s been quite good for business, which is something we should all be pleased by.

In the process of the business moving to a limited company we’ve had to re-apply for pretty much everything (as a limited company is a legal entity in it’s own right) but my big stumbling block today has been WorldPay (the payment processor).

WorldPay

We’ve been with WorldPay for about 5-6 years, the rates aren’t that great (in fact we get a better rate through PayPal!) but we’ve been loathed to change since they’ve been very reliable during that time.

I completely understood when they said they needed me to re-apply for an account in the limited company name and promptly filled out all the details for them whilst being assured that my new account would function in the same way as the old one.

They’ve asked for far more financial details than they did when I applied all those years ago (and the numbers I’m giving them are considerably higher). Yet in their wisdom today they’ve come to this decision:

As you may already be aware where goods and/or services are paid for by credit/debit card, the card processing company becomes jointly liable with the merchant under the card scheme rules (VISA, MasterCard, etc.) for the provision of those goods and services.

During our assessment we look at many factors including the age of your business, its net worth and the goods/services you are intending to sell online in relation to the perceived risk of chargebacks*. It is designed to help us understand and determine the potential exposure for which we may be jointly liable.

On this occasion in order to proceed with your application we have found that we will need to apply a reserve to your account. The reserve level will initially be set to £2500 and represents additional security that may be required to cover our potential exposure.

Once you begin to trade, the reserve amount will be accrued from funds due to you and then, providing the reserve level has been met, we will transfer the remaining funds to your bank account in accordance with our standard terms.

£2500? What’s that all about (believe me I have asked and am awaiting a decent response), I put more business through PayPal than I do through WorldPay meaning that this is likely to take several months to accrue – during this time they won’t pay me a penny!!! This is ridiculous, and then on top of that I’ll need to pay transaction charges on each transaction (so it will take longer to hit the £2500!). That’s £2500 I could be investing back into the company… No company in their right mind can justify that surely?

Needless to say I’m looking elsewhere whilst they await my response!

The Economy

What’s all this got to do with the economy? Well I read an article this morning about starting up business on the back of a recession and will try to get around to listening to the show on listen again this week and one fact stuck with me all day….

We’re losing 120 small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) every day, but for each one of those around 11 are starting up. That’s approaching half a million new SMEs in 2009.

I’m not surprised businesses are going under when payment processing companies are doing the above. I also have a concern about how the new ones will survive when companies like WorldPay ask for this in their starting up costs!

I’m an A to B kind of guy, who might enjoy the scenery on the way – but I am not, I repeat NOT a dawdler! Not in towns anyway, walking in the countryside is a different game of course…

photo credit: Caveman 92223

My problem is this, if I’m on a pavement I expect to be able to get to where I need to – that’s what pavements are designed for isn’t it?

I get tired of people wandering and dawdling in front of me, and bumping into me from the wrong direction (clearly it’s wrong as it’s not the direction I’m walking in!!!). This was proved more than ever several weeks ago when I attended a fund-raising event my sister was taking part in, thousands of people dawdling or walking in the wrong direction!!

My Proposal is simple, we create a set of rules for pavements!

I’m not proposing that if you want to walk in one direction you can only walk on one side of the street, but it’s not far off that idea, and obviously if an accident were to happen with the below that could be a contingency!

It’s simple:

We paint a line down the middle of pavements everywhere (see there’s jobs there for someone!), OK not everywhere – just busy pavements (a system of A-pavements and B-pavements is now forming in my mind!). If you want to dawdle with your ice-cream or bag of chips you dawdle close to the shop windows where you can gaze into the shops. If you want to move quickly you move closer to the line down the middle.

The same principle applies on the other side of the line except that dawdlers are actually closer to the line so they can still see in the shop windows. I know what you’re saying – what if they want to see closer? That’s easy – they should move past the window of interest, indicate appropriately (hand in the air or something) and cross the lane of A-B walkers in their fast lane to join the dawdlers on the other side – passing the shop again or even stopping to enter the shop.

photo credit: Toni_V

Rant over – Thoughts?