:Clear Skin Blog

Business venting time….Sometimes I just want to quit sending any shipments to the UK. On the one hand, a lot of UK residents are great customers and trustworthy people, but on the other, we get more lost packages and chargebacks from the UK than from anywhere else, despite that we ship a whole lot more packages to the US. Why? The problems are two-fold. First, Royal Mail is just less reliable than the postal services in countries such as the US, Canada or Australia. We almost always ship orders within 1 business day, but Royal Mail seems to arbitrarily take anywhere from 1-3 weeks to deliver, and sometimes not at all.

The second problem is taxes (and it’s related to the first, since customs is a big part of what delays deliveries). In an effort to stifle free trade, the UK slams imported products with ridiculously high import taxes that often add 30-50% onto the final cost. These customs fees cannot be charged or collected by us in advance, they have to be paid by the customer when they pick up the package. This is the same with any international (or outside the EU trade zone) purchase that falls over a certain amount. Big corporations with local warehousing or distribution centers can get around it (like Amazon, etc), but for small operations like us, the customer needs to be aware of their local tax laws. Unfortunately, many in the UK don’t have a clue about their nation’s tax policies, and are actually surprised when they get charged VAT/customs fees, etc. This leads to packages getting sent back to us since the customers were oblivious to their country’s tax system. I wish we could change the UK tax system, but it’s quite out of my hands. If you’re buying anything internationally, you have to be an educated consumer.

My next headache comes from our new toll free number, which I’m currently regretting. I’ve never been a fan of phone sales, since your credit card information is a lot more secure if you simply purchase online. With online sales, human eyes never see your credit card info and everything is encrypted. Of course, there’s no such thing anywhere as 100% security, but basically, an online shopping cart is a lot safer than a phone purchase. We now offer the option of phone orders, but as far as I can tell it’s rarely being used (most smart customers stick with the cart), and worse, the call center keeps trying to overcharge us. I’m still getting false invoices from before we were even up and running, and calculating an 8-week billing cycle seems to be beyond the ability of their billing department. I don’t want to quit just yet, but if the 800 number disappears for while, don’t be surprised.

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I was putting together the script for a Clear5 commercial and running it past some friends. In one part of the add, I use the line: “Best of all, Clear5 is all natural! No more smearing harsh chemicals on your skin!” While this might sound like a positive thing, it struck one of my friends as a weakness, the reason being that in his mind, any treatment labeled as a “natural treatment” most likely didn’t work. Sadly, this is a sentiment shared by quite a lot of people, and not without good reason.

Natural products have been hot sellers for a while now, with brands such as Vitamin Water becoming household names. Unfortunately, with so many products out there, and many of them “me too” cash-ins, it’s inevitable that a lot of people are going to be exposed to low-quality natural products that are more or less useless. After you’ve tried a few “natural cures” which gave you no results, it’s easy to write the entire industry off.

Of course, if you did give up on all natural products, you might never find the solution you were looking for. But who can blame you when so many products are crap? The real blame lies with the companies pumping out products based not on results, but on psychological reinforcement.

Pick any disease or unpleasant condition, and now go check out what vitamins and herbs are said to help with it. Chances are, you’ll find a list a mile long. Now, if you were making a natural treatment, you might want to give the impression that your treatment works the best by including every one of those ingredients in your pills. You’ll end up with a nice long checklist down the side of your bottle that is sure to impress. Will your pills do anything to help anyone? Nope. But hey, someone looking at the side of the bottle will probably pick your treatment over the one beside it that is missing X ingredient.

This, unfortunately, is how a lot of natural treatments are born, and uneducated customers make sure it continues. Anyone who really knows about vitamins will tell you that proportions make all the difference. You might have a dozen “great” ingredients, but if they don’t compliment each other and are not present in large enough amounts, you’re still stuck with a useless product. You might not know this, but Clear5 actually used to have an ingredient list that was twice as long. Did we remove ingredients to save a buck? Nope (manufacturing actually still costs us exactly the same). We removed some side ingredients because we found out from our tests that the product gave better results without them! Sure, we might lose a few of those customers who buy supplements based on some side-of-the-bottle checklist, but the repeat sales from customers who are actually happy with their results more than makes up for it.

So don’t get discouraged. There are natural treatments out there that work, but you won’t find them by looking for the pill that has everything under the sun packed into it. Become an educated consumer, read reviews and do your research on why certain ingredients help and how much of them it takes to make a difference. The rewards are worth it.

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