Silk Road forums
Market => Rumor mill => Topic started by: Pharmville on October 11, 2011, 10:09 am
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Hi Everyone,
This is a repost of a post I put up just about exactly 48 hours ago so the title is still, at least, appropriate. SR Admin told me that there was an exploit in the open source code of the Forum code and that someone has been messing around and deleting (and then sometimes reposting) whole threads. He didn't say specifically, but I *think* he was saying he's got it fixed so here's my update on all things Pharmville
First, anyone who has done business with us for any period of time knows that usually your pm's are answered within 4-6 hours and all orders are shipped within 24 hours unless there is an issue to resolve before it can ship and the answer doesn't get received in that time period. This last week there were approximately 50 pm's that didn't get answered for 1-3 days because there were other issues that presented themselves that had to take precedence over the pm's. Each of those will be explained in the rest of this post. But I want to apologize profusely to those people who had and have waited so long for an answer. I've been working all weekend to get to the last of the pm's and with a few more hours work tonight I hope to have that accomplished or nearly accomplished and finish the balance in the morning. Plus I did get food poisoning from a little Thai place that Ben and I ate at Thursday afternoon right after we sent out all the shipments which is why a lot of you got your shipping confirmations for Thurs and Fri on Sat afternoon, that was the first time I could get out of bed and Ben doesn't know how to use Tor but I am going to teach him for the future in case something ever happens again where I can't do the computer work. :)
Second, if you ordered roxis you probably noticed that about half of you didn't get your order shipped on time, meaning within 24 hours, but still within 2-3 days. This was because our main roxi supplier decided to lose his mind. I mean that literally. After years of shipping exactly what we ordered and always doing it on time he suddenly started using his own supply and then sending emails saying that X amount was coming only to find that either nothing showed up or some other much lesser amount. In fact, he ended up sending us just 15% of what we had ordered and so Ben and I had to take to the streets and (mostly during daytime hours) search out every roxi 30mg we could lay our hands on. The good news is that with the exception of one 3 pc order all roxi shipments went out by Friday and complete. I will be doing something nice for the one poor guy who didn't get his and I'm really sorry I couldn't roust up any more for him. We also shipped about 50 15mg roxis, two for one, as a stand-in and I had one buyer who complained loudly because he is an IV user and these are not useful to him. I apologize for that, in the heat of trying to fulfill every order I failed to think of that possibility and I should have contacted the people who were going to get the 15 mg's to see if that would be o.k. but we were simply out of time because of....
Third, it was a holiday week with no mail delivery on Monday. Neither Ben nor I thought of this until Thursday when suddenly we started receiving many more Express Mail orders than usual. At that point it became a race against time and I stopped my communications duties almost entirely, except for replies that affected current orders, and helped Ben pack, package and label so that all orders did go out on time. We did get every order out by Friday that was Express Mail and all but a few large quantity valium orders that were obviously not going to be consumed in total over the weekend. I should note here that it is our policy, as it has been since we started, not to ship something that is going to just sit at the Post Office for 2-3 days and not move. So, if you placed an order Friday afternoon, and it wasn't Express Mail, we didn't ship it because we didn't want it sitting in the Post Office until Tuesday morning doing nothing. We still consider that to be an appropriate policy and will continue to do it.
Fourth, we did get in our perc 5/325's and another large valium 10 mg shipment. Apparently I have priced these far below the market because they, as well as our 2mg xanax, are being ordered in quantities that are far beyond what we had expected. As a result I am increasing the quantity and frequency of the orders for these three items so no matter how many you order, we will have them in stock. I am also not going to raise the prices even though it is obvious we could and still get very good sales. I am a firm believer in lower prices being good for both the buyer and the seller and hope that more and more vendors will appear on the Silk Road who have their own items that they can get at "extra special" large quantity pricing and that the buyers here will start to find more and more good deals like these among the items offered on the listings. We are in an era where we will probably never again see really nicely priced roxi 30 mg's or dilaudid so I think it's a nice thing to have some items where the buyer can really get a bargain if they're wiling to take a decent quantity.
Fifth, the ketamine bottles WILL BE BACK! And they will be back sometime this week. However, there will be no more shipping of the bottles as they arrive and finding out later that they either were short on ml volume or had a solution potency that was less than advertised. The solution is being tested in bulk and being packaged in new packaging (you are going to *love* this one, Ben really went creative genius on me on this one!) and the new bottles will contain 100mg/ml solution with an overfill to 11ml so that every person is guaranteed to have a minimum of one gram. The price will be $100 and the brand is still Bioket. The bottle will also be sealed in such a way that you know no one has tampered with it since it was filled (I can't say more about that here without giving LE some hints) but let's just say it's a much better seal than the old snap rings around the caps were. There is a good possibility that if the buyer reaction is good and we sell this batch quickly that there will be a very good chance for a new, lower, price with the next batch. So, order with confidence, you have my personal guarantee that you'll get a full gram if you dry the solution and if you support this item with vigor you can expect to see it drop in price in the coming months.
Lastly, you have probably noticed the that the bitcoin continues it's ever downward slide. In the slightly more than two months that Pharmville has been selling on Silk Road we have watched the stable price of the bitcoin drop from $6.00 to $5.00 to $4.00 (and even dip down to $3.70) , most recently taking a nose dive when the Bitcoin 7 web site was hit with a computer hack and lost, apparently, 75% of it's coins to the hackers. I, like many people, suspect that an awful lot of these "hacks" are actually inside jobs where people are pulling medium and long cons on the community. However, the effect on the profitability of a store like our own has been devastating. We have sold a ton of product in the last two months and both Ben and I have real world business management experience so we know how to price products. Our gross profit has been fine, however, the net profit has been virtually zero. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not complaining and this is not a sideways attempt to say "Oh, now that you like us and our service, we're going to raise the prices on you" but even as much as we enjoy selling on the Silk Road we did expect to also make some money at it. As you may have noticed, we don't price our products like many drug sellers do where it's "buy for $1.00, sell for $2.00". We believe in high volume, with modest profits, and that a large top line takes care of the bottom line. So we work more like the Target store model: what is the lowest price we can charge and still make a decent profit at the end of the day. However, you can't have a 30% gross margin and then lose 35% on the bitcoin devaluation when you go to sell them and still have a positive result. The fact of not making anything (well, that's not quite true, we *did* have a profit for the first two months but it wouldn't have been enough to take the both of us to Outback Steakhouse for dinner and still have enough left for a nice tip! ;) ) leaves us with only two, well actually three alternatives: one, we could just quit, but that's not really an option, that's just giving up. Two, we could raise prices, but we don't want to do that because drugs are expensive enough to the average buyer and our average gross profit is sufficient, at least to us. Or three, we could ask our veteran buyers to finalize their orders early. This is the choice that we've decided on and here's why: when we calculate our profit on any individual order, it's fine, until we go to sell the bitcoins we collected from it and they've dropped 30-35% since the time the order was placed. I recently had our first resolution order that went all the way to resolution (in the past they were all overseas orders that finally showed up and took care of themselves). It popped up in the middle of the roxi crisis and I failed to respond to the resolution request so the buyer was given a 100% refund. Ok, fine. But I wondered which order it was so I went back and saw it was from when we first got the valium in stock and offered 20 pcs for $20. This buyer had taken two packs so that would mean a $40 order. So we lost $40 right? Well, if you said "yes" to that question then you don't know how to do bitcoin math. The actual bitcoins lost came to a total of $26.35. A 35% decrease in the 28 days since that order had first been placed. That's when I went back and added up all our sales and profits for the first two months and realized we hadn't made any money. So what we'd like to ask is: if you're one of the many fine people that order from us once or twice every week, could you do us a favor and until the bitcoin finally decides to stabilize, please finalize your order as soon as you see it's in the mail? This would give us a chance to sell those coins at the same rate they were when you bought the items. Now I don't want to sound like I'm trying to coerce *anyone*: if you're a new buyer or if you haven't ordered from us several times before or if you've had any kind of problems with us that give you concerns, then by all means use the escrow system that is put there to protect you. BUT...if you're one of the people who've been buying from us since basically day one and you've always gotten your shipments in full and on time then we would really appreciate if you could see your way clear, and *only* if you could see your way clear, for you to finalize your order once you get your shipping confirmation and you see it's in the mail. If enough people do this so that we can purchase new product with coins that are the same approximate value as the ones we got when we sold the products, then everything will take care of itself. If however, the bitcoin continues to slide and we come to the end of the third month and there's still no profit, then some further actions will have to be taken. We love selling on the Silk Road and we are very grateful to all the buyers who have now made us the #2 vendor on this site, and we want to continue to work the 15 hour days that it takes to provide the excellent level of service that our buyers are so kind to describe in such effusive terms when they fill out our feedbacks. It's just that we'd like to get paid something for that work too, it doesn't have to be a fortune or even a lot, but we do think we should be able to see a profit there at the end of each month and this seemed like the most pain-free way to accomplish that. We hope that you agree and that enough of our regular buyers who have come to know and trust us will be willing to finalize early so that you'll never have to hear about this subject from us again. For a lot of reasons, I can't get into specifics just yet, but we have every intention of continuing to expand our line of products and within the next 30 days we hope to be bringing you a small group of fantastic new items, some of them well-known highly popular items but at fantastic new low price points and some of them things that have never been seen on the Silk Road before and that are going to blow your socks off! I'd say watch our "coming soon" section of our sellers page every few days and you will be nicely rewarded in the very near future! :D
As always, thanks for all the support that you've given us and we still think the Silk Road is the greatest place on Earth for recreational substance products, both as a buyer and a seller.
*your friendly Pharmville dispensers, Alex & Ben*
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Doesn't escrow hedging protect against bitcoin fluctuations?