Carrot Jumper

I saw this quote on ecommercebytes blog comments and find it amusing that Top Rated Sellers are generalized as "carrot jumpers".

Yep our 5 business days shipping looks better and better each day. But of course you can't be a carrot jumper and do the 5 day thing.

I am no carrot jumper. I didn't put down 1 day handling until after I had already attained TRS. After I did, I said why not try to get a discount? I never strived for Top-Rated at all, it was just a result of how I do business. If the money is in my hands/account then why keep the stuff lying around here? Especially with 4 cats, a clumsy college student, and a 5 year old. Too much breakage/damage risk.

If you have the resources to pack and ship the item, then why sit around on it for days? It makes you look bad. Why not just ship it?

I have shipped within 24 hours during very difficult emotional times. I've shipped when my car was broken down - I packed a large tote bag and filled the basket under my sons stroller and walked to the post office.

There was a time about 3 years ago that I had no printer, my car was malfunctioning, I was so poor that I could not afford a .89 convenience store drink and had to wait for the paypal to hit my bank account to ship, and only then would I have needed a 5 day handling policy. It still probably would not have prevented the "Pokemon Master" from getting my account restricted because he didn't bother reading my terms anyway, he would have had to click a link, lol.

I don't drink the "kool aid" but I've got to ask what the people who are complaining about handling time defects are doing to earn them. As long as I've got the ink, my postage is always printed within hours of a purchase, and then scanned in within 1 business day thereafter. I don't dump my paypal account until everything from one particular batch is shipped, that way I know everything is paid for, and I am withdrawing the net amount. My dashboard says:

99.28% of your transactions had tracking uploaded within handling time and validated by carrier

The reason it is not 100% is because there was a set of plates I waited 2 days to print the shipping out on. I wasn't going to know the weight until I completely packed them, and because Job Lot was out of medium boxes, I wasted a day.

I've got to say that a printer is one of the best business tools there is when you sell online. Mine was given to me by my ex-husband. It came free with a computer he bought. But...there are some that are fairly cheap to buy, just have to price replacement cartridge prices before you do. The particular one I use, I buy one $15 cartridge of black ink a month and it saves me all kinds of shipping time defect headaches.