I agree with Bob. I keep all the invoices (that I get) and am surprised when I don't get one at all, or I get a heavily edited one. I just made a $300 purchase and received an invoice that is 1 1/2" by 8 1/2". What am I supposed to do with that?
I always provide an invoice for my buyers purchases, but when I have an invoice with many inexpensive items on it, I have to create a summary invoice since it would be ridiculous to print out five pages for an invoice with a total of $60. In BidStart, the invoice was compact with little white space, therefore enabling me to print an invoice of 50 items before I had to manipulate the size. I could shrink an invoice and print (on both sides) about 150 items that would still be legible.
My feeling is this -- as a seller, I should always provide an invoice, whether the buyer wants one or not. It is then their choice to keep it or not. I think that it also important so the buyer can immediately identify the lot purchased when they receive the items.
I just had a sales of 85 items. Wanted to print the invoice and it was 7 pages long. I then shrunk it down to 30% with the following results (one inch of the invoice):
I then copied the invoice to Word, changed the font size to 9, with the following results:
Note that the first example was so small that it is illegible. I was able to get the first invoice down to 3 pages
This reduced the invoice from seven pages to 1 1/2 pages, shrunk down to 80%. Note there is no white space (unused area between the lines). Please, fix this issue on the invoices -- you would make many sellers happy!
It would also be very nice if the invoice would have at least the option of displaying the images. Also, PLEASE bring back bidStart's "Items I've Won" listing w/ images.
I agree with Steven. It certainly would save on paper, and postage, if the purchased items on an invoice were spaced more like PayPal's packing slip. It still looks very nice and professional, yet allows for several more items per page.
Thanks for your response Paul. I followed your instructions, and got nothing—presumably because my myriad of purchases were all "Buy It Now" items and none were action for bids that were placed and items won. I can get the list of items won, but the format on screen is very spread out compared to BS. It would take by my calculations some 80 pages to print what used to fit on 20 or so—and the visual effect of the printed page in atrocious.
My recent Paypal payment letters for HS sales have listed the items sold, rather than just saying I have money for HS Invoice number XXXXXXX. I print that out and use it to pull the order, and to prepare a Thank you letter listing what I am shipping to the buyer ( and advertising whatever else I want to advertise). Works ok for me.
Keeping in mind that our current invoice size was updated to reflect previous feedback from our members that our invoices printed too small, we've made some recent changes to printed invoices which should keep the overall legibility roughly the same, but allow for significantly more items to be printed per page. Depending on the lengths of your titles, and printer, you should be able to see up to 27 items on the first page, and 35 items on subsequent pages.
Thanks for addressing this issue, Mark. Will the same be true for printing out the list of items purchased on the buyers end? The old My BidStart::Buying—Items I've Won printout was fantastic! Trying to print the Buying—Purchases screen is very problematic.
Thanks for your response, Mark. I must say that your "hands on" personal attention to detail is impressive. I just printed an invoice as you suggested and can see the improvement, which is most beneficial from a seller's standpoint. But it still does no address the concern from a buyer's standpoint. Case in point: I just made 49 purchases from different vendors, ranging from one stamp to many stamp from each individual vendor. For my records, i would have to print at least 49 pages by hitting print invoice 49 times. In the old BidStart days, I could simply go to Buying, "Item I've Won" and print and I would get a continuous printout showing the image, vendor, item information such that all purchases that would fit on the same "internet page" from multiple vendors were printed by executing one print command. My current 49 purchases would probably have fit on some 20-25 pages including images and would have required me to hit print only two or three times at most. Can we get back to that type of a printout for the convenience of consumers? Again thanks for continuing the website and for your personal attention to it.
If you want to keep a record of your purchases outside of HipStamp, you can use the Report: CSV - Sales Report (Purchases). At the moment this is under Selling > Reports, which is a little confusing, but we haven't yet had time to create a Buying Reports section: https://www.hipstamp.com/members/tools/reports
However, selecting the "CSV - Sales Report (Purchases)" option will give you a spreadsheet of all of your purchases, complete with Seller information, etc. You should be able to simply keep this file instead of printing it (although you can also print the spreadsheet if you would like).
Thanks again for your impressively quick response. I ran the report you suggested, but it still doesn't accomplish my objective. Before I could simply print my items won, but now if I simply print my purchases I get a mess. Compare the attached pages of such a printout from BidStart and from HipStamp. I would greatly appriate an option that would allow me to produce a document (within specified dates) that has the appearance of the BidStart printout. Thank you for your attention.
Thanks for the change you made to printing invoices. Much better! Many more line items, and it is large enough font that my 67 year-old eyes can still read it. Vast improvement. Thank you.
Ecology minded collectors appreciate your efforts to save the trees. I like what it may do to my postage/shipping fees, and it may encourage more sellers to include the list of purchased items with their shipments, without spending more on postage. rrr...
Would it be possible to add to the Invoice, the Email address of the customer? This would save the time to "run over" to PayPal to get it. I know, I could use the Message feature, but I would prefer using Email.
Yes, I agree with Jacques. Many times when a customer isn't responding to messages, I have gotten their attention by writing an email. But getting their email address thru PayPal is quite time consuming, and, of course, impossible for a first-time customer. Adding their email address to an invoice would definitely help.
It's not difficult at all to get a payer's email address from PayPal. It just takes one click of the mouse, and one more click to send a message.
When you receive your email message from PayPal that you have received a payment, read the message from PayPal. The payer's email address is located in that one sentence message. All you have to do is click on the email address to launch your email program and send the payer a message.
You are absolutely correct, in what you are saying. But if the customer hasn't paid, there is no email from PayPal. And to find where the customer paid for an order "a month or two ago", there is no searching in PayPal. You have to scroll down until you find it. Of course, you can search in HipStamp to find the date of their previous purchase, and then go to PayPal to scroll down to that date, saving some time. But wouldn't it be much quicker to just have their address showing on the invoice?
Bob, I'm confused, why wouldn't the customer pay? I thought here at HS when the customer buys, they must pay right away. Why/how are they able to wait a month or two?
I know, its not difficult, and I know where to find the email address. I have always printed the PayPal packing slip, because at the same time I could include a message. Now, I would prefer to use the Hipstamp packing slip because it has more items included on one page AND it shows up in good order and includes countries which PayPal refuses to indicate. So, to make a long story short, I print the Hipster form but now I have to send my message separately and look up the address on PayPal, nothing complicated but a waste of time.
I am with you on printing the packing slip off the HipStamp site. Saves plenty of time getting all those stamps in country and mostly catalog order!
Regarding hidden country names, that isn't PayPal doing that. It is HipStamp that blocks the country names that PayPal considers illegal to sell stamps from. PayPal created a blanket policy of everything is prohibited from those countries, which is false, but they made their decision a long time ago about that. HipStamp's (and this was the case with StampWants too) blocking the country names from going to PayPal permits those selling outside of the US to sell stamps from those prohibited countries, and lets us in the US sell the stamps that are not part of the embargo.
I'm late to this party and don't really want to read all the messages to see if what I say has already been said, but: There are easy workarounds to the multi-page invoices. When you click on "Print" and the printer box pops up, go to "Preferences," "Settings" or whatever is appropriate to your brand. Set it to print on both sides of the paper. If that is not good enough, you can also set it to print "2-up" so that 2 pages print on one side of the paper, and 2 on the reverse side. An 8-page invoice will then fit on 2 sheets of paper.
Comments
I always provide an invoice for my buyers purchases, but when I have an invoice with many inexpensive items on it, I have to create a summary invoice since it would be ridiculous to print out five pages for an invoice with a total of $60. In BidStart, the invoice was compact with little white space, therefore enabling me to print an invoice of 50 items before I had to manipulate the size. I could shrink an invoice and print (on both sides) about 150 items that would still be legible.
My feeling is this -- as a seller, I should always provide an invoice, whether the buyer wants one or not. It is then their choice to keep it or not. I think that it also important so the buyer can immediately identify the lot purchased when they receive the items.
I then copied the invoice to Word, changed the font size to 9, with the following results:
Note that the first example was so small that it is illegible. I was able to get the first invoice down to 3 pages
This reduced the invoice from seven pages to 1 1/2 pages, shrunk down to 80%. Note there is no white space (unused area between the lines). Please, fix this issue on the invoices -- you would make many sellers happy!
For "Items I've Won"; select buying ,then bids and change filter from "current" to "WON"
However, selecting the "CSV - Sales Report (Purchases)" option will give you a spreadsheet of all of your purchases, complete with Seller information, etc. You should be able to simply keep this file instead of printing it (although you can also print the spreadsheet if you would like).
Bob
rrr...
https://www.hipstamp.com/store/directmaildiscount
When you receive your email message from PayPal that you have received a payment, read the message from PayPal. The payer's email address is located in that one sentence message. All you have to do is click on the email address to launch your email program and send the payer a message.
I have never understood why customers feel it's okay to delay payment.
Why is there no deadline as to when payment is due?
Regarding hidden country names, that isn't PayPal doing that. It is HipStamp that blocks the country names that PayPal considers illegal to sell stamps from. PayPal created a blanket policy of everything is prohibited from those countries, which is false, but they made their decision a long time ago about that. HipStamp's (and this was the case with StampWants too) blocking the country names from going to PayPal permits those selling outside of the US to sell stamps from those prohibited countries, and lets us in the US sell the stamps that are not part of the embargo.
There are easy workarounds to the multi-page invoices. When you click on "Print" and the printer box pops up, go to "Preferences," "Settings" or whatever is appropriate to your brand. Set it to print on both sides of the paper. If that is not good enough, you can also set it to print "2-up" so that 2 pages print on one side of the paper, and 2 on the reverse side. An 8-page invoice will then fit on 2 sheets of paper.