Extra pin being dropped for the time being

As you may know, I always send out an extra bonus pin along with my orders. From my perspective, it's not much more expensive to just include an extra pin in the package which is why I never sell individual pins and always include a bonus. In the interest of minimizing failed deliveries, I'm deciding to drop the extra 4th pin for the time being though.

Because of my relatively unusual envelopes, every once in a while a usps employee decides my envelope aren't valid envelopes and returns the envelope back to me asking for additional postage to upgrade it to a package (usually about $3.50 extra on top of the already paid 1.26). In these instances, I just take the loss and send the package back out with tracking to ensure they get there ok. This has only happened about 1%-2% of the time, however in the past week I've had 1 instance of a late package and 1 instance of a package being returned back to me which is extremely unusual.

My packages should be considered as a non-machinable envelope by usps because they're in a plastic bag. I always pay the correct postage for a non-machinable envelope, however in every single case of an envelope being returned back to me they have clearly been ran through a machine instead of being hand sorted. As I understand, it's common for managers at post offices to instruct their employees to run certain non-machinable mail through a sorting machine to "see if it will run". So, despite the attributes of my envelope requiring me to pay the non-machinable surcharge I still need to make sure my envelopes are machine safe.

During the time that the store has been running, I've been experimenting with different ways of sending my envelopes to minimize failed deliveries. Although I'm not completely sure the changes I've made have helped because I have far too low of a sample size of failed deliveries to go off of, all my decisions are based on real research. For a little while, I'm going to be dropping the bonus pin in order to keep the envelope thickness down. I'll revisit the inclusion of the bonus pin in the future once I see how it affects failed delivery rates.

Because this is a decision made purely in the interest of minimizing shipping failure, on orders sent as packages instead of envelopes I will still be including the bonus pin sense it will not affect failed deliveries at all.

If the rate of failed deliveries continues to be high, I'll unfortunately be moving the shop to package shipping only like most other shops & prices will increase as a result.

I apologize to anyone who has received their package late because of this. If you have any questions feel free to comment on this post or email me at mail@themismegas.com

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