I forgot to write yesterday. Or rather, I didn’t prioritize, and journalling fell into place.
I shipped 3 packages this morning.
I looked up a customer service fundamentals video. It was boiled down into three topics.
- Know what you’re doing
- Be efficient
- Be nice to me
Yesterday I had a conversation with a customer that I think I might have handled poorly. I noticed a tendency in my communication with other people where I habitually try to, “one up” the other person.
My customer was saying that their collection binder was almost full, and I said, “haha I know the feeling 😆. I have four binders and I’m low on space.”
It’s not mean, but why did I feel the need to one up them? I don’t even have one binder that is full. Most of them are empty.
I think I might have drove a wedge between that customer and I. I know that customer gets paid at 2AM on Friday and they didn’t buy anything from me. think my ego might have lost me a sale.
No, no. That customer told me that they had something else to buy this week that I didn’t have. They wanted me to remind them next week to make a purchase from me.
I’m watching another customer service video.
S.E.C.
- Smile
- Eye contact
- Comment
Another thing I learned from this vid is that followups are important. So I think that part of my sbtp-loyalty project could be to solicit followups. Maybe a points reward would be a good reward for an honest review.
“Drip campaign” is another thing. An offer of something valuable or of interest.
The 3 things customers want…
- be heard
- be understood
- be cared for
I took the mail out and I went for a walk.
Now I’m going back and forth on Discord with my favorite customer. They want to know about 5-toubun no Hanayome P-Memories cards. I don’t have any cards from that set, unfortunately.
I have a package at Buyee that’s ready to be shipped out. I paid $15 for protective packaging so I’m going to send it via ship which will take around 2 months for delivery.
I had the idea to hurry up and pay to get it shipped, because it’s going to take me 2 months to receive the product.
As I showered I remembered that I need to act on logic, not emotion. My calendar says that Wednesday July 1 is the day to get a shipment coming. Is today Wednesday July 1? No, it is not.
Therefore, I am going to wait. I am going to spend my money on something that is more pressing– a subscription to 3D sellers.
3D sellers will give me some tools that I really want. Inventory import/export, artificial scarcity which lets me maintain a separate eBay inventory and warehouse inventory.
They also have a feature which will de-list items that are older than 30 days. eBay used to do that by default, but they changed it to Good-till-cancelled (GTC) in order to increase their profits on eBay insertion fees.
With 3D Sellers platform, I’d be able to cycle out under performing products without going over my item limit.
It fucking sucks that eBay has insertion fees… But that’s the way things are!
I just have to remind me that I’m getting the lifestyle I want, and eBay is enabling me to have that lifestyle.
In the future, eBay will be dethroned. eBay will be forced to adapt to survive. Whether that’s reducing fees or incentivizing sellers some other way, it’s going to change eventually. There could be some sparkly new selling platform which is orders of magnitude better for sellers…
eBay will have their last day as a company, just like I will have my last day as a person.
That’s how life works!
So anyway, I’m trying to focus my attention and my measure of success to my lifestyle, not my finances.
Finances still matter, because they play a role in the type of lifestyle I live. But they don’t matter to the point where I’m going to get myself down because I lose some money or whatever.
My happiness is important to my measure of success. I’m pretty damn happy right now!
I am grateful for my customers, the eBay platform, my coding habits, etc.
I’m really grateful that I went to bed last night at about 8:30PM! I felt amazing after waking up this morning! I haven’t felt that in what feels like months!
I’m grateful that I’m listening to my body, and discovering new things about myself. For example, last night at about 8:30 I felt something that I don’t have a name for. I felt like I needed to get off the computer and go outside.
I looked at the clock and remembered that earlier in the day I had set an intention to go to sleep at around 8:30PM. Instead of going outside and riding my bike, I instead went straight to bed.
This morning I woke up an hour before my alarm went off. I felt refreshed, and I felt rested.
RESTED!
I am so grateful for the feeling of rested. Incredibly grateful. I’ve felt so sleepy and worn down for weeks. I thought there was something wrong with me, like I was dying from some unseen disease.
Now I think I was just exhausted, and I have been getting less sleep that my body needs on a regular basis.
I’m having seconds thoughts about the 60 day shipment thing. I don’t have any shipments on their way right now. That 60 day timer is not ticking!
The ideal thing that I’m thinking of is having multiple incoming shipments, each spread 2 weeks apart.
You know what? I think my calendar date still stands. The thing is that my inventory is going to completely change next week, because of eBay pulling their 50,000 free insertions promotion on the last day of June.
What I’m going to be doing is I’m going to combine several eBay listings into one new listing. I’m going to be selling card lots instead of card singles.
I’m going to be using green-seller to help me with this. I already have code which combines several images into a mosaic, as demonstrated by the following example.
I’m going to use this code in conjunction with code I’m writing this week which downloads the first image in an eBay listing.
I’ll feed green-seller a list of eBay item URLs, then it’ll spit out an image like the above example which combines the images from all those eBay items. All that’s left is to add an attractive text title and description, and I have a combined listing ready for buyers to snatch up!
I just have to make enough combinations to bring my total active listing count down to around 1000, and I’ll be good for July.
I just got a spam message on Discord. I figure they got my user info from the Prediction market Discord server. I haven’t read jack shit on that server so I’m just leaving it.
I first wanted to get that user banned, but they aren’t listed as being a member on the server so there’s really nothing that can be done there. Apparently there are other people complaining about that spammer on the same #feedback channel that I posted in.
The user got banned before, but now they’re acting from a different account.
Whatevs. I blocked them. To pursue this any further is not worth my time.
In the future, I now know that there is a way to report issues of trust & safety to Discord. So now I know what to do if such a thing occurs in the future!
Ok then. What next? Time for a 5 minute break, after which I’m probably going to jump into green-seller code. Only 4 days till July! I gotta downsize my listings ASAP!
Made some really good progress on code. Jest has this really nice output format when using the --verbose flag
I love how cleanly formatted that is, with all the test cases and whether they passed or not. Green checkmark means the test passed. Red x means the test failed. The orange circles mean they were skipped.
That was kind of a crappy screenshot because there is some of the output from the precious command, followed by the jest incantation, followed by partial output.
There is detailed output below all that which shows the reason why the test failed. It’s a bit difficult to screenshot that output since it’s so long.
One sec, lemme fix it.
There we go. Behold, the power of image editing!
This screenshot shows the output of the command DEBUG="green-seller" jest --verbose -t run
I’ll explain all the parts. DEBUG="green-seller" is the first part of the command. This is setting a Bash environment variable named DEBUG to contain value, green-seller. This part doesn’t affect any part of the output we see so it really didn’t need to be there for this example.
I’ll explain it regardless. There is a node package used in my codebase called debug which reads the DEBUG environment variable and uses that variable’s value to determine what sort of information should be written to the console.
In my project I use lines of codes such as, debug('Hello World'). That debug message would only display to the console if I set the DEBUG environment variable to the name of my project.
Similar libraries will do the same thing. Axios for example. Axios uses debug(...) in their codebase so developers like me can get detailed debug messages in my console when my codebase calls axios methods.
To get Axios messages in additon to green-seller messages, I would have to set my environment variable to DEBUG='green-seller axios'.
The next part of the jest incantation is jest --verbose -t run.
jest is the name of the test suite I’m using. It runs tests against my codebase and ensures that my javascript methods behave as they are intended to. When I’m creating a program such as green-seller, I first write tests which programmatically describe how my program should work.
Then, I write the code which satisfies the test. These tests are re-run when I make changes to my code in the future, to ensure that new changes don’t break old features.
--verbose is what gives me the nice list of methods, and whether they passed, failed, or were skipped. That’s the part with the green checkmarks, red x’s, and orange circles
the -t in -t run is short for --testNamePattern. testNamePattern runs only tests with a name that matches the following. In my case, I wanted to run tests on my run method, hence -t run.
IDK why I’m explaining all this in my journal.
Public journal.
Yeah right. I’m probably going to get scared to release this and I’ll pull it before it auto-publishes.
Yeah right. I’m probably going to become brave and open about my private life. That’s what I want, because that’s how I can create connections with people who like and appreciate the TrueChris™.
