Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Craftastic Sale - this Saturday 3/27/10 - Orangevale, CA

Please join us for the Craftastic Sale this Saturday, March 27, in Orangevale, CA. Orangevale is a suburb of Sacramento. Detailed driving directions are at the bottom of this post!

Date: Saturday March 27th
Sale Times: 9am til 2 pm
Address: 5912 Beech Ave. in Orangevale, CA (near Hazel and Greenback)
For more info, contact: OddArtist

There will be nearly a dozen Sacramento artists and crafters in attendance, from both the SacEtsy and SactoMetro teams! While some of us have sold at the same craft fair before, this will be the first time so many of us will be selling together at once.


Please help us promote this event by FB'ing it, blogging, and Tweeting. Please Tweet the following:


#SacEtsy Craftastic Sale in Orangevale, CA. 9am-2pm March 27th featuring some awesome products. http://sac-etsy.blogspot.com for more info

Please stop by and say hello to the following members of the Sac Etsy team:

prairieprimitives
BKD Signature
mchristo
Oh My Posh
Bailoutabarista
oddartist


and also the following members of the Sacto Metro team:

mrstalbott
maleaab
DazzlingDogz
rockknitmomme

Your support of our teams is much appreciated! We hope to see you there!

DIRECTIONS:


From Hwy 50, go north on Hazel past Madison and make a left at the light on Pershing. When you get to Beech, turn right.

From Folsom, go down Greenback to the first light past Hazel and turn left onto Beech.

From Hwy 80, take the Greenback exit going east until you have passed Illinois. Turn right at Beech (there's a stop light at that intersection).

The house has a tall cedar out front along the road near the top of the hill, a large deep concrete driveway and a black mailbox with grapes painted on it. There will be signs out early, probably at the corner of Greenback and Hazel, among other places!

Saturday, March 20, 2010

A New Kind of Status Symbol ...

"Handcrafted products produced by individual artisans could be a new kind of status symbol, and that bodes well for retailers that sell handmade products. According to OPEN Book: Trends from American Express Open Small Business, luxury's new form consists of products and services based on "authenticity and exclusivity."

"In addition to the handmade nature of the product, the story behind the item is just as important. So if you're selling, say, handcrafted quilts, you emphasize not only the beauty of the quilt, but also the story of the person who made it, the materials used to produce it, the significance of its design and other elements.

"The new luxury consumer appreciates the time and effort that goes into the manufacture of such products," says the publication. Small businesses who sell handcrafted products are in a good position to provide their customers with their products' story and, the publication adds, such businesses "will find that promoting great craftsmanship can pay dividends."

(Published in Country Sampler's "Country Business," February 2010)

My dear artist friends, it looks like our time may have come!

PayPal's Micropayments

If you process a large number of small transactions, you may be interested to learn about PayPal's micropayment processing. This seems to be one of the biggest PayPal secrets unearthed to date! PayPal introduced micropayments in August, 2005, although this feature wasn't available worldwide until late in 2008. The rate for US to US micropayments is 5% + $.05 per transaction; fees for cross-border payments are available in a link on this page.

The regular US to US processing fee charged by PayPal is 2.9% + $.30 per transaction, which means that payments below $12.00 will be less expensive to process with the micropayment plan. The only "gotcha" is that you'll need to set up a separate PayPal account in order to receive micropayments. This is because each PayPal account is associated with one processing rate.

According to a recent article in Business Week, PayPal may be considering allowing merchants to accumulate micropayments until they reach a certain amount and then release the funds to the merchant, charging just a single processing fee!  

You can use this link to sign up for an account to accept PayPal micropayments.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

New IRS Rules to Take Effect in 2011

Starting next year, the IRS will require payment processors (including PayPal) to report how much money each user has received through their service. Many of us will probably be exempt from this since it only applies to sellers who sell more than $20,000/year AND who have 200 or more transactions.

The time is also coming when we will have to provide our Social Security Number (or employer ID # in lieu of a SSN) to whatever payment processing companies we're registered with. If we fail to do this, the processors will have to do backup withholding (this is usually a rate of 20%) starting in 2012.

More info here:
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y210/m03/abu0258/s03