Lauren: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Publish & Prosper. Matt and I are coming in hot today, not because we're super excited about this topic or anything like that, but just because we are both so ready to get out of this office and the marathon of podcast episodes that we've recorded in the last week. 

Matt: I don't know if I agree totally with that, but I'm just trying to beat the rain. Nah, I'm just kidding. It's an important topic. It's a tough topic, but we'll get through it. We'll do it quickly, accurately, and hopefully with a little bit of fun. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: And then maybe we'll actually get out of the office and back home before the heavy rains come back. 

Lauren: That's really the goal. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Mostly that's just my disclaimer right up at the top of this episode. Sorry for the fact that we are going to speed run through this. I'm literally in the middle of editing another episode right now. And there were at least two points in that episode where I was listening to myself talk and I was like, God, am I always this fast? And I know the answer is yes, but it's a completely different experience to hear it played back to yourself and hear like, wow, I really do talk fast.

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Sorry, everyone. Matt just shrugged. Like, all right, fair enough. 

Matt: No notes. 

Lauren: Anyway, well, okay. 

Matt: Hopefully that doesn't turn anybody off from listening. While we say we might speed through this, not to the detriment of causing you any less accurate or efficiency - 

Lauren: Oh. 

Matt: - in the delivery of this information. 

Lauren: No, of course not. And I do actually think this is an important topic for us to talk about. So do not let that discourage you. 

Matt: Thank you. What are we talking about today? 

Lauren: Today we're going to be talking about some solutions for common ecommerce store issues. These are things that we see people asking about a lot. We have a lot of conversations with entrepreneurs and author, whatever you self-identify as, business owner - because you are a business owner, whether you are a fiction author writing a bunch of novels or an entrepreneur with a small business that you've just decided to add a book to your product line as a lead generation tool or something like that. 

Either way, you are a business owner, which means that you are now responsible for the maintenance of your business, including the maintenance of your website and your ecommerce solutions and stuff like that. We have a lot of conversations with people where they're asking us questions about some of these specific pain points that we're going to talk about today. So we're going to try to share some solutions. 

Matt: That's right. When we talk about this concept that you're a business owner, it's often really - it's mostly directed at people who are selling direct, but it is important for people that just sell a lot on other channels to understand that even though some of those other channels handle some of these issues for you - and as a result, you share some of your profits with them - you're still a business, and so there are other aspects of that that you need to address accordingly. 

What we're going to talk about today are some of the things that you take on as the business owner when you sell directly to your clients, customers, fans, readers, however you want to describe them. Some of those things we’re used to being taken care of by the platforms that we typically would allow our products to be sold on. So when you sell a product on a third party retail site, I won't name any, but traditionally what happens is they handle the transaction. 

They handle a lot of the issues with taxes and customer service and things like that. And you simply have to handle the shipping of the product in most cases. And then as a result, you get less profit, but that's because the third party retail channel is taking most of the risk and assuming a lot of the liability and or the work involved to make that transaction happen. When you sell direct, you're the one doing all of that. 

Lauren: Yep. 

Matt: So now all of a sudden you have to think about collecting tax and shipping and some of the other things that come along with promoting the product and or the customer support piece of that, which is a big one for people. We do get these questions a lot. These are some of the major hurdles that people have to cross or try to get over when they're setting up their direct stores.

Some people dive right in and others are a little more trepidatious about it. This episode is for both. I'm the jump right in type of person. And then I learn after the fact what I should be doing or should have been doing or can start doing. Others are a little more trepidatious and they like to do their homework before they go into it. 

Lauren: Some of us are the type that are gonna do so much homework ahead of time that they're never gonna get started. 

Matt: There's those too. 

Lauren: Not pointing any fingers. 

Matt: Yep, well there you go. 

[4:46] - Sales Tax

Matt: The first area I think that tends to scare people the most probably is this concept of sales tax. So keep in mind a couple of things. First of all, we're not tax experts. That's not what we do. That's not the title next to my name on my business card. Pretty sure it's not Lauren's either, even though her father was in the financial world. 

Lauren: You know what they say about the shoemaker's kids. 

Matt: Well. 

Lauren: Okay?

Matt: Don't take anything we're giving you as financial advice. You cannot come back to us later and try to sue me saying that you did something that you thought I said and it didn't work out for you. 

Understand what we're giving you are best practices. We're giving you information that comes from certain websites that are closely tied to state and federal financial entities. And we're just gonna try to give you the best information advice we can based on others' success with these topics.

Lauren: Yeah, I literally spent more time on this section of this outline than I have on the entire episode outline of other episodes, because I really was trying to thoroughly make sure I was as accurate as possible about everything, fact checking everything and making sure that I was Banjo-Kazooie really understanding my sources. 

But that is the ultimate bottom line is that we are making suggestions, best practice tips, stuff like that. And giving you direction towards other tools that can help you with this, but please, please, please, please, please do not take our word as gospel. Neither one of us are tax experts. 

Matt: Sales tax is collected at the state level in 45 states of the US and the District of Columbia, at a local level for some towns and municipalities. However, there are five states that don't collect sales tax at the state level. That's Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon. That can be found on any tax website. This is common knowledge. So understanding the states that do and do not participate in collecting sales tax is step number one. 

Now, what do you need to be aware of when it comes to sales tax? A couple of things. First and foremost, what you need to be aware of is there are apps and plugins that will take care of all this for you. 

Lauren: Yes. And we'll recommend a few of them - 

Matt: That’s right. 

Lauren: - at the end of this section.

Matt: Out of the gate, what we will say is that is what you should do. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: Some of them are free up until a certain threshold of sales that you're running through your platform. And some of them cost a monthly amount that is pretty manageable, in my opinion, for what's being done. But - 

Lauren: You know what costs more than whatever you're going to pay for access to a sales tax tool like this?

Matt: I'm sure you're going to give us some dad-oriented little quip about not paying your taxes and the IRS coming knocking. 

Lauren: Yes, exactly. 

Matt: So yes, there are plugins on every one of these platforms. They all have plugins. There are some plugins that are not even necessarily native to those platforms, but that's what they do is tax collection. And so they have plugins for all of the platforms.

The Shopify tax plugin and a couple of the others that we again, we'll talk about, we’ll link to, those have been discussed at length to be some of the most convenient, easy to use, especially if you're a Shopify store user. But nonetheless, just know that there are plugins and apps for this and that would be our recommendation is to use one of those. 

That being said, there's criteria you need to understand - and this is where it gets complicated - for whether or not you even have to collect sales tax. And that depends on whether or not you meet what is called nexus in each state. And there are two types of nexus. There's physical nexus and there's economic nexus. And you need to know whether you hit either or both of those in each of these states. Physical nexus, really, you're only going to potentially qualify for in one state, more than likely it's your home state. And in some cases you don't qualify for physical nexus and that's okay. That's actually good. 

And then in some states, you will qualify for economic nexus. Most of the time, economic nexus just means that you've hit $100,000 or more in sales, most states the threshold for economic nexus is $100,000 in a given year. We love all of our authors and creator friends, but most of you are not selling $100,000 or more in each state. So in many cases, you are pretty safe when it comes to sales tax and you qualify for the most basic of sales tax collection and operational procedures. 

Again, these are things that plugins will do very easily for you. So you could essentially just get one of these plugins and be done with it and not even have to worry about it. And at the end of each fiscal year, these plugins do all the work that needs to be done to calculate the sales tax, what you've collected, all those things, not a big deal at all. 

But again, everything starts with understanding where you fall in terms of physical or economic nexus and whether or not that qualifies you for needing to collect sales tax and how you would go about doing that. When you use things like Lulu Direct, for example, for fulfilling your orders, Lulu Direct will charge you, the author, the applicable sales taxes for the printing and shipping costs.

It's typically a pass through cost, meaning you've already collected that from your customer anyways, so it cancels each other out. But again, this is something that you can reach out to us too if you believe that you should not be charged sales tax on your manufacturing through Lulu, you can apply for and submit the necessary documentation so that we don't charge you that sales tax. So you would wanna reach out to us about that. International orders is a whole ‘nother story. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: That's where it can get a little dicey and where you definitely want to use a plugin or get some help for those of you that do sell or want to sell internationally. But I would say the level of complexity that comes in when you start to deal with international orders can be a little daunting. If you're not using a plugin or getting some external help, you're dealing with customs duties, VAT, all kinds of other areas where it can definitely get a little confusing. 

Lauren: I am going to link to a fairly new blog post in the show notes. It's called International Book Shipping, but it does include a lot of points about international sales tax as well, because those kind of go hand in hand when it comes to fulfilling a print-on-demand order. So if you want to dive much more thoroughly into international sales tax and international shipping, I would definitely recommend checking out this post. 

Matt: Absolutely. And again, we can't stress enough that if you can get an app to do this, if you can afford it, again, many of them are free until you hit that nexus threshold of $100,000 or more. Just do that. 

Lauren: Yeah, really. 

Matt: But if you're not gonna do that, keep listening. 

Lauren: Well, keep listening, but all we're gonna talk about now is what apps you need to use. So keep listening as we continue to insist that this is something that you get help with and don't do it on your own. Whether getting that help is hiring a tax advisor to review your business practices and make sure that you're doing everything correctly and that you've covered all your bases or using one of these apps or plugins that we're going to recommend or both. 

Matt: Yeah. The tax advisor thing is a really good point. And in many cases, you can get a consultation with a local CPA or tax advisor or small business tax advisor in your area for pretty inexpensively. You can get an hour of their time to go sit down and ask them some questions around what you're trying to do, what would be sufficient. 

If you already have a CPA or a tax advisor or an accountant you work with, they're a great place to start too. But between those two, you should be fine. Apps and an advisor. But definitely use one or the other, if not both. 

[11:38]

Matt: So that being said, there are some very helpful apps and plugins that you can use that will handle these taxes and things for you. The first one I'll talk about is the Shopify one, because I do think that's probably one of the easiest, especially if you're using Shopify obviously, it's simply called Shopify tax. 

But essentially it automatically handles the collection of taxes for you. It already understands and is pre-programmed on a state-by-state basis to know how much it needs to collect for you in that area, if you're at nexus thresholds, all of those things. It is currently free to use for sellers earning under a hundred thousand dollars annually. Again, that's typically the nexus threshold in most states. And then once you reach that $100,000 threshold fees will apply. So just make sure you look at what those fees are. 

But we've had a lot of great feedback around this app. I know people who've used it personally and they've had good experiences with it. So if you're using Shopify, I really do recommend this app. But again, as we said at the top of the show - we are not accountants, tax providers, or any of those other types of people. So do your own research as well. 

Lauren: Please do. If you're using WooCommerce, on the other hand, WooCommerce also does have a built-in free to use plugin for basic sales tax collection on their site. So if you're using WooCommerce, WordPress to build out your site, you've got access to all of that already. They do also have recommended extensions in the WooCommerce marketplace, if you're looking for something that has some more robust features, if you want to get more customizable with it, or if you're looking for really advanced sales tax collection and whatever. I don't even know how it would get more advanced than that. But if you are looking for something more than what their built-in tool is, they do have plenty of plugins available in their marketplace, but they do also have that free plugin for you to use. 

Matt: Yeah. If you're using Wix, they also have a way to allow you to easily handle this. They've got a built-in dashboard that allows you to manually control how you collect tax, but they also have an integration with Avalara, and we'll talk about Avalara in a second. Avalara is also a tax and financial merchant processor. 

So they handle taxes and potentially credit card processing, things like that. They have plugins that work with ecommerce stores as well. So Wix is working through Avalara based on what tier or plan you might have with Wix to facilitate collecting taxes appropriately and handling all of those.

Lauren: Yeah, I think it was if I remember correctly from looking at the Wix website, depending on what tier membership plan you have and what you're paying for annually, you might already have access to the Avalara plugin. And if not, you can add it for a fee. So that's something that you can have directly. 

And since we're, you know, already talking about Avalara, it's a tax compliance software, like Matt was saying, that I learned while researching it that they're based out of Durham. I was like, by their office the other day. I had no idea. So that's cool. But you can also - you're not limited to just using Avalara if you are a Wix user. If you're any of the other, Shopify, WooCommerce, one of the other ones, if you're using our API, you can also just integrate Avalara into your platform. 

Matt: Would it blow your mind to know that Lulu actually uses Avalara? 

Lauren: Really? 

Matt: Yes. 

Lauren: Oh, that's cool. 

Matt: Yeah, we've used them for a little while now. 

Lauren: How fun. 

Matt: Avalara has been in the tax game for a long time. I'm assuming that, you know, as ecommerce became a bigger thing, they obviously did the thing that a lot of people do and they started developing some plugins so that they could help smaller business owners as well. Yeah, Lulu uses Avalara for our tax collection purposes. 

Lauren: Well, that's great. Another really, really popular third party sales tax automation tool is TaxJar. You're going to see that come up a lot. They have a plugin available for both Shopify and WooCommerce through their app stores and for Wix through Zapier. Do you know more about that? 

Matt: Yeah. Zapier is basically an API bridge. If there are platforms, tools, things you want to use, and maybe they don't necessarily have an integration for the tool you're using, oftentimes you can still connect the two using Zapier building this app or an API bridge. Zapier is just a way to be able to connect to tools or more using their kind of API bridging system.

Lauren: Cool. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Look at that. Learned something new today. 

Matt: So we won't really go any deeper with sales tax there. Again, the hope was to give you a high level overview of like, what you should be looking at and thinking about when it comes to sales tax for your direct store as you're setting it up. Or even in hindsight, now that you've had it set up and you've been operating and now you're thinking about these things. Again, our recommendation, get a plug and let it do it for you. That's what they're designed for. They do it better than you could anyways. 

But if you're one of those that’s like, nope, I'm going to do it myself. That's fine. More power to you. Just understand again, there are some things that you'll need to figure out on a state by state basis, most of which will deal with whether or not you hit physical and economic nexus.

We will include some links, though, that will help you with that. So there's a very handy link that will take you to literally a state by state breakdown, which will include - Lauren's looking for right now, but I'll give it to you Lauren in a minute.

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: It'll give you a state by state breakdown of what their economic nexus threshold is, whether or not you need to worry about it and whether or not you would be considered destination or origin sales in that state. Meaning, are you going to be taxed based on shipping to that state or are you going to be taxed on where you're from, the origin of where it's coming from, things like that. So that should help a little bit if you're going to go at this without using an app or a tax professional, which we do not advise. 

[16:51] Shipping

Matt: Another area people tend to get pretty trepidatious about, because there's a lot of confusion around it - dealing with shipping. This can be confusing based on several factors. Shipping, you're dealing with multiple carriers. They all have their own timelines. They all have their own rates. They all have their own regions and things like that. So it can be confusing trying to decide what type of shipping options to offer. And then how that maps over to your provider, your dropshipper. 

If you're using Lulu Direct and Shopify and you're selling through Shopify using Lulu Direct to fulfill and ship your books, that means your books are getting shipped from Lulu, right? And we have our shipping platforms that we use, our carriers that we use, but you also have to be able to, on the front side, on your website, charge and educate people on what shipping options they have. The two have to map to each other. So your Shopify store has to map to your Lulu account, and the shipping types need to speak to each other. That's where it can get confusing for a lot of people. 

You can utilize what's called live shipping rates on Shopify, but to do that, you have to be using their $79 a month plan or higher. And if you're on the $79 a month plan, I believe there's a $20 a month fee that you would also have to pay to be able to take advantage of live rates. Now if you're selling a lot of books, then that's worth it. If you're selling a lot of books, you're on the $99 plan at that point because it's a $79 for the plan and the 20 bucks extra for the live rates access.

The live rates access basically simplifies and automates your shipping for you. So again, for those of you that are selling quite a few books to justify potentially paying Shopify $99 a month, then do that. Take advantage of live rates, it'll take care of all that work for you and you don't have to worry about it. 

If you are not on that $79 a month or higher plan, if you're only selling a few books a month and you don't have access to live rates on Shopify, then what we're about to talk about will help you. Some of the other platforms, WooCommerce and the others, again, they have their own ways of approaching and dealing with shipping. Some of this is gonna be manual mapping. It can get complicated, but at the end of the day, hopefully this will help you have a better understanding of how to do that.

Lauren: Because they're all different on each platform, it's not super easy for us to talk through specifics, as it often is, because of the variables on the different platforms. It's not easy for us to talk through specifics. I will have linked in the show notes tutorial videos for all three of the platforms that Lulu Direct integrates with. And for Shopify, we actually have two. We have one for setting up live shipping rates and one for setting up manual shipping rates. 

Matt: Yep. 

Lauren: So I will link all four of those videos in the show notes if you want to dive deeper into specifically how to set it up on one of those three platforms.

Matt: Yeah. So when manually doing it, the thing to remember is, again, it's all about mapping. If you're manually setting up what it costs to ship one book from your site for your customer to the east coast of the United States, then you're going to need to know what Lulu is going to charge you to ship that one book to the east coast of the United States. So again, when you're manually mapping, you're going to find out, okay, the cost from Lulu to you as the author to ship that book, let's say is $4.99, then you want to make sure that you're charging your customer at least $4.99 to ship that book to the East Coast. 

So that's manual mapping. That's all you're doing is making sure that you're not charging less than what you're going to get charged so that it ultimately becomes a pass through cost. There are people who don't want to even deal with that. So what they do is they just make sure they price their book a little bit higher and then they just offer free shipping. The shipping is not actually free. It's baked into the cost of the book, but you look good because you're offering free shipping. But again, that boils down to strategy. 

Lauren: Yeah. So it's again, it's up to you really how you choose to do it. 

Matt: That's right. 

Lauren: As long as you are covering the cost of the shipping, because again, Lulu is going to charge you the cost of shipping the book. So you want to make sure that you're not losing money on that sale. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Because you've not like, appropriately accounted for your shipping. Also, if you're listening to that and you're going, how am I supposed to do that? What guessing game magic math am I supposed to do to figure that out? If you go on the Lulu website, if you look at our pricing calculator, you can input the exact specs of your book and we will tell you what it would cost to ship one copy, two copies, five copies, ten copies, which is also a dynamic scale too. So that's something that you have to think about too. 

Matt: Yeah, and then some will make it very easy on themselves if they're doing manual shipping mapping just choose the cheapest trackable method. That's it. And - 

Lauren: Emphasis on trackable. 

Matt: Yeah, only offer that. And so that makes it a lot easier. You're not having to load in standard expedited, you know, all this other stuff. Just choose the cheapest trackable method, which is what most people often choose anyways as consumers and then be done with it. And again, like Lauren said, the emphasis is on trackable. 

Doesn't matter what options you load in, or what you have as a shipping strategy, if it's not trackable and something happens, the person getting screwed there is going to be your reader or buyer, ultimately, because if there's no tracking on it, the carrier's not gonna be able to tell you anything, you're not gonna be able to tell your customer anything, and we won't be able to tell you anything, because there is no tracking. 

And in most cases, I think Lulu has pretty much cut out most untrackable options on our end. I think we only offer trackable shipping methods in most areas and regions. Now there might be a few where you can get non-trackable, but again, we would not suggest that I would not do that. All of the carriers are a mess right now. So I would only offer trackable methods. 

Lauren: Yeah. And it is really, I cannot emphasize this enough. I’m consistently surprised by how often it comes up in a customer support chat or question, or even publicly on social comments, where somebody will kind of assume that even though they didn't choose to pay for a trackable shipping method, that somehow we have a secret back channel tracking method in place anyway. I don't know any company that does. Anyone that's fulfilling orders to you. 

Matt: Well, no, cause it doesn't exist. 

Lauren: Right, exactly. Like if you chose not to ship with a trackable shipping method, there is no secret tracker on that package that is just we chose not to share it with you. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: So genuinely - 

Matt: There's no air tag attached to every book that we ship out. And honestly, again, the carrier systems have gotten so bad lately that a lot of carriers right now won't even offer you a non-trackable service. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Just use trackable service. That's it. Don't offer anything - now there are some regions outside of the US and maybe even in pockets of the US where a non-trackable option will be offered through like DHL and some random third world country because there is no tracking available, okay. But you're probably not selling a lot of books there anyways and that's fine. 

But I would back what Lauren's saying by also telling you that the bulk of the support tickets Lulu gets on a regular basis tend to be shipping questions, like where's my order? And it's okay, where's your tracking number? Well, I don't have one. I didn’t - Okay, well, I'm not sure what you expect us to tell you. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: And I'm not sure what you expect UPS to tell you, since you didn't get a trackable option, but.

Lauren: And that is actually the last thing that we're going to talk about in this episode, is about proactive customer service. But I'm even just going to jump ahead now and say that especially when it comes to shipping, that's the number one thing. If you don't want to get like, really granular and in depth providing customer support information on your website, that's your choice. That's your prerogative. But if you're going to provide any information on your website as an FAQ or something like that, provide as much transparency about shipping as possible. 

Matt: Yeah, the more you set your customers up on the front end for what they should expect in terms of length of time it's gonna take to produce their book, length of time shipping could take, the best practices for choosing a shipping option that has tracking or why you don't offer anything that's untrackable. I think the more you can set your customer up on the front end, the less you're gonna have to deal with emails after post transaction. I agree with that. 

A lot of this also boils down to, especially if you're using Lulu Direct, a lot of that is white labeled, which means if you're a Lulu Direct user, when we print and ship the book, the book's not coming from Lulu to your customer, it's coming from you. So if something happens or they don't get their book, in many cases, they're looking at you and they're going to want to know where's my book or where's my tracking number or things like that. 

So again, understanding you're the business, we ship it out as you, not Lulu by design so that you can control that branding experience for your customer. Knowing that ahead of time and making sure again that you're preparing them and giving them proper expectations ahead of that sale and delivery, I think will set you and the customer up for success. 

Lauren: Yeah. I also think - take the time to figure out how to notify your customers of whatever steps within their customer journey they're in. So whether it's order confirmations, production progress, your order has shipped, your order has been delivered, whatever. Whether you're doing that within your ecommerce platform, there are plugins that you can use for that, carrier information, supplier, so Lulu, or your email service provider.

It's worth taking the time and effort to make that information readily available to your customers. It's worth it for the customer building and like, relationship building with your customers, but it's also worth it for you, because if it means that you get to like, cut out half of the customer support requests that are going to come in because they’re people asking about where their order is. But you've already proactively provided them with that information.

Matt: Yes, most of the time Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, most of these platforms have these transactional delivery touch points set up so that when you make a sale, a confirmation email is sent out. You have control over that confirmation email. You can alter the text in that, the logos, the branding. 

Lauren: And you should. 

Matt: You know, again, shipping, all those things. Most of that stuff is baked into these platforms. Just make sure that you're taking a look at whatever the copy is going to be on that email. You can customize it to be your own voice and tone, things like that. But yes, make sure that stuff is enabled and it's working and firing properly. 

Lauren: Cool. 

[26:24]

Lauren: I want to talk a little bit about what happens with missing, incorrect, or damaged orders. And this is going to be Lulu specific, but I'll also try to not be Lulu specific about it in places. So Lulu will replace damaged, incorrect or missing orders. Your customers can contact Lulu directly if you want them to, or you can contact Lulu on their behalf. 

Matt: If you're using Lulu Direct, you're Lulu's customer, not your customer. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: Your customer would contact you and say, hey I received the book but it's damaged, or I haven't received my delivery, I have my tracking number, but it's missing. You will reach out to Lulu, because you're Lulu's customer and you'll say, hey, one of my customers ordered a book. It was damaged. Lulu has its process. We'll get one back out to them as quickly as possible. 

Again, all white labeled under your branding. If you're using Lulu Direct, your customer can't reach out to us. You have to do it on their behalf. So by default, you have to be the customer service there and should be by the way, again, this is meant to be seamless for your brand, for your business, for who you are. 

If it's just a regular Lulu order, absolutely. Anybody who has placed the order can reach out and say hey, I have a damaged, lost, or incorrect item here that I'd like to have replaced. So that's one point of clarification there. 

Again, just backing up our point earlier that you're a business. If you're the author and you're selling direct, you are the business. If your customer has a problem, they're going to come to you. If it's something that Lulu should address and handle because the manufacturing was wrong. Absolutely. You'll reach out to us. We'll take care of it immediately and get it sorted out quickly.

Lauren: The only other thing that I would really want to add to any of that is again, a reminder - and we're going to talk more about customer service and providing customer service next - whether you're providing like an FAQ section on your website that speaks specifically to production and shipping, or you're using the emails that you can create within your ecommerce platform. 

Update this messaging in Q4. Which is, spoiler alert, imminent. Also, our entire next episode is about how to prep and set yourself up for success for the upcoming holiday season. So here's a pro tip ahead of that one is to make sure that you're keeping your messaging up to date around that time of year, because we all know there are gonna be production and shipping delays around the holiday season. 

Matt: Yeah, that is a good one. 

[28:43] Customer Service

Lauren: All right, so speaking of providing customer support and being proactive with your customer support, this is probably the, in no particular order, third most common thing that we hear from people when they're talking about the pain points and struggles of having their own ecommerce site or having their own website. You are the customer service provider and most people, most authors, entrepreneurs at this level are not in a position where they are able to hire a customer support team. So you are the person providing customer service for your customers.

You're definitely going to want to be proactive with that. You're going to want to get ahead of it as much as possible. So again, going to encourage that you strongly consider setting up a customer FAQ page on your website. I really can't think of an argument for why you wouldn't want to have one on your website. It's worth it to have that information readily available. You can choose how much information you want to include on there, but I can't really think of a time that transparency - genuine authentic transparency - could hurt you. 

Matt: Yeah. And if you want a really good example of this, go look at Joanna Penn's FAQs for her ordering and shipping and stuff. She does a really good job of talking about the fact that her products are print-on-demand, that it takes a certain amount of time for the quality products to be produced and shipped out to you. And she just does a really good job in her FAQs of setting expectations. So if you need a good example, go check out hers. 

Lauren: Yeah, which is also something that I think - and I'm not saying that she does this - but FAQs can also be a nice opportunity for you to explain your choices a little bit in a humble-braggy kind of way. So, if one of the questions that you want to answer is like, why does it take so long to get my order? Or why don't you offer overnight shipping? Or what's the timeline on how long to take my order to come? 

That gives you the opportunity to turn around and say, oh, well, you know, my books are printed on demand, which means each new order needs to be properly printed and bound. It takes time for that to happen because we want to make sure that we're providing you with the highest quality product. So it takes time for the glue to dry and for the covers to be printed and for the pages to be printed. You know, you can even link to this really awesome video that Lulu.com created that shows exactly how a book is made so people can see how their order is being created. 

You might also say in that same answer, like, using a print-on-demand publisher that's B Corp certified means that my products are environmentally friendly and a great alternative to the waste producing traditional offset printing method. So you're explaining an answer to your customers, answering a question and also getting a little bit of a brag in there too. 

Matt: Yeah, that's a great idea. 

Lauren: Yeah. If you want to kind of narrow down some of the questions that you want to include in there, I won't go through the whole list of questions that I drafted up, but I would include some questions about shipping. I would include some questions about customer transactions, things like your return policy, your refund policy, exchange policy, stuff like that. 

If people come up with questions like product types, especially if you for whatever reason, not all of your product types are currently available on your website, but if you have some upcoming, have one of the questions be, are your books available in different formats? And that's where you're gonna sneak in a little like, right now I only have it available in paperback and ebook, but a hardcover is coming soon, or an audiobook is coming soon. That's a good place to kind of tease that a little bit. 

And then I would also, I would take the time to go back through questions that you've received from people in the past and just kind of make note of some commonly reoccurring ones or ones that really stand out to you as something that, oh, I would like to get ahead of that in the future and have it covered on my website already. You could put together a pretty solid list of questions.

I'm also going to - another link that I'm going to have in the show notes here is a blog post that I love. I didn't write it, so I'm allowed to say it's a great blog post, on customer service and your ecommerce business. And it has a lot of really good suggestions for how to provide really high quality customer service as a small business owner. So definitely check that out linked in the show notes.

Matt: This all sounds like a lot of fun.

Lauren: I actually can't say it's fun at all. You know how much I like talking about how publishing stuff is fun. And also all these things are all my favorite things. 

Matt: I actually think it's fun. I like the beginnings of a business, setting all this stuff up, really laying out what your customer journey is going to look like. I wasn't being sarcastic. 

Lauren: Actually, that all does sound fun to me. I will totally give you that. All of this setup sounds fun to me and all of the like, thinking about what I can do to support the customer journey. That all sounds really fun to me. It's the actual providing customer support part that sounds terrible to me. 

Somehow I wound up working in customer service in so many different areas of my life. Which is actually a great segue for something else that I wanna talk about in this section. How to handle social media customer support. And then I'm gonna back up a little bit, but that was too good of a segue to pass up. 

[33:44]

Lauren: If you have a business and a social media presence, it is impossible to avoid having customer service requests on your social media. It's not gonna happen. People are going to use your social media to get in touch with you in regards to your business, whether you want them to or not. Be prepared for that and have a plan in place for how you're gonna choose to handle that.

Wherever possible on your social, have your support contact readily available, whether that's a direct link in your profile that leads to your FAQ page or a customer support request form. If you are gonna use an email - and we'll talk about both of those things in a little bit - whatever your preferred method for getting in touch with you, have that readily available, or instructions on how to get there readily available in your social profiles. 

If you plan to provide customer support over social media, I would recommend that you encourage any public commenters to move into your DMs as quickly as possible, especially if they are going to be providing any kind of personal information. I cannot tell you how often people would comment publicly on Lulu posts and like, leave their phone number or email address in the public post, as please get back to me immediately at this number or this email address. 

And I'd be like, oh my God, why are you, why are you publicly posting this on social media? So if it's something that you're going to require like, oh, I'm going to need your order number, I'm going to need access to your address so I can help you figure out this shipping information. The first thing that I would do would be comment on their public comment or post or whatever it is and say like, hey, I'd be so happy to help you with this. Let's move this to DMs or shoot me an email at this email address and I'd be happy to help you out with this ASAP. 

Matt: Yeah. Or you can just proactively DM them. What I will say is in listening to this, to a degree, it might sound like you're gonna get a lot of these. You're probably not. Unless you're selling 100,000 books a month and generating such volume that just by the sheer nature of it, mistakes will happen, you're not gonna get a lot of these inquiries. So I would encourage you to potentially solve some of these in social media or things like that. 

Larger businesses, including us, we don't tend to do any support over social media. Like she said, we can't stop people from reaching out on social media and asking for support. But what we do is we gently direct them to our actual support channels. We won't actually handle support over social media for the most part. It's just not efficient. 

For most people listening to this, you're probably not going to be selling the volume of books where you're just going to get flooded or inundated with support requests. And most of what you will get when you do get them is more than likely going to be either I got my book and it was damaged - because we all know that some of these carriers like to treat books like frisbees. I've literally seen them on my Ring doorbell, like just fling one up on the porch like a frisbee. Or you're going to get a request that says, hey, I've not got my book yet, but tracking says it showed up three days ago. 

Outside of that, you're not going to get a lot. And how you deal with these is really up to you, but definitely keep some of these tips and tricks in mind.

Lauren:  I got a record yesterday that the box the record came in was squished into the package locker. I almost lost it. Thank God it was very, very well padded and well packaged inside the box. And the part that was squished was actually extra space in the box. Thank God. But it was a limited edition Taylor Swift vinyl variant that is no longer available on her website. 

Matt: Of course it is. 

Lauren: That I would have, but I would have absolutely lost it because I would not have been able to replace it - 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: If it was damaged. 

Matt: I got - 

Lauren: And it was absolutely the carrier's fault. 

Matt: I ordered… Funko not too long ago, put out a new Robert Smith pop from The Cure. And so I ordered it immediately. It showed up and it was damaged. It came in a plastic, so it was one of the bigger ones, like a plastic hard shell case -

Lauren: Oh yeah.

Matt: And that was cracked. Clearly from the shipper, and we won't say who it was. So I reached out to them and of course they were sold out. There were no more left. They were really nice. They refunded - which I didn't ask for - they refunded me the cost of that one, because I'd ordered a few different ones, but they did refund the cost of the Robert Smith one, which is cool, so shout out to Funko, by the way. Same thing, yeah, they're sold out, so now I have mine but it's cracked which is a bummer because it wasn't Funko's fault, it wasn't my fault, it was the carrier's fault but they're not going to do anything for you, so. 

Lauren: Send me the info on the one that's cracked and I'll keep an eye out for it when I'm always out on my little scouting missions.

Matt: And I've gotten to the point now where I will try to avoid ordering records through the mail as much as possible. Even if it's like a limited edition, if I know there's a record store where I could go get it or some other way, I'll try that first, because I just don't trust the carriers anymore with records and books and things like that.

Lauren: This was actually, that was exactly - I've been looking for this specific variant of this vinyl since the album came out in April, and I'd gone to a bunch of indie record stores looking for it and this was me finally giving up, because it was up on the website for like 24 hours only, and it sold out in under 24 hours. So I knew I had to jump on it when I did. But I still, I just kept my fingers crossed the whole time it was coming. I was like, oh my God, please. And with the weather right now too, I was so afraid that it was gonna get, the box was gonna be soaked in damage. But thank God the record was fine. 

But the point of all of this of course, is that there's only so much that you can control as the business owner, but you do need to be prepared for how to handle it when your customers come to you and say, hey, this, this, and this happened. What can you do about it? How can you help me fix it? 

[39:09]

Lauren: That being said, whether you're using social or not, make sure that you have clear customer support channels and instructions for how your customers can get in touch with you on your website, in your social media bios, wherever the place may be. You have some options at that. 

Maybe you want to do a contact page with a submission form built into it. You can build that out pretty easily on your ecommerce or website provider. You can also just make it super straightforward, create a support email address and invite your customers to email you directly. They can fill it out themselves and then you have a direct line of communication with them. 

I would definitely recommend making a separate email for that. You want an inbox that is specifically like, support at author name.com or whatever it is, so that you have a way of keeping your customer support emails separate from the regular emails that you're getting for your brand. You don't want to give out your personal email address for this. I would definitely recommend you creating a specific email for that. 

Matt: Yeah, that's definitely a good one. 

Lauren: And just also, however you're doing this, whether it's in a contact form or an email or even, you know, just straight up providing support over social media, I would include in your FAQs or include in your contact page where you have this information, guidelines for when your customers can expect to hear back from you. 

And obviously these are not set in stone. No one is going to be - well, actually, that's not true. I was going to say no one's going to be holding a knife to your throat if you say that you'll respond within 24 hours and it actually takes 27. But we've all met customers that absolutely would. But you know your own bandwidth.

If you know that you're, you're wearing many hats right now, you're doing this small business in addition to having a full time job and whatever other responsibilities you have in your life, and you say like, okay, responding within 24 hours is not realistic for me, but I promise that I will get back to you within three business days. That's reasonable. As long as you set that expectation ahead of time, as long as you say to people like, you can expect to hear back from me within three business days. 

Matt: Well, whether or not that's reasonable, it's probably not for us to judge. 

Lauren: No. 

Matt: Because I would disagree with you there. 

Lauren: Well. 

Matt: But nonetheless, your point is, I think, extremely valid, which is, and it goes back to what we've been saying on several of these points, is just setting clear expectations always makes you the winner. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: It doesn't forget about the nuances of what that expectation might be. But if you set them up front, if you have those out there transparent and very clear for people to see, whether it's in your FAQs or otherwise, then you have that to fall back on and they have that as this guided journey. They can understand like, okay, they'll get back to me within 24 hours, so. I just submitted this. I'm going to wait a few hours and see what happens. 

Or I just submitted this on a Sunday. They said 24 business hours, so I probably won't hear back from them until late Monday or whatever that might be. Like, whatever that timeline is that's not for us to judge necessarily, although again, I think three days is a bit excessive but - 

Lauren: Well, but, whatever the timeline is.

Matt: Just setting the expectation.

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Yes. 

Lauren: Yes, it's it is the setting the expectation for sure. I - on Saturday, I emailed the Lost Bros with the support question and Or I filled out the form on their website and on that page where the form was on their website It said that they provide support during the business week - 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: - or whatever - 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: However they phrased it. Like it was very clear to me based on how they phrased it that despite me submitting this support request on a Saturday afternoon, I was not going to hear back from them before Monday. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: And I heard back from them at like 10 o'clock Monday morning. 

Matt: Right. 

Lauren: But like it just immediately set that expectation of, oh, okay, they will have support in-house - 

Matt: But if it said - 

Lauren: - Monday to Friday. 

Matt: You'll hear back from us in about three days. How would you feel? Honestly? 

Lauren: Uh…

Matt: That says it all.

Lauren: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt: I mean, listen. 

Lauren: Look, I'm not saying - 

Matt: You choose your own, but I will personally go out on them and just say you might want to narrow that down to less than three days. And again, the average indie author is not getting an influx of these inquiries. So being able to respond in 24 to 48 hours, I think is a little more realistic if you are really trying to make a go of this direct sales thing. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: Nonetheless, expectations, expectations, expectations. That's the name of the game in everything. As long as you set clear expectations, you've done the right thing. And from that point on, it's just about managing that interaction with your client or your customer or reader. 

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, that's really - when we talked about that earlier too with transparency, customer expectations. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Remember that your customers are humans and also that you are a human being. And that that's kind of the driving force behind a lot of these like small business entrepreneurs, ecommerce, all of that, as opposed to going to these crazy big box corporate nightmares that so many of us are avoiding these days is specifically that human element. Remember to treat your customers like humans and remember to speak to them like the human that you are yourself. And hopefully everything goes well. 

Hopefully you’re not beating your head against the wall by the end of this episode, because you're thinking about all the things that you have to go do, like collecting sales tax and shipping mapping, whatever that is.

Matt: No. There's an app for that. Use it. 

Lauren: Oh, I thought we weren't allowed to use that phrase anymore. 

Matt: We're not? 

Lauren: Didn't we look that up at one point? 

Matt: What? 

Lauren: Is this a very specific throwback? 

Matt: Oh. 

Lauren: There's an app for that. Didn't we find out that was like, copyrighted or something?

Matt: Maybe. Whatever.

Lauren: Oh well. 

Matt: Send me a cease and desist. 

Lauren: Okay. Yeah, you can send it to podcast@lulu.com where you can also send any questions, comments, concerns. If you want to talk more about anything that we talked about in this episode. 

Matt: Except tax advice. 

Lauren: Except taxes because we're not tax advisors. We are not tax professionals. I barely know how to do anything other than spend money when it comes to money. Very good at that part though, if you want help spending your money, I'm your girl. But in the meantime, you can always reach out to us, podcast@lulu.com, find us on Lulu's socials and check back next week for another new episode. Until then, thanks for listening.