ImplementedMake Printed Invoices Smaller
Can we make a change on this invoicing letter size, etc. It is very nice if you only sell 3 items, but when the list is in the hundreds, now your printing a crazy number of pages! I just printed a 223 items order, 14 pages long! In BS that will be tops 3 pages! That is crazy, Mark. Imagine the shipping cost to Europe for 14 pages plus the stamps. Also, I posted somewhere else about the issue with the offers.
This buyer alone made over 300 offers. They have to be accepted/decline one by one. Insane. Can we fix this?
This buyer alone made over 300 offers. They have to be accepted/decline one by one. Insane. Can we fix this?
Comments
I'd love to not print any invoice, paperless is a way to go for me.
Thoughts?
I don't care one way or the other -- if I ever have need of an invoice after buying something here there is plenty of information that I can print out myself either from my Member's Area or from Paypal.
Unfortunately, the invoices that I do receive with my items usually just go straight to the waste pile! It seems like a waste of paper - and printer toner - to send an invoice.
I'd much rather see a simple handwritten 'Thank You' from the seller!
I'm all for not sending an invoice, definitely always a nice handwritten thank you!
And you are right, there is PayPal, Credit Card and certainly here for us to bring up what we have bought/sold for tax purposes or even curiosity.
More thoughts?
When I'm in doubt about what to do pertaining to something in the stamp community, I think about what the norm would have been 10 years ago, and do that. (I'm personally a little more leading edge than that, but it seems like the stamp community is not the place for leading-edge practices, at least by one lowly little part-time stamp seller.)
And yes, 99% of the covers received have a return name/address different than the advertise on the site or none!
Now what?
Does that mean I really WANT a multi-page printed invoice? Nope. But an indication like that (somehow or another) is never a bad thing to see as a buyer. Overall, I'm a fan of conserving the paper.
Everybody can do as they please, include shipping invoice or not.
Take for example the other issue, accepting offers. NO problem when you get one, but you get hundreds NOW the problem is HUGE. I am sure we can click a box and select one, two, etc. and with another click select yes/no, simple and LOGICAL.
Maybe there could be a work around, don't know the best solution. I think from now on I'll message the buyer and ask if they want an invoice, if not then problem solved.
I don't have a highfalutin type of business, in fact, I'm just a very small time collector that is selling some duplicates so inventory is not a priority to me. The listings are my inventory/store. And I try to make them correct.
I remember when I did have orders at BS we could expand the listings. I would use that page and when the stamp was found I would close that listing, when all were closed, the order was complete. I sort of miss that feature. But this is a new area and we adjust.
I agree, let's keep it simple and shrink the invoice just a little.
That was an extremely useful feature on bidStart!!! A similar feature here on HipStamp would make filling orders much more efficient.
As with bidStart, on the Listings > Closed / Sold page, there's a checkbox next to each listing on this page. So if you're filling a large order, and just want to keep track of what you've pulled - it should be the same result there.
Clarification: I'm referring to the closed/sold order page. Which is nicer to fill orders from because the images are larger and the "check" box is nice. But the order is not sorted by country as the sold/orders page.
Dovetailing off of this subject, I am having a lot of frustration trying to find the buyers and give feedback once they have received their items. I cannot search the pending feedback page for a buyer (i.e. stampbuyer22) I cannot even look at a sold item to find out what date it was sold. I just spent 30 minutes (unsuccessfully) trying to give feedback because I could not find the buyer in question!
I agree wholeheartedly with Luree Hughes and Steve Ruecker that we need a better dashboard in order to process our orders. Just like Carlos Aristy said, a large order (over 30 items) is very difficult to process. First, the pictures are way too small to identify. For example, I sell a lot of used stamps, and I identify the sold item by the cancellation. I frequently have to open the item in a separate tab to identify the item (very time consuming). In BidStart I needed to do this perhaps only once in an order of 40 stamps. Now I have to do this with 50-60% of the sold items.
I have gone to using a sticky pad on my computer screen to be able to keep my place to properly scroll through the listings. At the end, I count the items sold, and I still end up missing an item or two. Since we could close or open the item in the BS seller dashboard, I never had this problem...
On printing invoices, since the line entries for each item sold take so much space, I get only 9 items on one page. When I shrink the invoice for printing, at 75% I get 15, at 50% I get 30. At 25% the font is so small that you cannot even read it!. On an invoice, it is not necessary to have so much white space around each item, a solid single-line entry for each item is just fine, then at 50% I can get about 70 items on one page.
To answer your question there are multiple reasons to print out an invoice. First I for one use the private ID's. All my stock is scanned,listed,filed packed and pulled by the private ID. Because of the number of items I have listed,those are in a different room then from the computer. Because everything I have listed is filed by private ID and the private ID is on the invoice it makes it very quick and easy to pull the items for shipping. (About a two months ago I pulled and packed an order of 450 + covers in a little less then an hour and a half.)
Two if you sell international an invoice is suppose to be included with the shipment. (That is for the customers end when it passes through their customs. If it's not included they can estimate the customs and duties or even confiscate the
package and NOT return it to the seller)
Three if for some reason the address on the package or envelope becomes unreadable and the PO will send it to the dead letter office. They do scan those packages to check for merchandise. If the package or envelope contains an invoice with the delivery address they can forward it on.
Fourth it does help the buyer know who sent the order.
Hope that helps as to why some of us do include an invoice with your order.
I resort to writing things by hand whenever I can. You know, like in the days before desktop printers!
Sometimes it's nice to know some of the reasons why. And on some things it's not as important on the one side as it is on the other.
Now, don't you wish you had received an invoice with the stamp... and kept it? So much for the brave new paperless world. Save all the trees you want, but you will pay more in taxes at audit time because of it.
My favourite auditor story involves the IRS. They audited a book dealer ( now with the angels) in Vermont in February. When they told the dealer that they could not accept his inventory figure he sent them to the unheated barn that his books were in. After a few hours they came back, teeth chattering, and told him that his inventory figure was fine.
Hoping to get an auditor with glazable eyes is like hoping to win the lottery. You might get a lazy one, but probably not.
If audited, hope for someone with a bit of gray in his or her hair. Junior auditors sometimes don't know what the bleep they are doing and have to have things patiently explained to them - again a time waster.