Hi, just to explain in detail, there’s two potential scenarios.
1. If we don’t have the new website with card payments operational in time, we won’t have a Black Friday sale.
If that’s the case we’ll postpone and have a big sale when it’s ready. That could be a week later, or it could be a new year sale.
It’s difficult at present with the current payment options, just as an example ratio brad has 1 payment/successful order email to 4 emails helping or explaining to people how to pay. That’s on a normal day with normal order volume.
And it can be difficult to match payments to orders, and delays between payments being sent /received and orders being processed and dispatched.
So imagine on Black Friday if there’s for example 500 orders, he’d be sending emails for three or four days straight, and he doesn’t fancy that. And a potential aftermath of people being frustrated.
That’s not a situation we would want to deal with, harking back to promo’s in the past where too much demand caused substantial difficulties and massive amounts of stress.
The boys have put a lot a lot of effort in this year to making sure promotions run as efficiently and smoothly as possible.
They’ve been preparing for Black Friday for a couple of months already preparing packs and pre-packing stock and so forth.
So since losing PayPal as a payment option we set about immediately to find a solution which meant finding a good person to develop a new site for us. To do a new site and webshop with a deadline of Black Friday has been a challenge.
And for me I’ve had to find a solution for cards. Again this is a challenge as we operate in a high risk industry. Banks, Visa and MasterCard all have seeds on their naughty list, despite them being legal in many areas they have outdated views and policies. But after going through the motions with a few banks and different companies we’ve found a solution and are working on it now, down to the wire to have it in place and set up.
We planned to have everything live for Monday. So that would have given us time to test, prepare and iron out any creases, then promote the sale,
However we’re likely looking at Tuesday now. But again this isn’t a definite.
It could be Wednesday of next week before I can announce with any real conviction if Friday is on or off.
So please just bare with us until that point.
As soon as I know either way, I’ll announce it here first.
Cheers.
